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The Test of Ireland
The lesson of Derry, according to the IMG, was the “vulnerability” of mass struggle. In its February 7, 1972, issue The Red Mole argued:
The massacre which took place in the Bogside on Sunday 30 January claiming the lives of thirteen Irishmen will bring home to many people, inside and outside Ireland, the importance of the IRA’s role in the Six-Counties. It has been the existence of armed bodies of men engaged in the defense of the oppressed Catholic minority which has prevented the latter from being crushed by the British army. The main lessons of the massacre in the Bogside is that the Irish people have to defend themselves guns in hand against British imperialism ...
Since August 9th last year, British imperialism has been under a constant attack mounted by the oppressed Irish minority in the Six-Counties, but this attack has existed on two fronts: first the military struggle and secondly, the mass rents and rate strikes. These two fronts separated by the logistics of guerrilla warfare, were not only aimed at the same enemy, but were also linked politically through the mass popular demonstrations such as have been held over the last week, culminating in the 20,000 strong march in Derry.
The demonstrations, unarmed and presenting an easy target, were the obvious choice to attempt and break the tightening noose of resistance. The Army had failed completely to inflict a decisive blow against the IRA. The only way to defeat a rates and rents strike is by arresting thousands of householders. This was clearly impossible. The mass demonstrations provided the clearest target. Here lay the real hope of stemming the tide. Here one decisive blow could teach a terrible lesson to those who continued the resistance, because here the demonstrations were the largest and the most defiant; and because here a salient lesson could be taught to the whole Catholic population of Northern Ireland.
What is this but a war? On one side is British imperialism and the Orange Order and on the other the majority of the Irish working class, spearheaded by the minority in the Six-counties and represented militarily by the IRA.
The massacre was designed to intimidate the Catholic population. But it was by no means the first use of massive and murderous violence against the minority by the British Army, as shown by the long list of Catholic victims before then, to say nothing of the massive internment raids and continual forays into Catholic neighborhoods that followed them. The British Army did not need a peaceful march to “tempt” it into using armed force against unarmed civilians. The resumption of the mass civil-rights marches despite this intimidation represented a crucial political test of strength. It threatened a decisive political defeat for the policy of repression. To this threat, the British Army responded by a calculated escalation. It took a political gamble. Who won out? According to Comrade Purdie, it should have been the British army. The logic of his argument is that this head-on political confrontation should have been avoided because the unarmed masses could not stand up to the British military.
The murder of thirteen unarmed demonstrators dealt the British government its greatest defeat so far in the Irish crisis. It touched off the first general strike in Ireland since 1913. It forced the Dublin government to take hostile steps against London for the first time in the conflict, although before this there were hundreds of violations of Twenty-Six County sovereignty by the British army, even threatening armed clashes between Twenty-Six County security forces and British units. It evoked panic from the organs of international imperialism. The New York Times called on the British government in obvious concern to do something to stop the crisis from deteriorating. And what is more, for a period of some months the British army pulled its troops out of the Catholic ghettos, something that the long months of the Provisional “military campaign” and the “very careful sniping” of the Officials had been completely unable to make it do.
Why did the Derry massacre have this effect? It was because world public opinion and the masses of the Irish people could understand the demands of the marchers and identify with them. The demonstrators were demanding democratic rights that clearly belonged to them. They were supported by the masses of the Catholic population, as was shown by their numbers and the breadth of the united front. There was no question of their trying to force their opinions on anyone by military conspiracy or the armed violence of small groups. It was precisely by stressing the democratic and peaceful character of the march that the maximum support could be achieved for the oppressed minority from the broad masses in Ireland and throughout the world, who were far from understanding, as shown by their attitude and actions, the need for the revolutionary violence of commando groups. The fact that the peaceful, mass character of the march was evident to public opinion was what fundamentally explained the power of the protests against the obviously arbitrary and repressive terror of the British army. It was clear where the fault for the violence lay. It was clear who was using violence to suppress the democratic will of the people.
But the IMG drew a completely contrary conclusion:
The reaction Of the British press to Sunday’s killings throws into sharp relief the need to make support for the IRA a central task of the solidarity movement in Britain. Running through many of the reports is the idea that the main responsibility for the killings lies with the IRA. Imperialism’s use of internment, the presence and high concentration of British troops, the terror tactics and the murder, are all justified as being regrettable aspects of a necessary campaign against what it dubs a cancer within the Northern Catholic community – the IRA. A solidarity movement in Britain has to have as its main task the overcoming of such mystifications. This can only be achieved by showing that at this period the struggle of the IRA is the legitimate continuation of the struggle of the Irish people for self-determination. For militants who take the side of the oppressed minority of N. Ireland against the Stormont regime, the N. Irish State, and therefore British imperialism, it is vital to solidarise with the IRA, the only force capable of giving an immediate perspective of struggle against an enemy, which is determined to crush the resistance of the Irish people. A refusal to take up this position, in the present situation, means running the risk of falling into the arms of the British bourgeoisie, which is desperate only to smash the IRA before clinching a political deal with Lynch, Stormont, and the reformists in N. Ireland opposition who are prepared to sell out on the national question and accept less blatant but equally exploitative forms of imperialist domination. (Avenge Derry, Red Mole, February 7)
Thus, at a time when both the Provisional and Official IRA were trying to refute the lie that there were armed gunmen in the demonstration, that the massacre resulted from an armed clash between the IRA and the British army, the IMG saw its main task as defending the “armed action” of the IRA. This editorial started off in fact with the statement: “And after this massacre it is clearer still that the mass struggle in the North cannot be fought and defended without arms.” Protests by people who did not understand this, it argued, would be of little value: “Yet of the many protests which Monday’s Morning Star urges should ‘flood Downing Street’, few enough will help militants in Britain draw the necessary conclusions from this.”
In an impressionistic and typically petty-bourgeois leftist style, the IMG sought to turn the propaganda of the bourgeois press upside down. Its notion of developing a “mass solidarity movement” to protest an armed attack by the British army on an unarmed, united-front march, was to hail the “armed action” of the IRA, “the armed vanguard of the Irish people.”
The same notion is at work in the masquerades that have become typical not just of the IMG’s but of the IEC Majority Tendency’s way of expressing solidarity with the struggle in Ireland. In the Glasgow march, the IMG tried to live up to the romantic image of the IRA projected by the bourgeois press. The Belgian conferences where Comrade Lawless was passed off as an IRA leader tried to produce an IRA that would live up to the thrilling pictures of the bourgeois media. In short, this is a pathetic petty-bourgeois attempt to frighten the bourgeoisie by imitating the scarecrows of its propaganda. Its effect is to both endanger and mock those who are actually engaged in the struggle.
What would have been the political outcome of the Derry massacre if there had actually been armed IRA men on the march or posted nearby? This question does not have to be answered by logic alone. No “hypotheses” are necessary. The whole course of the struggle in Northern Ireland since the spring of 1972 gives a concrete and irrefutable answer. With the death of the civil-rights movement, the IMG need not fear the possibility of unarmed masses confronting the British army. Since the resumption of the Provisional campaign in July, “armed struggle” has been the focus in Northern Ireland. In fact, technically the Provisional campaign is much improved, being bolstered by rockets and mortars whose effectiveness has been hailed in The Red Mole.
But what is the state of the situation now in Northern Ireland? A year ago, the murder of thirteen peaceful marchers by the British army touched off the sharpest crisis in the history of British imperialism in Ireland since the 1919–21 war of independence. Imperialist rule was shaken. Great masses of Southern Irish people rose up to defend their compatriots in the North. The full force of world public opinion was turned against the British rulers.
In contrast to that, since the resumption of the Provisional campaign on a wider scale the Northern people find themselves almost completely isolated. Not only that but the repression has extended to the South. The masses’ fears of a seemingly uncontrolled and uncontrollable bombing campaign was so great that the explosion of a few bombs in Dublin, an obvious provocation, was enough to dissipate the opposition to draconian legislation against the militant nationalists in the South.
In the crisis that extended from the British army’s murder of Cusack and Beattie in Derry city in July 1971 to the Derry massacre and direct rule, the bourgeois nationalists were on the defensive both North and South. The battered bourgeois nationalist party in the North was on the brink of being pushed into an impossible position, into either committing itself irreparably to revolutionary opposition to the Belfast parliament or exposing itself once and for all as a traitorous body. Today the bourgeois nationalists in the North have reconsolidated themselves as the political leadership of the Catholic minority. One year ago, the death of thirteen unarmed marchers brought worldwide protests. Since the resumption of the Provisional campaign, over a hundred people have been murdered by Orange assassins and by the British army’s equivalent of the Green Berets, and there has not been a whisper of protest, not even in the South of Ireland. One year and a half ago, Britain’s claim to being the “peacemaker,” the arbiter in the North, was hopelessly compromised. After months of the Provisional military campaign, this image has been restored, to such an extent that the politicians of the Dublin government can say publicly that they are opposed to a British withdrawal and get away with it. Until the resumption of the Provisional campaign, internment was a running sore in British politics and a grave international problem for the British government. Over the last year internment has continued and dozens of Irish liberation fighters have been sentenced to horrifying sentences by drumhead courts, and this has not aroused a ripple of international protest.
What has the IMG’s policy of explaining the need for “solidarity with the armed struggle” done for this generation of Irish martyrs? All that it was capable of doing was giving the coup de grace to an already declining support movement in Britain and defending the sterile tactics that led to this disaster.
The failure of the IMG in the solidarity movement to help the fighters in Ireland, even its parasitic attitude and its mockery of them was, however, not its most serious error. In the wake of the Derry massacre, in the period of the mass protests when British imperialism was on the defensive, there was an opportunity for a qualitative leap in the revolutionary process in Ireland, there was an opportunity to build an all-Ireland mass revolutionary movement and possibly even arm the masses. The Southern government was reeling from the gigantic upsurge in the South. The entire Northern Catholic population was united in its hatred of the British and Belfast regimes. British imperialism was on the defensive. With proper direction, the mass movement could have forced the opening of the border, compelled the Dublin government to allow the passage of massive material aid to the North, and prevented the British government for a time at least from seriously interfering. But instead of pointing the way forward for the mass movement, the IMG tail-ended petty-bourgeois terrorist politics.
In accordance with its conception of itself as the “army of the people,” as the “defenders” of the mass movement, the Official IRA responded to the Derry massacre by carrying out a terrorist action in Great Britain. It tried to bomb the officers’ mess at the Aldershot paratroop base. The bankrupt centrism of the Official IRA was never more clearly revealed than by this incident. To compensate for its inability to offer a perspective to the mass movement, it resorted to a stunt designed to win the applause of the masses. Instead of understanding how to capitalize on the mass sentiment running in favor of the national liberation struggle, it squandered its advantage for the moral satisfaction of punishing the murders directly by killing a few officers in the same branch of the military. Although to give credit where credit is due, when they saw the negative effects of the operation, not having the benefit of the brilliant theory and conjunctural analysis enjoyed by the IMG as a result of its relations with the IEC Majority Tendency, the Official leadership recognized its error.
The Official leadership, however, was in a position to feel these effects directly. When the bomb attempt went wrong and killed several cleaning women and a Catholic chaplain, the tide of popular sentiment abruptly reversed itself, leaving the Officials high and dry. In the South of Ireland, where tens of thousands of organized workers had marched in protest against the murders committed by the paratroopers and had burned the British embassy to the ground, the Officials found themselves totally isolated in the wake of Aldershot. No one came to their defense. Fortunately, they were able to embarrass the government by making it clear that the arrest of their leaders was aimed at suppressing the political activity of the organization, at making it unable to campaign in the Common Market referendum. This “reformist” democratic appeal saved them; they did not take this occasion to defend the “need for armed struggle.”
This was the tack taken, however, by the IMG. An editorial in the February 28, 1972, Red Mole rushed to their “defense.”
There must be no let up in the tempo of public agitation on Ireland, though the need for all meetings to be properly stewarded is now of prime importance. In this situation many will be tempted to retreat behind the cover of arguments of the form ‘Marxism vs. Neo-anarchist Terrorism’. This must be resisted. In our society we are constantly experiencing the violence of the bourgeoisie. This occurs in covert – the violence of economic deprivation and social oppression – and overt – the open violence of the army and police forms. We deny them the right to use this violence. Every time they do as on Bloody Sunday in Derry, we will use it to show the rottenness of their system.
For us violence is a response to their violence. The use of it is not a moral question. It is merely a tactic in our struggle – is a particular act of violence conducive to carrying the struggle forward or is it counterproductive?
No matter what criticism we might make of the tactics of the carrying out of this particular action the main fact is still that we unconditionally support the right of the IRA, or any other faction of the Republican population to carry on armed action aimed at destroying British rule in Ireland.
The pacifists and liberals may weep and wring their hands with grief but even in their own moralising terms the just violence of the IRA is nothing compared to the centuries of British imperialist butchery in Ireland. In political terms as we have explained, the struggle of the IRA is in the direct interests of the British working class. The fact that a bad technical error or tactical mistake meant that unfortunately British army officers were not killed by the blast, does not in the slightest alter the political content of the struggle of the IRA.
It is in this light that we must look at the Aldershot incident.
Victory to the I.R.A.
The main point as to the historic responsibility for the use of violence was correct, of course. But in the concrete instance was this sufficient? Didn’t the statement gloss over a tragic political error? The IMG, however, was quick to clarify its position. In the March 13, 1972, issue of The Red Mole, it said:
Had Aldershot been a success (leaving aside the question of whether or not Officers were killed for the moment). [The Red Mole tended to give credence to an Official statement that the British were hiding their real casualties. – G.F.], there can be little doubt that the Northern minority, and the rest of the Irish people would have been heartened. As it is the action spells out clearly to the British Army, the consequences of a future massacre like that at Derry. Had the IRA simply ignored the massacre it would have encouraged the attempts of British imperialism to frighten the mass movement off the streets. [I was in the living room of some key organizers of the “mass movement” when the news of Aldershot came over the TV. Their reaction at least was that it meant that the political advantage won by the Bloody Sunday protests had been squandered and that now those who died in the massacre had died in vain. – G.F.], The new campaign also multiplies the contradictions for Stormont and Westminster; they had been making a lot of noise about the lower level of the Provisionals’ campaign, although they were stretched taut in dealing with it. The Officials will make their military and propaganda situation more difficult.
The IMG hoped that the Aldershot bombing, plus some other actions of a similar type meant, to quote Comrade Purdie’s pamphlet, that the Officials were being forced off their “conservative pedestal.” The March 13 article continued:
Aldershot, however, shows up some important contradictions in the Officials’ policy. Firstly their repeated condemnations of Provisional actions, while being careful in selecting those which could be interpreted as being sectarian, nevertheless have tended to make generalised criticisms of the military struggle of the Provisionals which seem to counterpose a non-violent response to the situation. An example of this is in the interview given to Seven Days by Cathal Goulding, where he criticises the Provisionals for escalating the struggle after internment: ‘But the Provisionals escalated the struggle and that gave Faulkner the excuse he needed to continue internment.’
Such statements had brought the Officials many a false friend recently, who praised their ‘responsibility’, and denounced the Provisionals as ‘terrorists.’ It is as well to lose such supporters, but by giving them a basis in the first place the Officials did not help to clarify the politics of the situation. And if they are serious about carrying through such a campaign it is as well to prepare the Irish people for it in advance; they have done the reverse. It is as well also not to have organisations which are well-known to be heavily under Official influence, such as the NICRA, denouncing the bombing (see Morning Star, 23rd February).
These contradictions, which can all be explained in terms of ‘tactics,’ in reality flow from the basic contradictions within Official policy, their attitude towards Stormont. Still insisting, after internment, after Derry, that Stormont can be reformed, they are propelled into reformist and gradualist politics. At the present conjuncture the mass demonstrations do have a revolutionary potential, since they increase the contradictions of the Unionists and British imperialism; but not being placed in the context of a policy which tries to smash Stormont, their line of development is extremely limited.
But the Officials are still Republicans, they still come from the physical force tradition [which Comrade Purdie now no longer considered ’backward” – G.F.], It is impossible for them to stand idly by while the British Army tries to crush the minority in the North; retaliatory action was necessary, and has been taken. This, however, merely opens up more contradictions, for such a campaign will have very serious consequences for Stormont. If it is carried on for an extended period it could well lead to the collapse of Stormont, and if the alternative is not to be direct rule it is necessary to prepare the ground work for a peoples’ alternative now.
It will be inevitable too that such a basic contradiction will lead to disagreements within the Officials; one section will try to resolve the contradiction by bringing the military policy into line with the reformist political policy, and another will try to change the political line. This is not the best internal situation with which to sustain a military campaign.
Nevertheless we pledge our continued solidarity with the struggle now going on, and will renew our attempts to build a principled solidarity movement in Britain, one which does not hesitate to say: VICTORY TO THE IRA!
The Official IRA did not follow the IMG’s friendly advice. When the pattern of “retaliatory” actions isolated them and brought them to the brink of destruction, they declared the cease-fire that was such a disappointment to the IMG and their continental co-thinkers.
But if the Officials let down the IMG, there were still the Provisionals, whose military prowess The Red Mole never failed to praise, although at times expressing some disquiet about their political conceptions. In the March 13 article, a hope expressed by Comrade Purdie was that the Officials might wage a more political terrorist campaign than the Provisionals:
Until the beginning of this year the main core of the military struggle had been carried on by the Provisionals, being cast in the traditional Republican mould, they have seen themselves, fighting another army. This dictated sniping at soldiers, and attacking military installations and while they did give their campaign a political edge by attempting to bomb life in Belfast to a standstill, this has not been achieved and has more and more taken the form of random actions.”
On March 21, one of these “random actions” took place in Donegall Street, one of the main thoroughfares of Belfast. A bomb was planted in the street itself, and then the Provisionals apparently called the British army, warning them of the impending blast. Forcing the occupation forces to clear this heavily trafficked street while they searched for the bomb would have been a significant contribution to the campaign to “bomb life in Belfast to a standstill.” The British, however, did not cooperate. And it appears that they actually herded the crowd into the area where the bomb was expected to explode. When the event occurred, television sets throughout Europe and America showed British soldiers rushing to the aid of wounded and maimed civilians, including children, who were allegedly struck down by the “gunmen” of the Provisional IRA. Sanctimonious speeches by “shocked” British officers filled the airwaves.
There was something very wrong politically with this type of action. The concept of a military campaign divorced from the mass struggle, however, led inevitably to such incidents. The Provisionals’ actions were consistent with their political concepts, and they did not hesitate to take responsibility for this action and to carry out others like it later on. It was the IMG that was inconsistent.
After all, Comrade Purdie wrote in his pamphlet published just a few months before the Donegall Street bombing:
It soon became clear that the British Army faced an urban guerrilla war, a war which was probably tougher than the Black & Tan war and one of the most sophisticated guerrilla campaigns that has ever been seen. Within a few months the Army was totally incapable of making any progress, the audacity of the IRA volunteers knew no bounds, they pulled off coup after dazzling coup, while the Crown forces fumed impotently. (p. 5)
In his article in the February 28 Red Mole, entitled Ireland – Seize the Time, Comrade Purdie did criticize the militarist conceptions of the Provisionals:
The chief flaw in the thinking of the Provisionals is the old Republican one; because they place the military struggle to expell British imperialism from the North on a pedestal, they underestimate the importance of political mobilisation either of the Northern minority, or the southern masses.
But since Comrade Purdie also elevated “armed struggle” to a special position, calling it the “key” to the situation, such criticisms of the Provisional strategy became more and more overshadowed by praise for their guerrilla technique.
In an article in the July 10, 1972, Red Mole, Comrades Purdie and Lawless wrote:
The weaknesses of the Provisionals should not blind anyone to the importance of what they have been able to achieve. They have built up the most effective military resistance to British imperialism seen in Ireland since the Black and Tan war; never for more than fifty years has the British Army faced an adversary so formidable as the Provisional IRA.
We refuse to criticise them for their military strategy; we do not accept that the bombing campaign was sectarian, and we despise those on the British left who have echoed these slanders. The targets of the campaign were on the one hand the British and Six County state forces, and on the other hand the business interests, and the institutions of British imperialism in Ireland. The facts have been confused because bombs set off by the British SAS and Orange fanatics have been attributed to the Provisionals. The most common accusations is that the Provos have bombed protestant pubs and factories. First they have not bombed any pubs because they were used by protestants but for military and/or security reasons, and second they have bombed factories, which represented British investments. That they should directly affect mostly protestant workers in this way reflects the sectarian employment policy of the state, which the bombs were trying to smash.
To be sure, Comrades Purdie and Lawless pointed to the political weaknesses of the Provisionals, their lack of a program and socialist leadership. In particular they criticized the Provisionals’ concept that they had a mandate from the first revolutionary government (1919) to carry out whatever actions they deemed necessary. Comrades Purdie and Lawless stressed that the Provisionals had to develop structures of “direct democracy” that could authorise them to carry out such military and other actions. But, having put the cart before the horse, they were in a rather awkward position to make such suggestions. Since they hailed the military campaign that was being carried out by a “secret army” in isolation from mass struggles or control, calling it the “key” to the situation and the main thing responsible for the failure of the imperialists to achieve their strategic ends, weren’t their complaints about the Provisionals’ political weaknesses really rather secondary?
When the Provisionals repeated the mistake of the Done- gall Street bombing on a grand scale in the Bloody Friday bombings of July 21, 1972, the IMG’s criticism was again very ambiguous. In the July 29 Red Mole, Comrade Lawless wrote:
Taking advantage of the casualties, Whitelaw then launched his psychological warfare blitz to panic all other Republican, nationalist and socialist tendencies into condemnation of the Provisionals.
From this condemnation the British propaganda machine hopes to push them into at least neutrality, while Whitelaw ‘destroys the IRA’s capability’. From recent statements from the Official Republican movement, Whitelaw has reason to be hopeful on this score.
No one must fall for this. A defeat for the Provos would not be a defeat for the Provos alone. If Whitelaw succeeds against the Provos he will take on all other tendencies one by one. (Emphasis in original.)
Comrade Lawless’s comment was rather one-sided. The mistake of the Provisionals had its effect on the masses. The attitude of the other tendencies could not alter that. They of course had a duty to defend the Provisionals, to explain why they did what they did. But they could not help the Provisionals by endorsing their error. The best way they could help the Provisionals was by explaining very clearly why such tactics were wrong. It was all very well, moreover, to explain that many of the bombings were provocations and that the British army deliberately disregarded warnings. But the IMG did not draw the political conclusions from this. That is, that such acts could easily be distorted and manipulated by the British; they did not help to organize and educate the masses, they confused and disorganized them. They were, in short, terrorist acts, and it was the duty of Marxists to point out why they were ineffective.
The results of “Bloody Friday” were quick in coming. Confused and disoriented by the seemingly senseless and bloody bombings, the Catholic population accepted British occupation of the “no go areas.” Key neighborhoods that had been kept free of the repressive forces for months, that had served as political focuses and symbols of the resistance as well as refuges for victims of political persecution, were occupied without resistance. Once the mass mobilization and the political pressures that had kept the British army out were dissipated by the bombings, the “guerrillas” were no obstacle to the army moving in. Derry in particular, which had been the nerve center and political laboratory of the Northern resistance, the symbol of its hopes, where the Catholic population lived in freedom behind the barricades during the greater part of the crisis, fell under crushing military occupation. There was only a feeble glimmer of the spirit and unity that had defeated the British army in the aftermath of the internment raids.
But instead of explaining the gravity of this defeat and its causes, the IMG minimized it.
The invasion was hardly a famous victory, and certainly not a military defeat for the IRA. The struggle may have been pushed back by the elimination of the Free Areas, but it will continue in other forms. The Free Areas were important to the military struggle but the IRA was able to carry out quite effective military action before they were set up, and will continue to do so. (Cf. Comrade Purdie’s article in the August 7, 1972, issue of The Red Mole.)
Why was the occupation of the Free Areas not a victory for the British Army? Because the military was forced to carry out repression.
But in the long run Britain cannot win. Whitelaw’s initiative was the nearest they have got yet to imposing a solution, and having run that policy down with their own tanks the Heath government can face only a mounting crisis as the resentment of the minority is translated into a new round of the struggle against the Army of occupation.
Comrade Purdie did not seem to realize that repression does not always have the effect solely of stirring resentment The fact that the British army was able to accomplish this occupation without sparking mass resistance was a sign that they had achieved a significant victory over the mass movement. But apparently, Comrade Purdie was not very interested in that:
It is useless to make abstract condemnations of ‘terrorism’ and to declare in solemn tones that terrorism cannot achieve anything. The fact is that the Provisionals’ bombing campaign was as important as their offensive against the British Army, and the resistance of the masses in bringing down Stormont.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the bombings in Belfast were used by the British for their own ends, and to their own advantage. The advantages which they did gain are very limited, but for the purpose of the invasion important. This illustrates that while the present lines of battle remained unchanged even the most developed military technique can rebound politically on the IRA [! – G.F.] Without a solution of the problems of how to escalate the struggle in the North into an all-Ireland struggle which combines the completion of the national with the working class revolution the Provos will be balked in similar ways in the future.
That is, the Provisionals’ strategy was fine; their military technique was one of “the most developed.” But, “alas,” they lacked a strategy for extending the struggle to the South. Comrade Purdie did not seem to realize that the “bombing campaign” he praised had the effect of alienating the masses of the Southern population from the struggle in the North and was thus the exact opposite of what was needed to “extend the battle lines.” He was the one trapped in a contradiction, not the Provisionals. Despite his trying to straddle the fence, according to a method perhaps learned from the IEC Majority Tendency’s resolution on Latin America, his weight came down fundamentally on the side of terrorism.
The IMG, moreover, was apparently anxious to cash in on the popularity that the Provisionals had won in some circles of the young left by their terrorist actions. In the October 30, 1972, issue of The Red Mole, they printed an interview, without comment, with Sean Mac Stiofain and Joe Cahill, two Provisional leaders who would certainly have been characterized by The Red Mole in 1970 as “conservatives.” According to the interview, they said:
It is said that we have connections with the ruling circles in the South. I would then like to know why, if this connection still exists (certainly, who would have refused money and arms, when the battle began?), Lynch threw us into prison, and left the Official ‘Marxists’ in peace? The repression against us, coordinated between London and Belfast, gets worse every day. Heath gave Lynch a list of people who had to be put out of the way. The first victim was Francis MacGuigan, the only guerrilla fighter ever to have escaped from Long Kesh, arrested the other day with two comrades. The fact is that the Dublin government is much more afraid of us than of the Official IRA opportunists, who unfortunately have the support of a lot of marxists, even sincere marxists, abroad, while the revolutionary groups, particularly the Fourth International, are all on our side. It is we who are fighting an armed struggle against capitalism, against clerical conservatism, against the manipulation of our economy by foreign capital, against their control of the means of distribution and production, which deprives through wage slavery, the worker of the wealth which he produces.
This interview was supposed to have been given in Italy. Such sentiments have not been expressed by Sean Mac Stiofain and Joe Cahill in interviews with the Irish, British, or American press. But the interview does raise the question: Does the IMG believe that the extent of a group’s revolutionary determination and the threat it represents to the system is determined by the degree of repression to which it is subjected? It is notable that although the Provisionals continue to observe the principle of not recognizing the courts and thus put themselves in a position of suffering automatic jail sentences, a principle that Comrade Purdie noted in 1970 resulted in needless casualties, The Red Mole has not tried to persuade them to abandon this attitude.
Furthermore, the IMG has continued its “explanations” of the bombing technique:
The Provisional bombing campaign has been almost uniformly misunderstood or misrepresented. So-called ‘Marxists’ have sternly denounced ‘terrorism’ which they have defined in a quite un-Marxist way as a question of military technique, rather than as a question of the political relationship between military action and the masses. [Is this a “synthetic and elliptical phrase”? Its meaning is not exactly clear. – G.F.]
The bombing campaign had two main purposes. Firstly, it was designed to seriously disrupt commercial life in the main cities. In turn this had two subsidiary purposes: to bring pressure to bear on the British government; and simultaneously to break up the foundations of the Six County state. It was secondly an important defensive measure: the forces in the centre of the cities, forces which could have been used in the period before Operation Motorman to saturate the Catholic ghettos. The methods now being used in these areas are an indication of what this would have meant. Whole populations are constantly under surveillance by the Army, constantly threatened with arrest, and/or harassment. This seriously undermines their ability tq engage in political resistance. Fortunately the Army has not yet been able to totally crush the people but if they were able to dispose of large enough forces they would. By obliging the Army to protect the city centres the Provisional IRA contributes directly to the possibility of mass political opposition. Thus the bombing campaign is not terrorist [! – G.F.]
If we draw up a balance sheet, it shows a very heavy balance on the positive side. The campaign helped to maintain the free areas for much longer than they would otherwise have existed, by pinning down large numbers of troops. (The Red Mole, November 27, 1972.)
Thus, there is nothing basically wrong with the Provisionals’ tactics, according to the IMG, and that is essentially the message the Provisionals’ supporters have gotten. “Mr. Tariq Ali, the well-known theorist of revolution, who arrived in Dublin for a brief visit told the Commerce and Economics Society in U.C.D. [University College Dublin] that he supports the Provisional IRA’s bombing campaign in the North,” the Irish People, the New York weekly that reflects the views of the American Provisional support group, reported in its February 10, 1973 issue. What this amounts to is uncritical support for the political conceptions of the Provisionals, from which their tactics flow.
In order to maintain this effectively uncritical support of the Provisionals’ strategy, the IMG has been forced to completely distort the course of events in the North. This method is illustrated in the passage quoted above. If the bombings served to draw off the troops from the ghettos, how could the ghettos be occupied almost immediately after the largest Provisional bombing campaign of the crisis? If the bombing campaign “contributes directly to the possibility of mass political opposition,” why has the mass movement disappeared as the bombing campaign escalated, as was shown by the lack of massive passive resistance to the occupation in contrast to the response to the internment raids? The statement that the repression the ghetto dwellers are now suffering shows what would have happened if the bombings had not kept the troops off is completely dishonest and confusionist (and fundamentally an apology for the terrorism of the Provisionals). The fact is that the repression they are suffering comes in the wake of the most ambitious Provisional offensive in the history of the crisis. These arguments contradict even Comrade Purdie’s article in the August 7 Red Mole, which said: “... it is clear that the bombings in Belfast were used by the British for their own ends, and to their own advantage. The advantages which they did gain are very limited, but for the purpose of the invasion important.” The logic of adaptation is inexorable, and there is no end to it if you do not break fundamentally with this method.
The same method has led the IMG to deny the steady deterioration of the situation in Northern Ireland in the last year. Every new setback is regarded as the contradictory effect of a victory. An excellent example of this kind of “dialectics” is to be found in an editorial in the November 27, 1972 Red Mole.
The probability that Mac Stiofain will receive a two year sentence should not be seen as the main problem which is revealed by his arrest. Despite his enormous military ability, his arrest alone will not break the campaign in the North. The real problem is the continued weakness of the struggle in the South. The purpose of Whitelaw’s ramblings on the ‘Irish Dimension’ in his Green Paper, is now revealed. Unable to defeat the struggle in the Six Counties, British Imperialism is now going over to an all-Ireland offensive. And in return for meaningless promises of the Green Paper, Fianna Fail is acting as its main agent. Never before has the crucial importance of an all-Ireland struggle by the Irish republicans and socialists been shown so starkly.
In the first place, this argument runs somewhat counter to the previous chiding of the Officials for not realizing that the struggle in Ireland has been essentially one and that you cannot divide the North and the South. The Officials, as a result of their populist concepts, have tended to see the problem as building up the struggle to the same level in both areas. They have failed to see that the colonial and neocolonial system in Ireland form an integrated whole in which both the British government and the native bourgeois forces respond on a nationwide basis to threats arising anywhere in the country. At the same time, paradoxically they fail to grasp fully the political contradictions that arise from the different political pressures on these forces and that disrupt their cooperation. That is, their conception is incomplete and rather static. But in his attempt to present the Lynch government’s offensive as the result of a flanking maneuver by a British regime, thwarted by the invincible Provisional campaign, the author of this article reinforced this type of confusion.
Imperialism has always had an “all-Ireland” strategy, as shown by its pressures on the Lynch government from the start of the crisis. What prevented repression previously in the South was the support for the struggle in the North, and what permitted Lynch to move against the Provisionals was precisely the ebbing of that sentiment as a result of the political confusion caused to an important degree by the Provisionals’ bombing campaign. This decline in support in the South, moreover, was only a magnified reflection of a decline in support for militant struggle in the North deriving fundamentally from the same causes. As an apologist for “armed struggle,” in reality, petty-bourgeois terrorism, the writer of The Red Mole editorial cannot recognise this fact, and evidently was forced to suck a “new conjuncture” out of his thumb to explain the move toward repression in the Twenty-Six Counties.
In its analysis of the Irish situation, in fact, The Red Mole goes in rather heavily for involved speculation about the strategy of the British government in this or that conjuncture. This tendency brought a complaint from the writer of the earlier mentioned document entitled How to Lead from Behind.
We have tended to concentrate unduly on the analysis of British Government and Military strategy, to the detriment of broader issues where there is a real need to [convey] correct ideas to our members-periphery-readers. Mole readers get to know about the military situation in Belfast, the morale in the Army, etc. but slightly less on the question of ‘terrorism’, the question of working class unity in Ireland, loyalist ‘socialism’, etc. There has been a definite lack of articles which set out to explain in a clear and systematic way some of the key political issues on which there tends to be confusion, even inside the Left. For instance – Terrorism, is the Provo bombing campaign terrorism? why not? what is the marxist attitude to terrorism? to guerrilla warfare?
There does seem to have been something of a lack of clear consistent analysis of the main trends in the development of the situation. Some “conjunctural” analyses such as the following from the July 29, 1972, Red Mole (Tories New Course in Ireland by Gery Lawless) indicate that the author of How to Lead from Behind had grounds for complaint:
In entering this new phase we must realise that this will in many ways be the most dangerous phase of the national liberation struggle. Before we have had to face either the carrot or the stick. In the coming period the policy will be the carrot and the stick, thus increasing the tendency to division within the anti-imperialist ranks, both in Britain and Ireland.
The Irish Times in an article by the usually well-informed London Editor, Jim Downey, made it clear that Whitelaw is anxious for a return to the cease fire, and the attitude of Republican leaders, in Dublin and elsewhere, shows that the Provos would be willing for another bilateral cease fire.
With the final vote on the Common Market Bill out of the way, Whitelaw and those elements in the cabinet which represent manufacturing capitalist interests (Europeans) are now trying to summon up the courage to take on the Orange ultras and their backers in the Tory Party, the old guard ‘Commonwealthers’. But before they do this, they must clear from their flanks the military lobby represented by General Tuzo, and behind him the Defence Minister, Peter Carrington.
Whitelaw and the ‘Europeans’ blame the ultra-Orange backlash for the break down in the truce, and recognise that implicitly or explicitly, any new bi-lateral cease fire, to be acceptable to the Provos, will have to be based on a willingness on their part to call the Orange bluff. While being frightened of this possibility, they are haunted by another spectre – the spectre of a Southern backlash. They fear that a renewal of the confrontation with the Catholic population of the North will lead to other Derry massacres, without the sacrificial lamb of a British Embassy in Dublin to appease Southern anger.
Their tactics are to work for a cease fire as early as possible, but first to appease the military lobby they want to inflict what is known in British Army circles as a ‘bloody nose’ on the IRA. What this quaint English euphemism means is, a new cease fire in which the British Army can interpret the terms, where Whitelaw, if the necessity again arise, can squeeze the Catholics to make room for the granting of concessions to the Orange ultras, without the danger of another Lenadoon.
Although Republican leaders are playing their cards close to their chests, informed sources close to the leadership make it clear that whatever the other weaknesses of the movement, in this case they have taken Whitelaw’s measure and are determined that any new bi-lateral cease fire will not be one which is imposed on them in the aftermath of a British victory.”
Comrade Lawless is, of course, rather new to the IMG but his articles are an important part of the Red Mole’s Irish coverage and similar jumbled speculations could be found in articles by other IMG writers. The basic problem is the method apparently countenanced or even encouraged by The Red Mole editors. It is an impressionist and centrist method that cannot clarify any development over the long run but ends up in complete confusion. It cannot educate anyone – not the fighters in Ireland or the militants of the IMG. In the long run all these pretentious formulations and involved speculations only come down to the notion: if the IRA keep fighting long enough and if they get the right kind of equipment, something has to give. That is, it leads to capitulation to the most backward aspects of the military conspiratorial tradition in Ireland.
It is not impossible that the Provisionals will achieve successes with their present line. Adventures are not always unsuccessful. This is one of the reasons some people always keep hoping. But a consistent revolutionary line cannot be erected on such a basis. Furthermore, the IMG leaders seem entranced by the concept of military action, armed struggle, to the extent that they do not realise that armed action like any other activity, if it is not guided by a revolutionary program, can be co-opted by the system. “Military reformism” in fact has been one of the main threads in the history of the IRA. The fact that it was organized as a “secret army” did not prevent the IRA from being drawn into supporting De Valera in the South or into a symbiotic relationship with the Nationalist party in the North. And most of the people I have talked to in Belfast and Derry did not support the Provisional campaign on the basis of any hope in revolutionary victory. One Provisional leader thought it could force the British to turn the peace-keeping over to the U.N. Others hoped it would “make the government sit up and take notice.”
Inevitably, moreover, the IMG support for the Provisionals’ actions led to supporting their political conceptions. In an article in the January 10, 1972, Red Mole, Comrade Purdie chided the Officials in these terms:
The Provisionals also have a clear policy embodied in the work they are doing to build Dail Uladh and Dail Chonnacht, which are an attempt to create an alternative administration to, not only Stormont, but Leinster House [the Dublin parliament], since Dail Uladh involves the three counties of Ulster which are within the Free State; and the creation of Dail Chonnacht for the Province of Connaught, which includes the oppressed Irish speaking minority [Actually the Irish-speaking minority in Ulster, i.e., Donegal, is almost as numerous as the main Gaelic community in Connaught, that is, in Galway. – G.F.]. The fact that the Provisionals pose these assemblies ‘from the top’ and that they provide no clear way for linking them to the mass of the people [Comrade Purdie did recognise apparently that this represented something of a problem. – G.F.] does not detract from the fact that the building of local civil resistance committees could create the content which would bring life to the forms of Dail Uladh. The backwardness of the leadership of the Provisionals on political questions, and their lack of understanding of what socialism means could hold back developments, but this is all the more reason for those who do have a better understanding to participate in the building of the civil resistance movement.
The regional parliament idea of the Provisionals was only a reflection of their traditional Blanquist approach to government formulas. When the Fenian movement originated more than a hundred years ago, one of the first things it did was set up a government of the republic of Ireland “now virtually established.” This “government” did not arise out of a struggle or the process of the masses coming to rule themselves. It was simply an abstract formula to provide a political umbrella for the military struggle. As for the Provisionals’ assemblies, they were hardly more than publicity stunts, designed at most to show that they really did have a “political” program.
The important thing, Comrade Purdie says in another article, is where these formulas could have led the Provisionals. That is precisely the problem, they led them in the wrong direction. They did not lead them in the direction of understanding that they had to base themselves on the self-organisation of the masses. For revolutionists, the governmental formula for popular power arises out of the specific conditions of the mass mobilization and its demands, out of the revolutionary process. It is not some abstract formula decided on from above and then given “popular content.” Furthermore, the conception of Dail Uladh was fundamentally false in another regard. It was based on the premise that in Ulster as a whole, Catholics and Protestants are roughly equal in numbers and that therefore a government based on the province as a whole would be acceptable to both communities. This notion represented a complete misunderstanding of the caste mentality of the Protestants and did not contribute one iota to illuminating this key question. It was positively dangerous in the sense that it represented an accommodation to the Unionist propaganda myth of some special, separate character of the province of Ulster.
There was absolutely no basis in the ongoing struggle for such a formula. The struggle in the North had only sporadic reflections in the border counties. Such reflections moreover where not confined to the three counties of Ulster under the Dublin government but were stronger if anything in Louth, which is in Leinster. In all, the conception was a totally formal one and led away from and not toward a revolutionary political alternative for the struggle in the North.
It was particularly aberrant to present this formula to the Officials, who, whatever their other weaknesses, did understand that a revolutionary government had to be based on the mobilized people and arise out of their struggle. They attempted to develop this locally but lacked the concept of general governmental formulas. They remained populists and centrists. But after this example of abject confusion and accommodation to paleo-republicanism, it is not very likely that the Officials would have looked to the IMG for more advanced political ideas.
Thus, although it has certainly utilized to the fullest the “advanced theory” derived from the “turn” at the Ninth World Congress – Comrade Lawless in particular seems to have appreciated the “higher level” theoretical justification for an orientation he has long maintained – the IMG has failed completely to project either a clear and effective line for the support movement in Britain or for the struggle in Ireland. Its adaptations have prevented it from offering any useful Marxist education to its members or to any other forces, and have led finally to abject confusion. This failure, moreover, has been extended directly to Ireland through the IMG’s role in forming and educating the Trotskyist nucleus there.
Just as the IMG’s turning to the republican fringe represented by Saor Eire was a key bridge in its development of a guerrillaist orientation for Ireland, its involvement with this organization in Ireland was central to its concept of developing an Irish Trotskyist organization. The leader of the Irish nucleus, Peter Graham, became very deeply involved with Saor Eire when he returned to Ireland in the summer of 1971 after spending a year working with the IMG in London. Around the time Graham returned to Dublin, The Red Mole ran the manifesto of Saor Eire, which was introduced in the following terms:
Now we have received the following manifesto, in which Saor Eire explain their policies and methods of struggle. We publish it in the belief that it is an important contribution to the discussion on the way forward for the Irish revolution.
This manifesto was published nowhere else but in The Red Mole. However, it must have attracted special attention from The Red Mole’s readers. The conceptions outlined in it were remarkably similar to those of the ERP in Argentina, which by then was being presented in the British Trotskyist paper as an inspiring example. This is how Saor Eire defined its role:
Based on the premise of the necessity for armed struggle and the need to mobilize the masses of workers, small farmers and students, an overall strategy and programme must be developed. To limit the struggle to the confines of purely political parties and groupings is to relegate it to a process of endless discussions, ineffective motions, resolutions and debates and to sidetrack it into a political whirlpool. There are enough parties and groups in existence at the moment who claim for themselves the leadership of the common struggle. It will not help to create another such organization. Action will test the validity of each distinct political philosophy and it is only in action that leadership will be developed. New strategies and tactics must be developed for the Irish situation. Rural guerrilla warfare in relation to Irish topography and modern technological developments must be placed in its proper context and more emphasis placed on the urban guerrilla. Sabotage throughout the country, action by small independent groups and political work among the masses must be the order of the day. Separate revolutionary groupings must be formed to confuse the police and in the interests of security. The banks and the State have all the resources, finance and armaments, to supply these groups and at a later stage a guerrilla front can be created.
Since our inception we have strove to inject a new concept of political action into the blood stream of Irish revolutionary politics. This concept of revolutionary struggle, new in the sense that tactically and strategically it has not been tried in Ireland during the present epoch, is as old in essence as the struggle against British Imperialism itself. The idea of the National Revolution in 1916 was basically built around the belief that a small group of armed men could, by making what Pearce called a blood sacrifice, act as a detonator for the initiation of the fight for national liberation. None of the leaders of Easter Week 1916 believed that their action, taken in isolation from the rest of the country and surrounded by an apathetic populace would in itself have the immediate effect of freeing Ireland. What they achieved was a sowing of the seed which blossomed two years later into the War of Independence. Their action was a defeat militarily, but a success in that it acted as a detonator for a popular explosion. All actions in present day Irish politics should be viewed in that light.”
From the standpoint of The Red Mole editors, the Saor Eire militants were undoubtedly refreshingly free from any “spontaneist” or “massist” illusions:
What is needed is a movement that is one step ahead but still in contact with the people and not a party which ends tail-ending the mass movement at its present stage of development. The objective conditions for a revolution must not be waited upon but must be created from the material already existing. The inability or unwillingness of any party or group and their lack of success in this field has made it imperative to create small armed groupings who can take an active part in creating these necessary conditions. There are sufficient diverse political groupings in existence at the moment and the creation of one more will only lend further to the confusion already existing. Thus such a movement must draw for its support and manpower on these same bodies and carry the struggle to a higher plane. There is no contradiction between the building of armed groups and the building of the mass movement. Such actions as they will carry out whether they be armed insurrection in some labour dispute, the redressing of a social evil, or attacks on State property or its servants, will show to the people that there is in existence the means and the method to combat and defeat a bureaucratic capitalist state. Such actions will focus the attention of the people on the wrongs and the evils that exist in our society and will expose the dictatorial character of the state machine in its unwillingness to abrogate its privileges.
In theory at least Republicanism is nearer to this correct tactical approach than the more developed Socialist groupings. It is not the quantity of Marx digested that makes a revolutionary but the ability to prepare to take part in and make the revolution that matters. Some Socialist groupings, for various subjective reasons [lack of physical courage and devotion, one presumes – G.F.], hold to the belief that the mass of the people must be politically conscious and that the objective conditions must be ripe before we start to make this revolution. Such attitudes will condemn them to endless discussions, the continual analysis of actions after the event [i.e., “commentary politics” – G.F.] and eventually to political extinction.”
If the introduction to this statement was not enough to recommend this call to arms to Red Mole enthusiasts, the phoenix rising out of the flames that was superimposed over the manifesto must certainly have conveyed the message.
The Saor Eire manifesto was very much appreciated by Comrade Nathan Weinstock who quoted it favorably in his analysis of the Irish situation published in La Gauche and Rouge:
Alongside these two mass currents [the Officials and Provisionals] who are unquestionably leading the military resistance against the British presence in Ulster at this time, there are other smaller groups such as Saor Eire, a militant republican and socialist formation that has engaged in a series of armed expropriations of Irish banks to collect the funds necessary to supply the Northern militants. A passage of their manifesto very correctly points out how the movements that exist must be evaluated: ‘It is not the quantity of Marx digested that makes a revolutionary but the ability to prepare to take part in and make the revolution.’ (La Gauche, September 24, 1971; Rouge, October 2, 1971.)
The Saor Eire manifesto does seem to have had the merit of defining the attitude the IMG developed toward the Officials more clearly than any of its statements ever did: “These so called ‘left wingers’ are more reactionary than any so called ‘right wingers’ they might have deposed. For though they may indulge in ‘socialist’ phrase-mongering they have divested the Republican Movement of its revolutionary potential by dismantling and undermining its armed wing.”
The importance that the IMG gave Saor Eire is shown by Comrade Purdie’s treatment of it in his pamphlet Ireland Unfree:
But the important change since Connolly’s day is that the possibility exists for Republicanism to base itself much more firmly on the working class, and to integrate working class revolutionary ideas – Marxism – into its thinking. A fusion between revolutionary Marxism and Republicanism is the future for the Irish revolutionary movement. (Page 37, emphasis in original.)
By this concept of “fusion” between Marxism and the (no longer backward) ideology of “physical force,” Comrade Purdie was apparently extending the concept voiced in the basic programmatic document of the PRT (Combatiente) in Argentina, The Only Road to Workers Power and Socialism:
It is not by accident that the Trotskyist movement, from the viewpoint of the overall perspective for the world and continental class struggle, has arrived at important judgments and conclusions, broadening in this way the vision of revolutionaries.
Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement have also contributed – creatively – to Marxism an analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy and developed from this a very clear theory of the nature and role of bureaucratic formations.
Mao and Maoism applied Leninism to the theory and practice of the seizure of power, which is nothing other than applying revolutionary Marxism to the circumstances of a particular country with the perspective of attaining workers power. That is the ‘Concrete analysis of concrete situations’ which Lenin defined as ‘the very essence of Marxism,’ the creative application of revolutionary theory to the concrete reality of a revolution which had been thoroughly studied, understood and fought for. Mao himself said, ‘the fusion of the general truth of Marxism with the concrete practice of the Chinese Revolution.’
Mao and Maoism creatively applied and developed Marxism-Leninism in the revolutionary people’s war theory. That is, the need for a revolutionary army which can defeat the counter-revolutionary army; the need to build this army in the rural areas through a prolonged process during which the revolutionary forces grow from small to large, from weak to strong, while the reactionary forces go from large to small, from strong to weak. This produces a qualitative step forward to a general insurrection when the revolutionary forces have gained the greater strength.
Both Trotskyism and Maoism have mutually ignored each other’s contributions. What is more, some Trotskyists still believe Maoism to be a part of Stalinism and consequently a counter-revolutionary current. Maoism, for its part, continues to believe that Trotskyism is a movement of capitalist and imperialist agents provocateurs. Today the principal theoretical task of revolutionary Marxists is to fuse the main contributions of Trotskyism and Maoism into a higher unity which would prove to be a real return to Leninism. The development of the world revolution leads inevitably to this goal as is indicated by the unilateral advances of Maoism toward the assimilation of Trotskyism (the break with the Soviet bureaucracy, the cultural revolution); the moves of Trotskyism toward incorporating Maoist contributions (the theory of revolutionary war) and, above all, the efforts of the Cuban leadership to achieve this superior unity. (The Only Road to Workers Power and Socialism, International Information Bulletin, October 1972, no. 4, p. 8)
In Ireland, this “fusion” between the correct general ideas and the “concrete” strategy of struggling for power was illustrated, according to Comrade Purdie, by Saor Eire:
Alongside the Officials and Provisionals exists a much smaller group which represents just such a fusion between Marxism and Republicanism – Saor Eire (Free Ireland). SE was formed out of two distinct strands, a group of volunteers who left the IRA during the period of politicisation (they reacted against the rundown of military activity, and the influence of the Wolfe Tone Society [a Stalinist-influenced intellectual group]) and former members of the Irish Workers Group, a Trotskyist organisation which split up in the late sixties. Behind Saor Eire’s activities is the conviction that no change can be promoted within the Republican Movement unless it is pressurised by a more militant and active military [emphasis in original] 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.
But, like the ERP-PRT, the Saor Eire group, “alas,” was not exempt from militarist deviations.
But Saor Eire has been caught in the same trap as the leaders of the Officials in the mid-sixties – the contradiction between political and military activity. The need for a secret military organisation has eliminated any but the most token open political work. The sum total of Saor Eire’s political contribution has been one interview in The Red Mole, and a short manifesto, also published in the Mole. It has also meant that the group was formed on a rather vague political basis, and the pressing necessity of military action has made it even more difficult to hammer out a coherent political position.
The political restrictions on SE have in turn restricted its military activities, and so far it has been publicly known mainly for bank robberies. Without a stronger political content SE will not draw towards itself the kind of young revolutionaries who could make a military organisation a viable alternative to the two Republican Armies, and SE will remain a group respected for its courage and militancy but essentially marginal to the Irish struggle.
Comrade Purdie obviously recognised that there was a contradiction between the terrorist activity of Saor Eire and Marxist political work. That is, it was rather difficult to combine the two. But Comrade Purdie seemed strangely reluctant to draw the obvious conclusion from this. As a result, even his worst “hypothesis” fell far short of what ultimately happened to Saor Eire. The culmination of its activity was described in a statement by members of Saor Eire serving long prison terms in Portlaoise jail:
”We the undersigned Political Prisoners in Portlaoise Prison wish to publicly state that we have severed any connections which we have or ever had with the organisation calling itself Saor Eire. In this action we are following the lead of other genuine political elements who have resigned. Our reasons being the following:
What was it that encouraged Comrade Purdie to make such a positive assessment of a grouping like Saor Eire, disregarding the long experience of the Marxist movement with isolated units devoted to expropriations? Was it because the situation was so grave in Ireland that desperate measures were needed to procure arms for the embattled ghetto dwellers? The Official republicans seem at one point to have believed this. Some of their men staged an airport robbery to acquire funds to buy weapons. They are still in jail. Such measures do not, however, seem to have helped the Officials very much.
But Saor Eire had been engaged in expropriations for “three or four years” prior to the interview published in the Red Mole. That is, they started carrying out such activities at a time when there was no possibility of their being understood, much less supported, by the masses. Furthermore, despite periods of acute crisis, there has been little ongoing active mass opposition to the Dublin government, and bourgeois legality in general prevails. As far as the. broad political movement and the masses are concerned there is probably less repression than, say, in France. Of course, it could be argued that big battles were on the agenda and that Leninists, as opposed to spontanéists, had to prepare militarily for this eventuality. If such was needed in Ireland, however, would it not also be correct in France, or even in England, where, as many European comrades have learned from visiting both places, the conditions of bourgeois legality do not differ greatly most of the time from those in the Twenty- Six Counties?
The question arises in view of the positions taken by the IEC Majority Tendency on “armed struggle” and the evolution of the IMG’s position on Ireland, whether IMG leaders did not regard Saor Eire as an experiment in developing an “armed wing” of Irish Trotskyism that could push the revolutionary struggle forward by “injecting armed struggle.” In any case, the experience of Saor Eire is highly instructive and serves as a supplementary confirmation of the correctness of the orthodox Trotskyist position on such groups.
Comrade Purdie, as I have noted, was clearly not unaware of the dilemma faced by groups like Saor Eire:
But Saor Eire has been caught in the same trap as the leaders of the Officials in the mid-sixties – the contradiction between political and military activity. The need for a secret military organization has eliminated any but the most token open political work. (Ireland Unfree, p. 38)
But Comrade Purdie chose not to draw the logical conclusion from this statement. A “secret military organization” is not an obstacle to “political work” if it emerges from a mass struggle and serves as an instrument of the mass movement. In such conditions, political and military activity interlock. But it is precisely terrorist activity that is incompatible with political work, and demanding that such an organization find a way to combine political and military work is simply nonsense. It was inevitable that the isolation of this tiny commando group from the mass struggle, isolation flowing inevitably from its terrorist orientation, would lead it into deeper and deeper isolation and into more and more exclusively “armed struggle.” Virtually all the members of this organization had to hide constantly from the police as a result of the bank expropriations. They could not hold jobs or risk contact with open political workers. They were forced to live on the proceeds of the expropriations, and this proved more and more costly as they were forced to depend on underworld figures for shelter and services. The expropriations had to increase to provide a steady income to maintain this kind of life, a need which in turn accelerated the process. Very large sums of money passed through the hands of this small group that was not subjected to the discipline of a mass movement or to any effective political discipline. Undisciplined and criminal elements penetrated the organization, probably coming first from the lumpen fringe of the republican movement. Under the pressures of a perilous and irregular existence, the group degenerated. It became a deadly trap for the political elements that remained within it, and, since a group of this type can be easily used and manipulated by the police, it became a danger to the entire republican and socialist movement.
The hopes expressed by Comrade Purdie that this organization could play an important role if it developed more political activity were completely illogical. By its nature this group could not have operated in a political way. Its fate was as inevitable as anything in politics. Saor Eire, in fact, is one more object lesson that Marxism and terrorism cannot be combined. Comrade Purdie’s formulas simply covered up an adaptation to terrorism, which had the same tragic results in Ireland as it has had elsewhere.
The statement of the Saor Eire prisoners strongly suggests that Comrade Peter Graham was a victim of this process. If this proves true, those who were his political teachers bear a grave responsibility, because no matter how the specific decisions were arrived at, it is absolutely clear that the political positions of the IMG favored and encouraged close relations with Saor Eire. It is also absolutely clear that these positions were sanctioned by the line of the majority at the Ninth World Congress and represent an extension of this line to Ireland.
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Last updated: 19 January 2020