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The Test of Ireland
But doesn’t the IMG deserve some credit for being the only British organization to unconditionally defend the Irish fighters? What about the enthusiastic IMGers who bravely faced fierce hostility to sell their Red Moles with headlines that called for victory to the IRA? Haven’t they proved their revolutionary mettle? This plea by the IMG leaders and their defenders is not only an expression of petty-bourgeois moralism and an indefensible attempt to feed on the reflected glory of the sacrifices and sufferings of the fighters in Ireland (who face a more serious threat than an occasional punch in the nose); it is not even incompatible with the paternalism and sanctimoniousness of liberal imperialism in Britain. As the author of How to Lead from Behind wrote:
... and for our refusal to capitulate to the chauvinism of the British working class we have praised ourselves sufficiently in the past. But where we have had much more questionable position, and a definitely wrong practice, is on the question of how to intervene in and how to build the ‘solidarity movement.’
That is, the IMG’s virtues lie primarily in the sphere of its moral attitudes. No Marxist can accept such an apology. In fact, judged on a materialist basis, the basis of the objective effect and the underlying political implications of their actions, the virtues of the IMG are less than impressive. In trying to strike a pose of offering the most intransigent support for the Irish fighters, the IMG really developed a sectarian ultimatist position toward the Irish organisations and completely perverted the meaning of “unconditional support.”
The Irish revolutionists and their direct representatives could not have made their desires more plain. On the attitude of the Official IRA, the author of How to Lead from Behind quotes the leaders of the IMG’s Irish work to the effect that they want no part of the AIL but are backward and liberal enough to desire a “TOM.” But what about the Provisionals? Since they are dedicated to armed struggle, surely they could be counted on to reject anything so reformist as a “TOM”? But their organ, An Phoblacht, has so far obviously been more impressed with the development of groups calling for withdrawal of the troops than the increasingly sectarian actions of the AIL, even though the AIL has tended more and more openly to support the political line of the Provisionals. The Provisionals on the spot almost pulled out of the AIL after the conference where the “solidarity position” was adopted, the author of How to Lead From Behind explains.
In short, it was obvious that the IMG had not really maintained what was presented in Comrade Jordan’s September 1, 1971, article in The Red Mole as the proper attitude for British revolutionists to take toward the liberation fighters in Ireland:
Our first answer to these objections [of the sectarians] is to make it very clear that the major task of British socialists is not to tell the Irish people how to wage their struggle (methinks maybe they would be better placed to tell us how to wage ours), but, on the contrary, it is to end the position where the British working class, and especially the leadership of its organisations, are direct accomplices in the oppression of the Irish people.
As the IMG adaptation to ultra-leftism deepened, it not only did not hesitate to launch attacks on Irish militants whose forms of action did not fit into its “armed struggle” strategy but arrogantly ignored the desires of all the elements fighting in Ireland for the kind of movement that could give them effective aid.
On the other hand, the author of How to Lead From Behind does say that the local Provisionals were restrained from pulling out of the AIL by the Dublin leadership. This raises the question of why the Dublin leaders defended the AIL. Is it because of the organization’s effectiveness? But enthusiasm for the AIL seems markedly lacking in the Provisional publications.
What then could be the reason? It is true that the AIL is one of the few organizations that is continuing to do anything on the Irish question. That is to its credit. But it is still obviously declining, and even in this period of general downturn in the movement there are signs that point to its being bypassed. Let us look then at the way the Provisionals conceive of broad support activity. They have an anti-repressive front of their own, the Irish Civil Rights Association (ICRA). They have made few efforts to make this organization genuinely broad. It engages in polemics with the Official IRA, defending the Provisional line. It is small and isolated. Still it obviously has value for them, since they maintain it.
What precisely is its value? It is a “political wing,” a legal organization that politically defends the actions of the Provisionals. As such, it represents one of the historic components of the military conspiratorial movement in Ireland. The question then arises whether the Provisional leadership in fact views the AIL in the same light, as a legal front charged with the tasks of defending them politically. This could explain their support for it despite its obviously decreasing effectiveness. Such a suggestion is extremely grave. But the whole direction of the IMG’s Irish work, the essential dilemma in which all their propaganda and activity around the Irish issue is lodged, justifies raising it.
In fact, the IMG leadership finds itself in the worst possible position with regard to the nationalist movement in Ireland. On the one hand, it has proved unable to build an effective defense of the struggle arid thus win solid respect in its own right. On the other, it has progressively accommodated to the politics of petty-bourgeois nationalist terrorism and become a left cover for the conservative militarist leadership of the Provisionals. Thus at one and the same time its policy has been sectarian and opportunistic, and as a result of this it has failed in its fundamental duty of offering a perspective for carrying the struggle in Ireland forward to victory, lapsing increasingly into the role of apologist for the backward terrorist conceptions of a fossilized petty-bourgeois nationalist sect.
The courage of the IMG rank and filers who braved hostility to sell their deliberately provocative Red Moles could have been put to far better use than to support a bankrupt and fundamentally opportunist policy. If the IMG leadership did not fear to provoke the hostility of people on the streets and in other places where the Red Mole was sold, why were they unwilling to confront possible hostility of workers and soldiers in order to explain the need for British withdrawal from Ireland? Surely here a fight would not only have been much more fruitful for the Irish people but would have had a much better chance of victory in the long run. In fact, the conclusion seems inescapable that the IMG preferred a make-believe fight to the real one, and thus, however subjectively courageous individual militants may have been, the organization’s claims of revolutionary virtue are essentially hypocritical, that is, do not represent a qualitative advance over the opportunist British left organizations.
Before the irresistible pressures of reality, all the dogmatic pretexts for avoiding the duty of building a mass movement for withdrawal have slowly crumbled and become untenable. But miseducation, reinforced by frenzied factionalism, has gone deep into the leadership and the ranks of the IMG. It seems unlikely that they can reorient themselves sufficiently to build an effective troops out movement without squarely facing their errors and rejecting most of their past three years’ theory and practice on the Irish issue. The discovery of a “new conjuncture” is not enough. In fact, one of the realities they may have to confront is that because of the decline in the struggle in Ireland – owing to the political errors of the main organizations involved, errors moreover that the IMG itself approved and encouraged – it is already too late for a bring-the-troops-home movement to decisively aid the struggle of the nationalist ghetto dwellers.
The fact is that the IMG’s errors are not an accidental development, nor do their origins lie fundamentally in Britain. This entire evolution is the logical and inevitable result of the opportunistic turn taken by the majority at. the Ninth World Congress in adapting to the pressures of guerrillaism in Latin America. The development of the IMG’s sectarian and opportunist line on the Irish question in Britain has gone hand in hand with an adaptation to the terrorism of others in Ireland and the logical and inevitable corollary of this – adaptation to the political conceptions of Blanquism and populism.
As in the development of the IMG’s sectarian and ultra-left conceptions of building a support movement for the Irish struggle in Britain, there seem to be three parallel phases in the development of its adaptation to terrorism in Ireland.
In the initial stage, the IMG’s Irish experts were attracted to the conceptions of the Official IRA, according to which the armed action of commando groups was to be subordinated to “grass-roots” struggles or assigned a role of “defending” the mass movement. Then the IMG leadership placed its hopes in a small “Marxist” commando group operating in complete isolation from all mass struggles, Saor Eire. It was hoped that by its exemplary actions, this group could spark a radical development in the larger republican organizations. Finally, the IMG leadership fell more and more into the role of apologists and advocates of the apolitical militarism of the Provisionals.
From the beginning, the IMG leadership assigned Marxists an auxiliary role to the big nationalist organizations. As an article in the April 15, 1970, Red Mole put it:
The fate of the Irish revolution in the immediate future will depend on the ability of Irish revolutionary groupings to capture the leadership of the republican movement and to indivisibly weld together that movement with the struggle in the North.
In the August 1970 issue of the Red Mole, Bob Purdie wrote:
In addition the Falls is the stronghold of the ‘Red’ Republicans, that section of the Republican Movement which has declared for a Workers’ Republic. They have won the confidence of the people by assisting them against racketeering landlords, moving them into empty houses and protecting them from eviction. In co-operation with other organizations, they run an advice center, where legal advice can be obtained in addition to help in dealing with the state bureaucracy and physical protection where necessary.
In his assessment of the Official republican convention published in the February 1, 1971, issue of the Red Mole, Comrade Purdie wrote:
The walk-out at last years Ard- Fheis by the group now known as the ‘Provisionals’, although it took out a number of genuine revolutionaries, also sloughed off a backward section of the movement which could not overcome the limitations of the pure physical force tradition of Irish Republicanism.”
In an article in the April 7, 1971 Red Mole, Comrade Purdie described the differences between the Officials and Provisionals in the following way:
Following the failure of the 1956–62 campaign the leaders of the IRA spent a long time discussing the reasons for their failure. What was important to them was not their military defeat but that they had failed to get the support of the Irish people. With such support their guerrilla war would have been invincible; without it, despite the widespread sympathy they received, they were powerless against the armed might of British imperialism.
This long discussion had profound consequences. A large section of the movement began to realise the need for a clear idea of the kind of Ireland worth fighting for, and that the only perspective was to fight for a Workers’ Republic. This coincided with a move away from such practices as refusing to recognize courts, or to answer police questions, which had led to militants needlessly going into prison, thus weakening the movement further: to the dropping of the ‘abstentionist’ policy of refusing to take seats if elected to Westminster, Stormont or the Dail.
It was the latter point which was the ostensible reason for the split last year between the ‘Officials’ and the ‘Provisionals’. Following the decisions of the Army Council in favour of ending the abstentionist policy, the 1970 Ard Fheis (Conference) of the Republican Movement’s political wing, Sinn Fein, supported the abandonment by a small majority (which was not enough to make the necessary change in the constitution). A large number of delegates walked out, setting up the ‘Provisional Army Council’, and the ‘Caretaker Executive of Sinn Fein.’
The differences were of course more profound than on the question of abstention: the Provisionals also rejected the socialist perspective of the Officials, and accused the Officials not only of having sold out by recognising the ‘Treatyite’ parliaments, but of being under communist influence.
But there was another issue, which has been the cause of the real deep bitterness between the two organisations, and that is the role of the Army Council during the August 1969 events in the North. The fact that, when the people of the Bogside and Falls were facing a pogrom by the ‘B’ Specials and RUC, the Army Council did not send the arms which were available. Cathal Goulding, the Chief of Staff, has explained the reasons for this: they carry a great deal of conviction. However, the fact of the failure of the arms to appear, at a decisive moment, combined with the turn of the Officials away from pure physical force tactics, has enabled the Provisionals to label them as ‘pacifist’ and accuse them of running down the armed section of the movement. In addition the Provisionals have undoubtedly gone out of their way to prove their own militancy against the British troops. This has tended to obscure the fact that the longest engagement between British troops and Republican forces since the Black and Tan Wars was the 16-hour gun battle carried on by the Official IRA in the Lower Falls last July.
And further on, Comrade Purdie even argued that the British troops were trying to provoke the Officials into unwise armed actions:
It seems fairly certain that the Provisionals can turn out larger numbers in conflicts with the Army, than the Officials, and that they have hegemony in more areas, certainly of Belfast. So that talk of them being a ‘breakaway’ can only be calculated to sting them into proving their military capacity, and talk of the Provisionals being more ‘militant’ must be designed to prod the Officials into proving their own ‘virility’ (to use a favourite term of the same press).
Comrade Purdie offered this concluding judgment on the Officials:
Nevertheless, regular readers of The Red Mole will no doubt be aware that we have paid a great deal of attention to the evolution of the Official Republican Movement: it is clear from what we have written that we consider them to be the most important socialist organisation in Ireland today. We think that in the long term they will play a much greater role in liberating Ireland than will the Provisionals. This is not solely because of the fact that the Officials have embraced a socialist perspective; much more important is their capability of giving a political lead to the Irish people. In a situation where the British Army is smashing up Ardoyne or Ballymurphy, the Provisionals can gain widespread support for their military effectiveness. But were British imperialism suddenly to change its tactics, and not offer the minority this provocation, even if only for a period, the Provisionals would have no role to play within these communities. Whereas the Officials have been working patiently to raise the political consciousness of the entire working class of the Six Counties, agitating on such issues as housing, jobs, etc. It is significant that the area of Belfast which was behind barricades in August ‘69, the Lower Falls, is the area where the officials are strongest; the experience of that struggle must have raised the general level of political consciousness.
The first sign of the IMG’s interest in the Official republican movement came when the May 1970 issue of the Red Mole reprinted an interview with the Official leader Malachy McGurran from Intercontinental Press. Contacts seem to have developed subsequent to that, leading to Comrade Purdie’s visit to Belfast in July 1970 and to the Official Ard Fheis in December 1970. But at the same time, the IMG came in contact with, or began to take more seriously, a group of adventurers expelled from the republican movement in the 1960s. These adventurers were associated with Gery Lawless, an “independent” Trotskyist who had broken with the republican movement in 1955, accusing it of reluctance to begin the guerrilla campaign for which it began preparing with the arms raids in the early 1950s. Many of them were ex-members of the Irish Workers Group, a heterogeneous grouping led by Comrade Lawless which disintegrated in early 1968. The IMG’s interest in this group seemed to increase at the end of 1970 when Comrade Lawless joined the IMG and became the co-leader of its Irish work.
In its January 1–15, 1971, issue, the Red Mole published an interview with a representative of this grouping, Saor Eire, which offered a different version of the movement toward politics in the Official IRA. This interview was announced on a cover with a picture of a guerrilla pointing a gun at the reader, In answer to a question about the split in the republican movement, this anonymous spokesman said:
Well, we have seen the inevitability of such a split occurring for the last eight years. We did not particularly favour it since, unfortunately, it happened over wrong issues. In the official section, we have an amalgam of peaceful roadmen, reformers, and left-wingers; and within the Provisionals, we have more militant elements, but right-wing politics. In practice, we have found ourselves more closely aligned to the Provisionals, it is among those elements that we draw a lot of our support.
Of course, it is important to draw a distinction between the leadership and the rank-and-file in both these organisations. Both leaderships seem equally opposed to us and equally capable of spreading slanders about us, whereas with both rank-and-files we have very much in common. We are grateful for the help that Cathal Goulding, the chief of staff of the official IRA, sent in relation to Frank Keane’s case. But we condemn unequivocally their actions in issuing disclaimers and thereby helping police to finger our organization in the Arran Quay robbery.
The representative described the origins of his organization in this way:
I’ll have to go back to the ‘60s and trace the development of the Republican movement. After the failure of the mid-’50s military campaign in the Six Counties, a certain amount of disillusionment set in within the IRA and Sinn Fein. People saw the futility of a purely military campaign not backed up by some form of political action. In the early ‘60s some people connected with the London-based Irish Democrat joined the movement. Their Stalinist politics were not accepted overnight, but on account of the lack of clear-cut politics within the Republican movement, the position was that any brand of politics was accepted. With the influx of these people, political classes were started, which were good in themselves, as they gave many members of the Republican movement their first knowledge of left-wing politics; but hand in hand with the growing political awareness, there began a running-down of the armed section, the IRA. This unfortunately led to a lot of people equating left-wing politics with reformism. Many of our members at this stage started to voice their objections to this running down of the IRA. These people were either dismissed on trumped-up charges or left of their own accord. Other members saw through the politics of Stalinism and left on a political basis.
At this time too, many English-based revolutionary groups started to spring up. People saw in these groups alternatives to the Irish Communist Party and to the current Stalinist orientation of the Republican movement, and thought that maybe, through such organisations, a new fusion could be made between left-wing politics and the traditional militancy of Republicanism. Some people who had been involved in the Trotskyist English-based Irish Workers’ Group formed an important section of Saor Eire and began to form links with these dissident elements of the Republican movement. This resulted in a loose organisation being formed in Dublin about three to four years ago, which carried out some arms raids and some bank raids in an attempt to try to get a militant politically conscious, armed group off the ground. After these initial actions there was not such a mass movement toward this grouping as was expected, since its actions were seen as more in the tradition of the international revolutionary movement, as opposed to the Irish movement. The next period was spent in discussion with various political groupings, and with various members of the Republican movement, in an attempt to win them over to this new concept of political action.
The method by which this tiny adventurist group hoped to stimulate a “mass movement” toward itself was explained as follows:
Saor Eire is a left-wing armed group which is attempting to act as a fuse or detonator to the Irish revolutionary struggle. It is attempting to step up the tempo of development of political life. It is part of the Republican tradition but also draws from the international revolutionary movement, both politically and in a military sense. As opposed to past forms the Republican struggle took, Saor Eire is centred around the cities and could be called an urban guerrilla group, inasmuch as it sees the main struggle taking place in the cities, and within the working class directly.
As for Saor Eire’s activities, although they did not exactly depend on mass support, they were designed to win mass sympathy:
Unfortunately due to publicity given to us by the bourgeois press, people seem to think that we are only involved in robbing banks and living high lives, etc. etc. This could not be further from the truth. We have robbed many banks and taken responsibility for them. But we have also been involved in armed raids, in industrial disputes, in direct confrontations with the state and its agents, also in local disputes and tenants’ disputes. The money expropriated from the banks is used to purchase arms and equipment for the forthcoming struggle in Ireland. A lot of our finances have gone to aid the Catholic population of the North who have been under attack from British imperialism. This took the form of money, ammunition, and equipment. The money is also used for the maintenance of our revolutionaries in the field, who, at the moment, number quite a few. It is also used for political education, the arrangement of classes, camps, and all of the other running expenses that any armed group is liable to. We’re also involved in military training of members of other left-wing groups in Ireland, people from the North, and the broad Republican movement, who have not been able to get this training within their own organisations. (Emphasis in original.)
Despite a certain autonomy from the masses, Saor Eire was not, it was explained, a foquista group:
We don’t believe that the foco itself can become the party or has any monopoly on the revolution. But small guerrilla groupings, to a certain extent independent of the working class, can help to raise the level of the working class and so help to create the party. (Emphasis in original)
In fact, Saor Eire was a very special kind of guerrilla group, one sympathetic to the Fourth International and especially to the International’s support for “armed struggle,” an Irish facsimile of the Argentine Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo! An exemplification of the correctness of the line of the Ninth World Congress ...
As regards the Fourth International: we recognise the revolutionary role it has played since its inception; how it came to the aid of the Algerian revolution with arms and weapons while other so-called revolutionary organisations failed to fulfil their duty. We also admire how they came to the aid of the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions and defended them against imperialism, in America and throughout the world. We are particularly sympathetic to the political assistance it is giving the Irish struggle at the moment. While the Stalinists have consistently dilly-dallied and vacillated on the question of Ireland and on the role of armed struggle in Ireland, the Fourth International is probably the only organization which has consistently given it support. A lot of our members have been, at some time or other, members of Trotskyist groupings.
Not only did Saor Eire have a certain appearance of Trotskyist politics, it laid claim to its own tradition in Ireland.
As regards Saor Uladh, again we have much in common with them. This was a group which broke away from the Republican movement specifically on the question of armed action, which is a revolutionary feature. We also believe in their concept that the resolving of the Irish national struggle could not take place in the Six Counties alone, but would be resolved in a Thirty-Two County context. However, unfortunately, with Saor Uladh, this military outlook was not accompanied by the relevant and necessary political framework. For this reason they failed.
The thirty-two county perspective of Saor Uladh, the group that did perhaps the most to precipitate the 1956 border campaign, consisted of two features. Its leader, Liam Kelly, sat in both the Belfast and Dublin parliaments, assisted in the second case by a liberal parliamentary breakaway from the main republican movement. It, unlike the regular movement, conducted raids in the south that were used as pretexts by the Dublin government to intern IRA men on the green side of the border. It was this second feature that Saor Eire seemed to have in common with the old Saor Uladh, as well as its desire to precipitate the main body of republicans into guerrilla warfare by its example. This historic contribution of Saor Uladh was praised by Comrade Purdie, the main spokesman of the IMG on the Irish question, in his pamphlet Ireland Unfree published in January 1972:
Behind Saor Eire’s activities is the conviction that no change can be promoted with the Republican Movement unless it is pressurised by a more militant and active military organisation. This approach contains a great deal of truth, for the launching of a struggle in 1956 by Saor Uladh catapulted the main body of the IRA into the Border Campaign, and forced the leadership of the IRA down off its conservative pedestal.
Until the writing of Comrade Purdie’s pamphlet, the opinion had been held virtually unanimously, including in Republican circles, that the abortive terrorist campaign beginning in 1956 was an unmitigated disaster that strengthened Unionism and brought the militant nationalist movement to its lowest ebb in the entire history of the country. In fact, it was this total failure of the traditional terrorist methods that forced the republican leadership to look for new methods anywhere it could find something that seemed sensible. To be consistent with his support for “armed struggle,” Comrade Purdie was apparently forced to find a positive evaluation of the border campaign:
Despite the failures of that campaign, the fact that it was fought faced a new generation of Irish men and women with the imperative challenge of the oppression of their nation; that new generation brought into the struggle the forces which today have opened up a new chapter in the political development of the Irish revolutionary Movement.
It was notable also that in this evaluation, Comrade Purdie adopted the version of the 1956 split put forward by Comrade Lawless, who was an ally at that time of Saor Uladh and one of the group trying to force the IRA leadership to begin guerrilla warfare immediately, threatening to initiate armed actions himself with his own small group. Comrade Purdie was obviously in no position to make such a judgment himself, having no personal knowledge of the unwritten history of the IRA and the attitudes of the leaders of the time.
Comrade Lawless, however, did play a direct role. This is the version given by B. Bowyer Bell in The Secret Army, the most authoritative history of the IRA. It has not been commented on in the Red Mole:
The group of radicals led by Gery Lawless, a tough, violent, undisciplined agitator, left the ultra-conservative Army they distrusted and went with Christie. Magan opposed any compromise and even refused to allow the repentant Lillis to return. The drain continued over several weeks and the bitterness grew. Even the Fianna Boy Scouts split. The ‘Christie Group’ met in a convention and decided on action with three months and expansion throughout the country. Support was solicited from units in Meath, Limerick, and elsewhere but without firm results. The pace was too slow for some. Lawless and Sean Geraghty felt Christie was hedging and ‘kidnapped’ him to urge action. Refusing to talk under duress, Christie later agreed to the three-month provision. Both groups agreed that if they began action the IRA or Kelly would have to quit stalling and begin fighting, which was just what the IRA did not want to do prematurely ...
In September to get things moving, eighteen Volunteers from the old B Company moved up to the border of Donegal and Fermanagh and sat, hoping to blackmail either Kelly or the IRA into action. Eventually this Lawless ‘column’ withdrew and Christie agreed to amalgamate with Kelly, who had little Twenty-six County support outside the border areas. A joint border operation was planned for November against customs posts. (pp. 279–280)
There was, however, a dynamic in the activity of the Lawless group that could have been understood by a Marxist without any need for inside information on the 1956 split. None of the guerrilla campaigns of the IRA have ever been initiated by a deliberate decision of the leadership, not even the war of independence in 1919. In every case, individuals attracted to the IRA by the appeal of armed action and without political training or discipline have quickly begun to press for an immediate start to the campaign and eventually initiated actions themselves that have catapulted the entire organization into guerrilla warfare. In every case the leadership has found itself incapable of controlling this process and ended up in fact riding a tiger.
In the case of the 1919–21 war, this uncontrolled activity was able to win a partial victory because there was a solid front of the nation, including most of the bourgeoisie, against the British. Once the bourgeoisie and bourgeois-oriented elements achieved their limited aims, however, they found it relatively easy to isolate the IRA and defeat it. The people were worn out by the high cost of uncontrolled guerrilla war. Furthermore, the masses were not directly involved in this struggle, and it did not seem to be directly related to their most intimate concerns. Every attempt to revive the type of guerrilla warfare that existed in 1919–21, and there has been no lack of attempts over the past fifty years, has been a complete failure. The most successful try to date has been the Provisional campaign. But this in a certain sense grew out of the mass agitation of the Civil Rights movement.
By identifying Saor Uladh and the Lawless group as the “revolutionary” detonator in 1956, the IMG leaders identified Trotskyism with the purest traditions of guerrillaist adventurism in Ireland. This fact was all the more glaring in view of the context in which The Red Mole published the Saor Eire interview. In November, the premier of the Dublin government announced that his regime was prepared to introduce mass internment of political suspects and might do so at any time. It was forced to consider such a step, he said, because the police had discovered a conspiracy by Saor Eire, a group that had been carrying out a series of expropriations since about 1966 but which almost no one knew anything about, to kidnap some cabinet ministers, kidnapping, as everyone knew, being a popular tactic of urban guerrilla groups. In particular, because of their history, the large Republican groups could be linked in the public mind to the activities of Saor Eire.
Representatives of the Official IRA protested that there was no need to open a concentration camp if the government was only worried about Saor Eire, since all its members could be interned in one cell. The IMG, however, was determined to present Saor Eire as a serious force in Ireland, since “the brunt of the witch-hunt has been borne by a group whose name up to now has been practically unknown to the British left – Saor Eire.” After all, Saor Eire was almost Trotskyist. It is clear that by offering this group two full pages of the Red Mole, in which the Saor Eire representative explained the “internationalist” character of the group as well as its military activities and aspirations, the IMG gave credence to the Dublin government’s claim that the activities of Saor Eire did represent a serious danger to “order” in Ireland and thereby reinforced its pretext for launching an all-out attack on the left and militant nationalist movement. In order to give a forum to an almost Trotskyist guerrilla group, it endangered the entire radical movement in the Twenty- Six Counties and in particular the militants who identified with Trotskyism. Was it worth it? Apparently it was to the IMG, which for a whole period put Saor Eire at the center of its strategy for Ireland.
At the same time as it discovered Saor Eire, the IMG seemed to discover the guerrilla expertise of Comrade Lawless, who, although he had lived primarily in London in the 1960s in regular contact with the various Trotskyist groups, had not played a major role in the Trotskyist movement until that time. Nor had any Trotskyist group in Britain shown a great interest in his guerrilla credentials. He was, however, to emerge as the “military” expert of the IMG and, apparently, as the IEC Majority Tendency’s example of an Irish “Trotskyist” guerrilla.
In Belgium, in particular, Comrade Lawless’s past was especially appreciated in Trotskyist circles. In fact, in their zeal to defend the IRA’s right to speak in Belgium, the Belgian Trotskyists went so far as to publicize Comrade Lawless as a representative of the IRA, which, of course, he was not. In introducing an interview with Comrade Lawless, the February 18, 1972 issue of La Gauche offered this sketch of his qualifications on the Irish question:
Jerry [sic] Lawless (a fated name). Sentenced thirty-six times (this is an exact figure and not just intended to impress), imprisoned many times, notably for belonging to the IRA. Interned in a British concentration camp as a child. Described by the Unionist government of Northern Ireland as one of those responsible for the present agitation in Ulster. Sought by the British police.
In this interview, moreover, Comrade Lawless presented a different view of the split in the IRA from that offered in the Red Mole in 1970 by Comrade Purdie.
In 1969 we were in a situation where the IRA had relegated the role of armed force to a secondary position and the IRA underestimated the importance of resorting to arms. We found ourselves then facing a ‘virtual’ civil war unleashed by the Unionist party.
The IRA was badly prepared, incapable in fact of facing the needs of the moment. This coincided with the return, under the pressure of the threat of civil war, of many comrades who had left the IRA in 1962.
They had left in 1962 because they considered themselves regular soldiers. They said: ‘The fatherland has no more need of my services for the moment and I will go back and start a family.’
Jo Khal [Joe Cahill], one of the leaders of the IRA, provisional wing, is a good example of this attitude. He left the IRA in 1962 to found a belated family, and he rejoined the IRA when the threat appeared again in 1969. Men like Khal coming from Belfast noticed two things when they rejoined the IRA. The first was that it was much more left than it had been before. The second was that it had many fewer arms than before. They equated the two phenomena and made a link between them – did the IRA get soft when it moved to the left? ...
Then there was a new politicized youth that mobilized to defend its own communities. They flooded into the IRA. The fact that the IRA had neither arms nor a strategy for armed struggle brought about a split ... Many comrades joined the Provisionals in Dublin and the border areas in particular not because this wing was more right or because it was hostile to the left, but because they were intransigent, they were aware of the need for armed struggle.
The IRA split and the subsequent development of the two groups is a complex question, and as the situation developed in the North, the Provisionals did win broader support than the Officials. It is quite possible, moreover, that the Provisional republican movement will become the central element in the development of the Irish revolutionary movement in the next period, as it, like the Officials before, learns the inadequacy of Blanquist militarism and looks for more advanced revolutionary conceptions.
Comrades Purdie and Lawless analyzed the secret of the Provisonals’ success rather well in their article Ireland: The Eye of the Hurricane in the July 10, 1972, Red Mole.
The fact that the Provisionals have been better able to intervene in the last period will surprise only the dogmatists on the British Left who insist on misunderstanding everything which happens outside their editorial offices. During the present phase of permanent revolution in Ireland, when national struggle is in the forefront, it is only to be expected that the most consistent nationalists will play the leading role.
It is unfortunate that this lesson has not received greater emphasis in the summaries and reprints of the IMG’s positions on Ireland that have been circulated by the European sections as the Trotskyist answer to such questions. Of course, it does not fit in very well with the line on nationalism put forward in the key document of the IEC Majority Tendency, In Defence of Leninism: In Defence of the Fourth International, where Comrade Germain takes a notably dim view of the idea that “consistent nationalism” leads toward a process of permanent revolution:
This Leninist opposition to nationalism is not an abstract and formal principle, but starts, as Lenin indicates, from a ‘clear notion of the historical and economic circumstances.’ That is why there can be some exceptions to the rule based upon exceptional ‘historical and economic circumstances,’ i.e. those of oppressed nationalities which do not yet possess their own ruling class, or which have only such a miserable embryo of a bourgeois that, in the given and foreseeable situation, it is excluded that this embryo could actually become a ruling class without a complete disintegration of the imperialist structure. The best example of such exceptions are of the black and Chicano nationalities inside the United States. We shall discuss them in more detail in the final section of this text.
But it is clear that neither Quebec, Catalonia, the Basque country, India, Ceylon nor the Arab nation, can be classified as exceptional. All these nations have their own bourgeois class. Many of them even have their own semi-colonial bourgeois state. To support nationalism within these nationalities, under the pretext of supporting anti-imperialist liberation struggles, or even to defend the doctrine that ‘consistent nationalism’ would automatically lead to a struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat is to lose the ‘clear notion of the historical and economic circumstances,’ to lose sight of the class structure, the class decisions and the irreconcilable class conflicts inside these nations, which national oppression or economic exploitation by imperialism in no way eliminates but, in a certain sense, even exacerbates when compared to what occurs in non-oppressed nations. To defend the notion of ‘unconditional support’ for Quebec nationalism, Arab nationalism, Indian nationalism, or Ceylon nationalism, is to disarm the workers and poor peasants of these countries in their class struggle against their own bourgeoisie, is to make the conquest of power by the proletariat in the course of the anti-imperialist struggle – i.e. the whole process of permanent revolution – more difficult if not impossible, and puts a big obstacle on the road of building Leninist parties among these nationalities.” (Page 34.)
Oddly, Comrade Germain omits mentioning Irish nationalism. But why is there any reason, according to this, to regard Ireland as exceptional? Isn’t there an Irish national bourgeoisie that has its own state? Haven’t elements of it even called for armed confrontations with the imperialist power? Furthermore, there is a certain logic to Comrade Germain’s positions, which has become clearer with the development of the international discussion.
For example, in its main resolution at the 1973 convention of the SWP, the Internationalist Tendency, whose positions were endorsed by one of the principal spokesmen of the IEC Majority Tendency, Livio Maitan, as well as by Peter Petersen of the IMG, was even more negative about the possibility of “consistent nationalism” playing any progressive role:
Behind the party leadership’s new vocabulary, there is an adaptation in practice to the petty bourgeois ideologies of nationalism and feminism. The SWP leadership’s adaptationism is manifested both within and outside of the borders of the United States. In fact, it is not restricted to national groups but has been extended to include women. The nub of the issue is contained in the formula that ‘consistent nationalism will lead to socialism.’ Alleged examples of this dynamic are the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions. In fact, it was the Castroist movement’s break with nationalism, that is, with the concept of a national interest above classes, expressed in the smashing of the bourgeois state, that laid the basis for Cuba’s advance toward socialism. In the same way, it is the NLF’s ties to the workers’ state of North Vietnam, rather than its diffused nationalist ideology, that have made it able to endure as a fighting force against imperialism. Marxists have always characterized nationalism as a bourgeois ideology, i.e., a false perception of reality and an apology for particular interests, and have counterposed it to the scientific theory of international socialism.
Lenin’s distinction between the nationalism of the oppressed and that of the oppressor applies to the Communist attitude toward the two varieties of nationalism. It did not mean that we should endorse the nationalism of the oppressed, but rather, that while we intransigently fight the nationalism of the oppressor, our attitude is to patiently explain the bankruptcy of nationalism to the liberation fighters of oppressed nations. In some cases during the incipient stages of a colonial revolution, nationalism may play a progressive role in drawing the masses into action against imperialism. In such cases we give it critical support. But, we recognize that nationalism can only give the masses relief from the most superficial forms of oppression, as with the granting of formal independence. In order to advance the masses, it is necessary for revolutionaries to dispel the notion that all layers of the oppressed nation share common oppression. They must point out the bankruptcy of the petty bourgeois nationalist leadership, counterpose proletarian internationalism, and become the leaders of the struggle of the masses against imperialism. This requires a qualitative break from the ideology of nationalism and the opening of a world revolutionary perspective, which is precisely the function of a revolutionary party.
The SWP leadership’s adaptation to nationalism also takes another form: tail-ending the petty bourgeois program and leadership of national liberation struggles. The case of Palestine was the clearest example of this tendency. The SWP uncritically endorsed Al Fatah’s call for a Democratic Secular Palestine [Isn’t this what the term “republic” means to the Irish republicans, Comrades Purdie and Lawless? – G.F.], without clarifying its class content. In the case of Vietnam, Bangla Desh and Ireland, the SWP leadership has confined the party’s propaganda to the call for self-determination, without raising the need for the establishment of a workers’ state as central to the colonial revolution. (The Building of a Revolutionary Party in Capitalist America, SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 18, pp. 7–8.)
This attitude toward “consistent nationalism” has become a rather important part of the discussion going on in the International. For example, in offering its “critical support’ to the IEC Majority Tendency, the “June 10 Tendency” in the SWP cited as the first evidence of the alleged “rightward motion’’ of the American party: “The SWP leadership’s refusal to participate in the Women’s Liberation movement and in National Liberation struggles as revolutionary Marxists forwarding a socialist program ...” The first thing it cited as justification for adhering to the IEC Majority Tendency was:
To the SWP’s minimalist call for ‘Self-determination for Bangla Desh,’ the International Majority has countered, ‘For a Socialist Indian Sub-Continent.’
To the SWP’s call for a ‘Democratic Secular Palestine,’ they proclaim, ‘For a Socialist Federation in the Middle East.’ (Position Paper on the Current Dispute in the International, SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 29, pp. 18–19.)
Wouldn’t the same method in the case of Ireland lead to the slogan of a “Socialist Federation of the British Isles”? or to counterposing “For a United Socialist Europe” to the slogan of “Self-Determination for Ireland”? In any case, until further discussion clarifies the matter, we must assume that most of the members of the IEC Majority Tendency in Europe who support the IMG line on Ireland are unable to appreciate the factor of “consistent nationalism” in the success of the Provisional IRA, and regard the Provisionals’ dedication to “armed struggle” as their essential positive feature.
It is quite clear in his interview in the February 18, 1972, La Gauche that Comrade Lawless sees the revolutionary side of the Provisionals precisely in their maintaining the old “physical force” tradition of the Republican movement, which Comrade Purdie described in 1970 as “backward” and subject to manipulation by right-wing elements. Furthermore Comrade Lawless does not criticize the 1956–62 campaign for failing to involve the masses actively in a deep-going struggle, a failure recognized by Comrade Purdie in his first articles, but for its failure simply to “organize” the “popular support” that existed for the campaign.
And this line has clearly come to dominate the IMG’s analysis over the past two years. The evolution is obvious. Comrade Lawless was not integrated into the Trotskyist movement. His adventurist past and his present adventurist conceptions were and are hailed both by the IMG leadership and the leaders of the IEC Majority Tendency in Europe, especially by those comrades most directly influenced by the principal leader of this tendency, Comrade Mandel himself.
Instead of offering a political perspective, the arsenal of Marxism, and the Leninist conception of how to mobilize the masses in revolutionary struggle, the IMG and the European Trotskyist sections and groups progressively adapted to the “physical force” tradition of the republicans, to the idea that revolutionary activity consists essentially of the activity of armed commandos.
This conception, as the founder of Irish Marxism James Connolly pointed out, is an essentially petty-bourgeois notion. It grew out of the inability of the socially heterogeneous Young Ireland Movement to develop a social program for organizing the masses. As a result they fell back on a program of military conspiracy that enabled them to avoid raising social questions. This was precisely the response of the right-wing republicans to the development of a left tendency, of a social program in the organization. This was a response, moreover, that the reactionary American Irish leaders were anxious to support and which led them to provide the Provisionals with money to buy far more arms than the Officials could afford.
In his first articles, Comrade Purdie was capable of recognizing this dynamic. But progressively the spokesmen of the IMG, and their echoers in the European Trotskyist press, came to second the claims of the Provisionals that armed action as such was the decisive question. In fact, the spokesmen of European Trotskyism came increasingly to oppose the dynamic that was pushing the Provisionals to the left, their “consistent nationalism,” and to hail the tendency that was preventing them from drawing political and social conclusions from this process – their militarism.
This tendency reached a logical conclusion in La Gauche’s response to the Official cease-fire in May 1972. As a result of a disastrous popular reaction to an act of terrorism in Derry, the execution of a British soldier from a local family who was believed to be a spy, the Official IRA announced that they were suspending offensive operations against the British army. The shooting of Best in Derry was only the latest in a series of terrorist acts that had had disastrous results for the Officials – the Aldershot bombing, the assassination of the Unionist Senator Barnhill, the attempted assassination of the Unionist Home Minister John Taylor being other examples. The Official leadership realized that it was getting caught in a dynamic that it could not control; it was getting drawn into a terrorist campaign that had no hope of success. Small groups of IRA men were carrying out politically damaging actions in the belief that they were acting as the “Army of the People” when in fact they were under the control of no mass organization.
The cease-fire decision by no means meant the end of armed actions by the Official IRA, and members of the organization continued to be gunned down in clashes with the British army and Orange terrorists. But the Official call for a return to mass struggle apparently caused consternation in some European Trotskyist circles. After all, the organ of the largest European section of the Fourth International had expressed its support specifically for the “armed struggle” of the Irish people in its manifesto on the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry and projected this “armed struggle” as the future for capitalist Europe:
The workers of Europe must keep their eyes fixed on the armed struggle taken up on Irish soil since 1968 against British occupation. It is not only the instability or the latent crisis of British capitalism that is illustrated here, but also that of its European confederates. Ireland is only a foretaste of the crushing of the freedoms of traditional bourgeois democracy, of the trend toward the strong state which is in preparation throughout capitalist Europe. (Rouge, February 12, 1972, L’Avenir de l’Europe.)
This statement appeared to represent a very strong determination to extend the Irish example, since Irish comrades would be hard put to find a time when “a strong state” did not exist in Ireland. When the Dublin government introduced a new special powers bill in the fall of 1972, this was interpreted in a letter to the March 1973 conference of Irish Trotskyists as another move toward the “strong state,” although the Dublin regime has resorted to mass internment more than once in its recent history.
Another example of this eagerness to extend the experience of Ireland was the label “Armed Struggle in Europe” that was put on Comrade Lawless’s tours on the continent and the desire to utilize the tour of the Official IRA representative Malachy McGurran to “make propaganda for armed struggle in Europe.” Thus, it is easy to understand the disappointment of the Belgian comrades in particular when the Official IRA turned away from being drawn into a terrorist campaign.
This disappointment was expressed in an introduction to an article on the politics of the Provisionals by Comrades Lawless and Purdie that was reprinted in the December 26, 1972, La Gauche.
When at the beginning of this year the LRT [Ligue Révolutionnaire des Travailleurs – Revolutionary Workers League, the Belgian section of the Fourth International] took up a campaign of explaining the armed struggle in Ireland, we expressed our support for both wings of the IRA – the Officials and the Provisionals. We explained then the differences between these two republican organizations, but these differences could not induce us to support one over the other. The positions taken recently by the Official wing of the IRA force us to take our distance from this organization. Above all there is the cease-fire announced by the Officials, which was motivated by the argument that if the IRA did not cease its armed struggle, it would provoke a civil war. In a situation of de facto civil war, the Officials thus have deserted the task of the military defense of the Catholic neighborhoods.
The motivation for the cease-fire given in the Official statements was incorrect and politically unclear, reflecting their inability to definitively renounce terrorism, but it was rather hasty to conclude that the Officials had abandoned the military defense of the Catholic neighborhoods. In fact, it was a slander against an organization that continued to suffer grave losses at the hands of British repression precisely because it continued to defend the Catholic neighborhoods by every means, including armed force.
This denunciation of one of the main organizations leading the struggle in Northern Ireland was an exceedingly grave step, one moreover that could have serious consequences for the Irish Trotskyists, as well as the reputation of the Fourth International in general in Ireland. How could it be taken without any international discussion or consultation whatsoever?
The only possible answer is that the IEC Majority Tendency had separated out armed action from the revolutionary process, had made support of armed activity the criterion sine qua non of a revolutionary attitude, and had furthermore applied this criterion in utter disregard of the opinion of sections of the Trotskyist movement that did not share its guerrillaist orientation. Thus such a conclusion was inevitable and automatic for the writer in La Gauche.
A supporter of the IEC Majority Tendency in the U.S., Chris Marat, followed the same logic:
This confrontation with the bourgeoisie has taken on the aspects of urban guerrilla warfare during the past three years. The struggle has been led in Derry by both sections of the IRA until last year, when the ‘officials’ took their distance from the ‘provisionals’ in order to conform to the wishes of the bourgeoisie in the South. Contrary to popular opinion there remains only one IRA.” [Emphasis in the original. The Struggle for Proletarian Parties in Capitalist Europe, SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 31, no. 30, p. 7.]
Comrade Marat’s conclusion, in one respect, does run counter to the line of the IMG. For example, in the March 30 Red Mole, an IMG Political Committee statement said:
The Provisional IRA is ideologically linked to the Southern bourgeoisie, and the Officials stages theory means in practice that they are incapable of linking their explicit socialism to the national struggle.
But, nonetheless, isn’t his conclusion a logical one? If a guerrilla strategy is the criterion sine qua non of a revolutionary organization, doesn’t it follow that the Official IRA – clearly less enthusiastic about the prospects of guerrilla war, as shown by the cease-fire – is more under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie than the Provisionals who held on unswervingly to the guerrilla strategy? But what about Comrade Purdie’s analysis in 1970 of the bourgeoisie’s ability to divert a purely military struggle? It seems to have gotten lost somewhere in between.
The Red Mole’s response to the Official cease-fire was as hasty and bitter as that of La Gauche. If its dedication to the principle of “self-determination” made it view with righteous horror the very idea of criticizing any armed action the IRA might resort to, the IMG apparently felt no such qualms about issuing a blanket condemnation of an Irish group that declared its intention to depart even temporarily from a concentration on guerrilla warfare.
In its June 5, 1972, issue, The Red Mole said: “Already one section of the resistance forces, the Official Republican Army, has yielded to the pressure and announced a cease-fire.” In its July 10 issue, The Red Mole said: “The Officials grabbed a few brief headlines with their cease-fire.”
These intemperate attacks completely exposed the hypocrisy of the IMG’s claim that its explicit support for “armed struggle” in Ireland was a way of “concretising” its support for self-determination. They made it absolutely clear that what the IMG was in fact doing was refusing support to any other kind of struggle in Ireland but one that suited its conception of a guerrilla strategy. Comrade Purdie himself had moved from his position of August 1970 that the British troops were deliberately trying to provoke the IRA into armed conflicts to a position that it was the armed actions of the Provisionals in particular that were the essential obstacle to imperialist policy.
In an article in the September 15, 1971, Red Mole, Comrade Purdie argued that if the British failed to win the support of Lynch in Dublin, they would be forced to try to restore the old system of all-out repression of the Northern Catholics. Only the armed struggle of the Provisionals could prevent this:
If the situation is returned to the old order and the Catholics are defeated, the whole development of a revolutionary struggle in Ireland will be set back. It was the existence of the stalemate over the Northern question which froze Irish politics for fifty years; there is a danger that they could be recast in that reactionary mold once more.
It is for this reason that we raise the slogan ‘Victory to the IRA’; the whole future of the struggle in Ireland depends on whether the volunteers of the Official and Provisional IRA can resist British imperialism, and can prevent them from imposing their strategy on the North. It is the armed resistance to the British Army which is the key to the development of the struggle. If it fails, British imperialism will smash the possibility of any independent political action by the nationalist minority. This would prevent the development of any leadership emerging which was superior to the present leadership of the IRA in ability to develop a correct revolutionary strategy.
One consequence of this theory was a clear tendency to separate out the “military” struggle from the general anti-imperialist struggle. In a reply to a letter from IS criticizing the IMG for giving uncritical support to the IRA, the IMG Political Committee replied:
”In the case of Ireland therefore’ we have to sort out several points. Firstly does either wing of the IRA have a programme capable of destroying the hold of British imperialism on Ireland. This in fact boils down to the question of whether the IRA can destroy capitalism in Ireland. The answer to that question is clearly NO. The Provisional IRA is ideologically linked to the Southern bourgeoisie, and the Officials’ stages theory means in practice that they are incapable of linking their explicit socialism to the national struggle. Therefore any slogan which states that the IRA can destroy British imperialism is completely incorrect. Any Marxist who holds to the theory of Permanent Revolution must accept this. Nevertheless this is entirely different to saying that the IRA cannot defeat the British army. Here in practice we may think it unlikely but it is not theoretically excluded in the same sense as is the IRA destroying British imperialism. There are many examples of struggles in which imperialist armies have been defeated without capitalism being destroyed and thereby destroying imperialism. We have already noted Algeria and the case of the FLN; Aden and Cyprus are other examples.” (The Red Mole, March 30, 1972.)
While the IMG Political Committee’s analysis of the impasse of the Official IRA’s stages theory was correct, it could be objected that they themselves seemed to accept a kind of stages theory – military victory first, political victory later. In this conception, what becomes of the permanent revolution in Ireland? Can the national bourgeoisie or forces “ideologically linked” to it win the political independence and unity of the country or not? If they can, wouldn’t that justify the Officials’ fear of the national bourgeoisie co-opting the struggle in the North, the fear precisely that led subjectively revolutionary leaders like Malachy McGurran, for instance, who does not hold the stages theory, to adopt a politically sectarian attitude toward the mass national struggle? Furthermore, if a purely military victory over British imperialism is possible, how could the IMG oppose the purely militarist conceptions of the Provisional leadership and the bulk of the rank and file, whose conception of the struggle is limited to the desire to defeat the repressive forces of imperialism and oust them from the country?
Moreover, the IMG not only exaggerated the power of bourgeois nationalism; it exaggerated the potency of the pro-imperialist bourgeoisie of the North. Not only could nationalists “ideologically linked” to the Southern bourgeoisie defeat British imperialism; the Orange bourgeoisie itself was powerful enough to balk the policy of the British capitalist class and prevent it from achieving a political solution in the North. It was on this premise that the IMG based its contention that the British could not isolate the guerrillas from the Catholic population. Any concessions would be opposed by the Orange bourgeoisie.
In its August 7, 1972, issue, for example The Red Mole wrote:
But protestant extremism remains a block to any progress in Ireland. In Lenadoon Avenue, the Provisionals manoeuvred the British into a choice between taking on the UDA and bursting the bubble, or capitulating to their pressure. Predictably British imperialism lined up once more with Orange reaction, despite their long term desire to ‘normalise’ sectarianism out of Six County politics.
From this capitulation the rest follows. It is not possible to give in to one side in the Six Counties without pushing hard against the other. The Provisionals having gained a new position of strength it was necessary for the British to attempt to gain the ascendancy over them in order to avoid being pushed against the UDA again. Since this could not be achieved politically the superior technical resources and fire power of the British Army had to be asserted. The invasion was not only in line with this, but it was a very substantial scrap which could be thrown to the wolves of the Protestant right.
An editorial in the same issue said:
Whitelaw failed because in the Six Counties any concessions given or promised to the catholic minority will always result in the mobilisation of the mass of the protestants determined to retain their ascendancy and sectarian institutions.
It is true that the outdated ideology and fanaticism of the Orange population makes them an unwieldy instrument of repression for British imperialism, which must, however roughly it has to handle them at times, still retain their loyalty. But this is not a new problem. It has existed for the entire history of Orangeism. In fact, for a whole period in the nineteenth century British imperialism found itself forced to outlaw the traditional Orange processions, whose purpose is to intimidate the Catholic population. The dilemma of British imperialism was stated already by the magistrate Thomas Knox in 1796:
As to the Orangemen, we have a rather difficult card to play; they must not be entirely discountenanced – on the contrary, we must in a certain degree uphold them, for with all their licentiousness, on them we must rely for the preservation of our lives and properties, should critical times occur. We do not suffer them to parade, but at the same time applaud them for loyal professions. (Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Ireland and Britain 1795–1836, p. 45)
Furthermore, the “licentiousness” of the Orangemen in the 1790s played a major role in driving the Catholics into the arms of the revolutionists and provoking the revolution of 1798.
However, by attributing to the Orangemen effective independence from British bourgeois hegemony and the control of the British ruling class, the IMG departed fundamentally from the principles of class analysis. Moreover, as a result of this eclectic schematism they underestimated the ability of the British ruling class to maneuver and exaggerated the effectiveness of a “blunt instrument,” that is, the apolitical terrorism of the Provisionals.
It is the armed struggle which has created the situation in which imperialism has been unable to impose a solution, and which has underpinned the self-confidence of the minority. (Bob Purdie, Ireland Unfree, p. 63)
The centrality of the terrorist campaign was defended, moreover, by exaggerating the ability of British imperialism to democratise Northern Ireland. It was wrong, according to Comrade Purdie, to try to mobilize the masses around the democratic demands most acutely felt by them because imperialism was ready to meet these demands. What imperialism could not accept was “armed struggle” that kept it from “stabilizing” the situation. Against the Officials’ contention that civil rights was the key issue around which to organize in the North, Comrade Purdie argued in an article in the October 16, 1972 Red Mole:
There are three dangerous elements in this argument. Firstly, it is true that the British have refused to grant the demands of the Civil Rights Association, for such simple concessions as a Bill of Rights. But this is not because they are opposed to civil rights. On the contrary, they have been anxious to ‘normalise’ the North for a long time. This is indeed essential for their long term plans to re-orient their relationships with the gombeen bourgeoisie in the South. They resist such demands because they are trying to re-establish stability, and they know that concessions to the Catholic minority on that scale would deepen the mass Orange resistance.
So they balance delicately, while trying to achieve their main priority at this time; the de-mobilization of the Catholic resistance. If they achieve this, through militarily smashing the Provos, and/or exhausting the minority, it is quite possible that they will introduce sweeping reforms in the North, as a means of sealing up the crack in the dam which nearly flooded them. Such reforms would aim at buying off the catholic resistance, and eliminating some of the structural factors which have made the catholic revolt so powerful. It is doubtful, even given the above conditions, that Britain could actually solve the Northern Ireland problem, through internal reform, but at least they could create a period of stabilisation.
In this situation the Officials’ schema would have two disastrous results.. It would mistake as a victory of the minority, what would in fact be a consolidation and strengthening of British imperialism. And, more important, they would not be prepared for the inevitable smashing of the resistance organisations which would accompany such a strategy. The Official Republicans would go down along with the Provos, PD, et al. and despite the ‘democracy’ would he unable to advocate any ‘sort of Ireland.’” (Emphasis in original.)
Fundamentally, Comrade Purdie’s theory was simply a left version of the concept held by the centrist CRA leaders that the British bourgeoisie essentially wanted to introduce normal bourgeois democracy. The conclusions that they drew were that they could use the interests of the British bourgeoisie as a lever against the Orange state and that the basic problem was to force the London government to grant these reforms in a “hot” way, that is, in response to mass pressure, rather than in a cold way, from above. According to Comrade Purdie, the problem for revolutionists was to prevent the British bourgeoisie from offering such reforms by blocking “stabilization” through the use of terrorism.
Both the approach of the centrist CRA leaders and that of Comrade Purdie deny the basic premise of the theory of permanent revolution, that is, that in the age of imperialism the imperialist bourgeoisie cannot carry out the tasks of eliminating the repressive instruments of rule characteristic of more backward social systems. The caste system in Ireland is one of the principal props of reaction not only in the smaller but in the larger of the British Isles. The notion that the British capitalist class is desirous or capable of eliminating it would mean that it still had the potential for carrying out major democratic tasks. Comrade Purdie’s concept, therefore, represents a serious revision of a fundamental element of Trotskyist theory.
But doesn’t Comrade Purdie avoid this? He says, for instance:
It is doubtful, even given the above conditions, that Britain could actually solve the Northern Ireland problem, through internal reform, but at least they could create a period of stabilization.
Doesn’t this qualification protect him against the charge of revisionism? Well, it does seem to be evidence of a general knowledge of the implications of the theory of permanent revolution. But what role does this qualification play in his overall conception? If the British ruling class cannot solve “the Northern Ireland problem, through internal reform,” why would a period of stabilization following democratic reforms be so fatal? Wouldn’t such victories encourage the Catholic minority to demand more? Wouldn’t they encourage all the workers to look toward the dismantling of the archaic repressive society of Northern Ireland? If after centuries of repression, the Catholic people won important democratic concessions, why should this be the signal for them to turn over their most dedicated defenders to the jailers of imperialism and the Orange caste system? Wouldn’t giving such democratic concessions require the imperialists and their local supporters to grant a large measure of political freedom to the revolutionists to explain to the masses the real “solution to the Northern Ireland” problem, and in conditions favorable for the assimilation of this message?
If Comrade Purdie were convinced that the British ruling class is really unable to solve the Northern Ireland problem through reforms, it would be hard to understand why he apparently thinks it is so essential to maintain the kind of instability represented by the Provisional terrorist campaign. This concept of chaos at any cost is in fact rather typical of social groups irrevocably condemned by capitalist development, such as small farmers in the United States and elsewhere. But a Marxist would have to recognize that chronic unrest of the type that has existed in Northern Ireland since the collapse of the mass civil rights movement does not necessarily favor revolution. In fact, without clear political perspectives, it can exhaust and demoralize the majority of the population and prepare them to accept any “solution.” Such a concept, then, that a decline or halt in the guerrilla struggle would mean inevitably the elimination of the revolutionists in Northern Ireland seems rather to represent the kind of desperation that comes from a feeling that capitalism has the power to solve its problems in its own way and not a conviction that imperialism is in a profound crisis. In short, Comrade Purdie’s conception is an essentially reformist one turned upside down, that is, a classically ultra-left approach that represents a revision of the theory of permanent revolution.
Comrade Purdie’s method here, moreover, is reminiscent of that illustrated by the document In Defence of Leninism: In Defence of the Fourth International, which says:
Democratic demands will normally not be granted by the decaying imperialist bourgeoisie. But nothing organically, economically, socially, (i. e., in terms of basic class relations), prevents the bourgeoisie from granting them as a ‘lesser evil’ in order to avoid a mass movement approaching a victorious socialist revolution. Organically the ‘national bourgeoisie’ of the colonial world cannot solve the agrarian question without to a large extent expropriating itself. There is no fundamental obstacle of the same kind to prevent the realisation of free abortion on demand, or freedom of the press, or even a democratic electoral law in an imperialist country. Given a powerful mass upsurge with a revolutionary potential, the imperialist bourgeoisie can grant these concessions precisely in order to avoid expropriation.
In normal circumstances, imperialism was in the past never willing to grant national independence to Quebec or Ireland. But given a pre-revolutionary situation, a powerful upsurge of the workers’ struggle, a concrete danger of a ‘workers’ republic’ being set up, there is no funda[mental] interest which would prevent imperialism from transforming any nationality into independent puppet states.
For these reasons the danger of a mass struggle in an imperialist country based solely on demands for national self-determination being absorbed by the bourgeoisie is very real. That is why revolutionary marxists must constantly combine in their propaganda and agitation, demands expressing the right of national self-determination for oppressed minorities with demands of a proletarian and socialist character in order to make this absorption much more difficult. This is what Trotsky meant when he argued that we must prevent democratic demands in imperialist countries from becoming ‘a democratic noose fastened to the neck of the proletariat.’
Trotsky’s method, however, in contrast to that of Comrades Purdie and Germain was to try to impel struggles for democratic demands out of the context of the capitalist system by stimulating the natural dynamic that they have in the age of imperialism, not to try to slip in some specially concocted anti-capitalist vaccine from the start. The latter method is a subjectivist and voluntarist one and not a scientific one. So, if Comrade Purdie’s program of chaos at any cost in order to prevent the British imperialists from co-opting the democratic demands of the Northern Irish Catholics does not seem on the surface to correspond to the “demands of a proletarian and socialist character” recommended by Comrade Germain for the same purpose, it clearly represents an outgrowth of the same logic. And this conclusion was undoubtedly made all the easier for Comrade Purdie by the increasing tendency of the Ninth World Congress majority to identify “armed struggle” in the abstract with revolutionary struggle.
Comrades Purdie and Germain’s method is a formalistic, schematic one. Under pressure of a mass upsurge, imperialism may even admit reforms that go against its fundamental class interests, such as the dual power that existed for a whole period in Austria after World War I. The importance of such reforms is their place in the process of struggle for the completion of the democratic revolution, to which capitalism as a whole is now opposed. And the fact remains that the mass struggle in the North of Ireland was touched off by mobilizations in support of demands for simple democratic rights. For four years a violent struggle has been going on, necessitating the stationing of 20,000 British troops in Ireland, marked by the most acute crises such as a general strike in the South in February 1972 and serious dangers to the stability of the Dublin regime on at least two occasions, seizure of Republic of Ireland ships on the high seas by British vessels and even the threat at times of confrontations between British and Irish armed forces. And still the North has not been “democratised.”
Furthermore, this method seems to have already led Comrade Purdie into making a serious miscalculation of the British ruling class’s objectives. In his pamphlet Ireland Unfree, he writes:
The strategy of the Irish revolution must therefore focus on sharpening the struggle in the North, to create the greatest possible crisis for British Imperialism, and the Irish bourgeoisie North and South. The main single factor which would attain this would be the smashing of Stormont [the Belfast parliament] and the complete disruption of the State, which would also involve the destruction of the Unionist Party as an instrument of British domination in Ireland. The unfolding events of the last three years have revealed that British Imperialism is willing to take any steps possible to preserve these two institutions, and that they are desperately afraid of the impetus which their eradication would give to the minority, and indeed to the whole Irish people. It is true that a small section of the British ruling class has been pressing for direct rule, but despite its ability to speak through the pages of the Sunday Times it is still a minority, even the Labour Party leaders are united with the Tories in trying to preserve Stormont and the Unionists. They would like to use the Unionist Party, as the only viable bourgeois political formation in the North, to give reforms to the minority, they are quite unwilling that the minority should take them. They hope also in a new deal with Irish capitalism, to use the Unionist Party as a lever against Fianna Fail, whose Bonapartist nature and whose loose grip on the reigns [sic] of the power makes it a not completely reliable instrument.
If Stormont were made unviable, and was swept out of the way, it would cause tremendous problems for British imperialism, it would give new confidence to the minority, and would stimulate the 26 County workers and small farmers, while also causing difficulties for Fianna Fail. We must be clear that these difficulties would not constitute an insuperable crisis for the British and Irish bourgeoisies, but they would open up new opportunities for advancing the revolution. Even if direct rule were imposed this could give imperialism at most a temporary respite, like that achieved by the Labour Government between August 1969 and July 1970. They could not fulfill the expectations of the minority, since they could not overcome the resistance to reform by the Protestant ultras, this would create the basis for a new and more effective struggle. (Pages 61–62.)
On March 25, 1972, only a month or two after the publication of this pamphlet, the British abolished Stormont and imposed direct rule. It was regarded as a victory by the minority, which, like Comrade Purdie, falsely believed that the main block to democratisation was the Orange apparatus. The change was actually rather slight; direct rule began in fact when British troops were first sent in. Comrade Purdie seems also to have forgotten that in the last analysis the state is a body of armed men, and the armed men present were under the direct command of the British government.
The immediate effect of direct rule was not to stimulate struggle but to touch off a peace movement that forced first the Official IRA and then the Provisionals to declare a cease-fire (although a brief one in the latter case). The British role of “arbiter” between Catholic and Protestant was reinforced and they were given considerably more flexibility to maneuver. Despite the spectacular resumption of the Provisonal campaign, in July 1972, hailed by the IMG as a new stage of the struggle, it is how absolutely clear that the situation has been steadily deteriorating since the introduction of direct rule, and has presently reached its lowest ebb since 1968. The new governmental formulas are, of course, not the only factor in this. But it seems clear that the demand for the abolition of Stormont as such could not effectively educate the nationalist-minded masses about the real source of oppression, was not a serious obstacle to the maneuvers of British imperialism, and the actual granting of this demand did not advance the struggle of the Catholic minority. In short it appears undeniable at this point that Comrade Purdie made a fundamental error in his assessment of this demand. In his search for the most radical proposal, the one that would cause the greatest “disruption” of the state, he settled on the one that fitted in precisely with the long-term strategy of the British ruling class. This error went deeper than a simple misjudgment of the conjunctural relationship of forces. It was the result of a revision of the theory of the permanent revolution that he picked up from the IEC Majority Tendency.
Comrade Purdie’s overestimation of the capacity of British imperialism to carry out democratic reforms led him to exaggerate the differences between the Orange bourgeoisie and the imperialists. From such a wrong judgment, it followed that calling on the central imperialist bourgeoisie to politically expropriate the Orange caste was the way to exacerbate the contradiction, to remove one of the important barriers to the national liberation struggle of the Catholic population. The imperialists’ assuming full and direct political control, according to this notion, was actually progressive. This concept led Comrade Purdie away from keeping the emphasis on the democratic demands of the oppressed people and most importantly on the demand for British withdrawal, from his revolutionary duty of constantly explaining that Britain has no right in Ireland and can perform no useful role there. Instead of constantly repeating “no trust in the imperialists, rely on your own strength,” Comrade Purdie came around by the back door to encouraging illusions in the capacity of capitalism to play a progressive role. In this process, an underestimation of the revolutionary dynamic of democratic demands went hand in hand with an underestimation of the political power of mass struggle. The result was that the need to mobilize the masses was obscured by an eclectic notion of pitting one section of the ruling class against another.
In his underestimation of the political power of mass struggle, Comrade Purdie very clearly followed the line laid out by the leaders of the Ninth World Congress majority. In an article in the September 15, 1972, Red Mole, for instance, he says:
It is the armed resistance to the British Army which is the key to the development of the struggle. If it fails, British imperialism will smash the possibility of any independent political action by the nationalist minority.
This is almost an exact parallel of the main argument used by the IEC Majority Tendency to defend the guerrilla orientation in Latin America. For example, in In Defence of Leninism; In Defence of the Fourth International, Comrade Germain says:
”Under the given circumstances, with the given social and economic instability in Latin America, the profound influence of the Cuban revolution on the vanguard of the mass movement, the decline of control of the traditional working class leaderships on that same vanguard, the explosive character of mass mobilizations which lead to rapid confrontations with the army, the emergence of the army as the mainstay of bourgeois power, not only materially but also politically, and its relative strength as opposed to the extreme fragility of all political formations of the ruling classes, a long period of gradual rise of mass struggles under conditions of relative (be it decaying) bourgeois democracy is extremely unlikely (except, as we said, in the case of Chile). The most likely variant is that a head-on collision between that mass movement and the army is unavoidable after a short period of emergence of mass explosions, a collision which could lead to a prolonged civil war, if the mass movement isn’t crushed by capitulation or disastrous defeats. Even if the enemy succeeds momentarily in establishing a military dictatorship, such a civil war could go on, temporarily take the form of guerrilla warfare, and help to overcome the lull in the mass struggles after the partial defeat. Whatever may be the various combinations of forms of struggle, it is necessary to tirelessly prepare the masses for such armed confrontations, which are unavoidable, so that the workers and poor peasants should not face the army without arms and without preparation.” (Pages 4–5)
For a very different country, quite a distance from Latin America, on the threshold of Europe in both the geographical and socio-political sense, Comrade Purdie came to the same conclusion: “... the armed resistance ... is the key. ... If it fails, British imperialism will smash the possibility of any independent political action by the nationalist minority.”
This extension of the thesis of the Ninth World Congress Resolution on Latin America to a new context shows quite clearly that what is involved in the dispute over the guerrilla line is not a concrete analysis or the specific perspectives of socialist revolution in Latin America but a certain political conception. What the line of the Ninth World Congress Majority and now the IEC Majority Tendency represents, in fact, is an underestimation of the political impact of mass struggle and a tendency to reduce the area of conflict between the masses and the state to the arena of armed action alone and finally to replace a program for arming the masses with a strategy based on small commando groups isolated from the mass struggle. This inexorable logic is well illustrated by the IMG’s reaction to the Bloody Sunday Massacre of January 31, 1972, in Derry.
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Last updated: 20 January 2020