Get your own Free Home PageIn our view the rise of the Provisional IRA represented a tragic step back for the Catholic working class in Northern Ireland.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Civil Rights Association in Northern Ireland was agitating for an end to discrimination against Catholics. At the origins of the civil rights movement lay genuine working class concerns over issues such as housing and unemployment. If these issues had been taken up on the basis of fighting for working class needs, there would have been a chance of uniting Catholic and Protestant workers, since all workers have a material interest in struggling for better housing and higher wages.
However, rather than fighting for more and better resources, which could have achieved real material improvements in conditions for all working class people, the Civil Rights Association’s campaign to establish the so-called rights of a persecuted minority within civil society amounted to merely demanding a more equitable sharing out of the miserable resources which already existed. This movement was, moreover, deeply imbued with liberal illusions about achieving equality and justice - in a system which by its very nature cannot do anything but generate inequality and injustice.
The direction of this movement was driven even further away from its origins by the reaction of the Northern Ireland Unionists, who regarded the civil rights campaign as a threat to their 'privileged' position. Northern Ireland was certainly no paradise for working class Protestants. Their 'privileges' didn’t amount to much more than having a slightly less shitty slum to live in or a slightly less miserably paid job to go to than their Catholic neighbours. As the Dublin based anarchist Workers’ Solidarity Movement puts it, 'The reality of Orange bigotry is one of 2 1/2p l looking down on 2p'. Nonetheless, the civil rights movement’s demand that Catholics should have equal access to jobs and housing previously reserved for Protestants was perceived by Protestant workers as something that would undermine their own already precarious standard of living. It’s not hard to see, for example, that if a factory employed 600 Protestants and no Catholics, where without religious bias in employment there would be 400 Protestants and 200 Catholics, then 200 Protestants would feel their jobs under threat by any call or an end to discrimination.
Protestant working class hostility towards the civil rights movement was of course fostered by the Northern Ireland ruling class. Ever since the establishment of the Northern Irish state at the start of the 1920s, the outlook of the Unionist ruling class had been dominated by a mixture of aggression and insecurity aptly summed up as 'the politics of siege'. It pursued its own survival through a classic policy of 'divide and rule', on the one hand demonising the Catholic population within Northern Ireland as the treacherous 'fifth column' of its southern enemy, and on the other hand tossing just enough crumbs to the Protestant working class to convince them that their interests were identical with those of their rulers.
Whenever Catholic and Protestant workers did show any signs of joining together, the ruling class was always quick to find a way to whip up renewed sectarian hostility, in order to destroy working class unity. The Outdoor Relief strike of October 1932, for example, when the unemployed of the Falls and Shankhill fought side-by-side against the police, was followed less than three years later by a long summer of bloody sectarian rioting in Belfast which left 11 dead and nearly 600 injured.
In the late 1960s, if the Northern Ireland ruling class needed any extra incentive to crush any signs of working class struggle within its own territory, then it only needed to look across at mainland Europe, where in France in 1968 and in Italy in 1969, the working class was defying all the sociologists and media pundits who said it had been dissolved in the 'affluent society' with a series of massive strikes.
It was against this background that the Civil Rights Association’s mainly peaceful protests were frequently met with savage violence meted out by the RUC and the notorious B Specials. The IRA did nothing to halt these attacks; legend has it that its initials were now said to stand for I Ran Away. Initially Catholics had to organise their own self-defence - as they did, for example, at the start of 'Free Derry'. It was in these circumstances that the Provisional IRA emerged. Increasingly, Catholics turned to the Provisionals for defence, first of all against sectarian pogroms, and later against the British army.
Although in recent years Sinn Fein and the IRA have fought a twin-pronged campaign 'with the ballot paper in on hand and an Armalite in the other', the Provisional IRA initially came together as a purely military organisation. Unlike the Official IRA, from which they had split during 1969-70, the Provos had no interest whatsoever in the sort of reforms demanded by the Civil Rights movement, since the Provos’ aim was not to modify the Northern Ireland state ate but to get rid of it. At first even the Stalinists of the Official IRA were denounced as too left-wing by the Provos - though when the Provisionals came to write their own programme after the split (published as Eire Nua in 1972), they actually based it on an old document that the Stalinist Coughlan [i.e. Official IRA member Anthony Coughlan] had written before the split.
In a relatively short space of time, therefore, the reaction of the Northern Ireland Unionists and the British army aborted a movement with its origins in working class grievances over jobs and houses, and rejuvenated in its stead, among a section of the population which throughout the 1960s had shown little explicit interest in wider constitutional issues such as partition, a military campaign for the political end of uniting Ireland.
What this says to us is that the Provisional IRA did not develop organically out of the struggles of the Catholic working class in Northern Ireland, any more than, say, the Labour Party or the trade unions are a direct outgrowth of the current struggles of the working class in Britain.
When we point this out, one response we get is that we should still support the armed struggle, even though it is controlled by the IRA, in the same way that we support strikes, even though they may be controlled by the trade unions. Or as someone who wrote to Class war about this issue put it: 'So what if the IRA defends a Catholic, nationalist community? Would you attack strikers if they supported the Labour Party?'
In fact, this analogy only strengthens our case against supporting the armed struggle in Northern Ireland. The basic motivation of workers who join a trade union or the Labour Party thinking that it will fight for working class interests may be sound but their course of action is not. Yet a strike organised be a trade union and involving workers who support the Labour Party does have the potential to go beyond these initial limitations. This is because strikers are pursuing their material interests as members of the working class. Sooner or later this will bring them into conflict with capitalist organisations such as the trade unions and the Labour Party. If their struggle is then to proceed any further, the strikers are forced to go beyond the forms and ideas they started with, by in practice rejecting trades unionism and Labourism.
We know, both from our own experiences of direct involvement and political intervention in strikes, and from looking at the history of previous high-points of the class struggle in many different countries, that this does frequently happen. So far it has been most noticeable only among a minority of the working class, because only a minority, usually, is ever involved in the class struggle, and it is only this active involvement which is necessary for the old practices and ideas to be challenged and overturned. Nonetheless, such a process does occur.
By contrast, the fact that after 20 years of the modern day 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland there is still no sign that any significant minority of the Catholic working class has gone beyond the outlook which dominated it back in 1969, nor any indication of the armed struggle developing wider perspectives than those set by the IRA, speaks volumes about the class nature and potential of the struggle in Northern Ireland.
We don’t shed any tears for the police, soldiers and politicians killed by the IRA; our only regret on seeing someone like Norman Tebbit dug out of the ruins of the Grand Hotel in Brighton after the IRA bombed the 1985 Conservative Party conference was that he was still alive. But this doesn’t mean that we automatically share a common cause with anyone and everyone who opposes the British state besides ourselves. We don’t judge the class nature of a struggle by the targets it attacks. We must also take into account the purposes and intent which motivate such actions.
As communists we oppose the state because it is the instrument the capitalist class uses to enforce and maintain its domination over the working class. In overthrowing capitalism the revolutionary struggle we agitate for will abolish ALL nation states and national boundaries. Clearly, the Irish Republican movement’s opposition to the British state is not founded on this basis. It seeks merely to re-arrange the existing national boundaries by establishing a new state with jurisdiction over the whole of the island of Ireland. This new state would be just as much an enemy of the working class struggle as are the existing British and Irish states.
The notion that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, which leads some people to support the IRA, invariably misjudges who or what the real enemy is, and so ends up dragging the working class into taking sides with 'nice” factions of the capitalist class in its squabbles with the 'nasty” factions of the same class. We see this in anti-fascist fronts where the working class allies itself with 'democratic” capitalists against 'totalitarian” capitalists, and in anti-imperialist struggles where the working class fights its present 'imperialist” bosses in alliance with its future 'home grown” bosses. However, the real enemy of the working class is not any of these different factions of the ruling class but the entire capitalist system itself.
What is wrong with the working class taking sides in struggles among rival capitalists was neatly summed up during the Spanish Civil War by the council communists who published the journal International Council Correspondence, when they said that it amounted to encouraging the working class to co-operate with one enemy in order to crush another, in order later to be crushed by the first” ....which is exactly what did happen in Spain, when the social revolution which also broke out in 1936 was first of all subordinated to, and then destroyed by, those who sought to preserve one form of capitalist rule (democracy) against another (fascism), and when, from May 1937 onwards, members of the POUM and the CNT-FAI were imprisoned, murdered or generally terrorised by their erstwhile anti-fascist allies, the Spanish 'Communist’ Party.
The outcome of past 'national liberation struggles’ shows that the working class always ends up being oppressed just as much by its so-called 'liberators” as it was by its old imperialist masters. IRA supporters, like the RCP, admit that they can see this prospect taking shape among 'liberation movements' such as the ANC and the PLO, as soon as they sniff the scent of state power: 'Yesterdays freedom fighters are everywhere climbing into business suits, talking diplomacy, and looking for compromise on terms dictated by their enemies' What makes them think that Gerry Adams and co. will behave any differently when the British government invites Sinn Fein to the conference table to settle the war in Ireland.
Forward to Part 3, The Myth of National Self-Determination
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