The answer: spread to the South

Scan page 13

'To win the Protestant worker means overcoming a real objective breach' Number 13 Septemb are going-to be hut. By Satvinder Singh away from home c On the other hand, he has done this in the name of an uncertain middle way between the two nationists on the one hand and Peoples "Democracy and the Republicans -on the other (SO129).

The trouble with this middle way is that, without the Permanent Revolution, it remains uncertain and, hence a prey to eclecticism. Its clearest feature is its call to integrate Ireland's struggles. But who would dis- various potential revolutionary agree? Gerry Adams wouldn't, for one; however, he would insist that such integration would be done subject to the primacy of the armed struggle. People's Democracy would also agree, and, having done so, it would then turn to the practical day-to-day tasks of integration which it has been struggling to achieve for a number of years.

In this, it will continue to find more adequate guidance from Permanent Revolution than from John O'Mahony. As a revolutionary group fighting in Ireland, PD has to take positions and fix priorities for its areas of work. What John O'Mahony, and even more specifically Bas Hardy (SO140) do is blur the necessary choices that are involved in this.

Our Annual General

Meeting is on Sunday October 30, 10.30am to 5pm in County Hall, London SEI.

On the day before, Saturday 29th, there will be a Socialist Organiser day school, also in London.

They agree that a military struggle based on a minority of the population in six of Ireland's thirty-two counties cannot achieve its ends. Sondoes PD. Where PD differs is that its perspective leads it to see the struggle as necessarily spreading in one direction; the SO comrades reserve the options.

To Bas Hardy, the possibility of an appeal to the workers of the Republic is neither more nor less than the hope of winning the Protestant workers of Northern Ireland. Yet, even an empirical approach, if based on accurate data, would show that the two tasks were qualitatively different in their feasibility. To win the Northern Irish Protestant worker means overcoming a real objective breach in the province's working class, a breach that the six county state was created to maintain; to win the worker of the Republic means overcoming the subjective factors that are fostered by the workers' leaders as well as by the bourgeois ones -whether 'Catholic Nationalist' or not.

Overcoming this last means that the struggle must become a politically working class one 'To win the Protestant worker mean: because Republican economics in the old style have no more credibility with the twenty-six county workers than with the vocally nationalist (let alone the other) capitalists.

Of course, the other side of the picture is also true, and, it should be necessary to add, even more important for socialists. The fact that those whom Bas Hardy calls the most left wing labour organisations have political consciousness nor their popularity.

Together their vote is still less than that of the Labour Party alone in 1969; after fourteen years, this cannot be ascribed to war fever or chauvinism. Worse still has been their political decline. Labour is now in a state of semi-permanent bourgeois coalition.

Abandoned

Sinn Fein (now just) the Workers' Party has abandoned its mass struggle perspective for an electoralist one which is certainly to the left of Labour, but only insofar as Labour's 1920s policies were more radical than those it has today. As for the puny sub-Roy Jenkinses of Socialists Against Nationalism (now the Democratic Socialist Party) it is difficult to understand how Bas Hardy can list them among the most left wing Labour organisations while ignoring the Communist Party; at least Stalinism has more claim to Socialism than Liberalism.

So, to answer Jim Denham (SO132), there is no question of a thirty-two county 'Catholic Nationalist' bloc being able to destroy partition. If this were, indeed, the precondition for winning Irish national unity, then, yes, the desirability of that would have to be reconsidered.

In fact, the Catholic Nationalists (in the only true meaning of that much abused term: those who combine the desire for Irish unity with that of state support for Catholic teaching) overcoming a real objective breach' are hindered by their Catholicism land, in most cases, more basically, their capitalism) from rying to mobilise the sort of nass support that is needed u threaten partition.

In fact, and hints of this appeared in 1972 and during the H Block agitation, only a working class movement can even put the destruction of partition on the agenda of practical politics. When that occurs, the federal tactic may become important, but in its proper role, as a tactic, not a principle in the way of the secular programme of socialism.

Less valid

Another point of Jim Denham's was less valid. The present writer is not worried to be told that he is writing 'United 'Secretariat gobbledegook' , but to ascribe the phrase to a letter of which one-third is accurate history is worthier of Gerry Healy than of a serious Marxist.

The truth is that, in his original article, John O'Mahony tried to bolster his case by resorting to mythology rather than history. All Marxists must share his hopes (SO129) for the radicalising of the Protestant workers; no Marxist can accept the use of inaccuracy to bolster such hopes. Jim Denham need not accept the version of Irish history given in the 'Open Letter'; he should not condemn it out of hand; let him research for himself before judgement.

Connected to this is Jo Quigley's two-nation line. There is a very basic error here, albeit one lifted from an opponent. He quotes the assertion that Protestant workers are militant unti the national question is raised as justification for his position. Had he considered the facts wouldn't be so sure.

On the one hand, an important reason for rejecting the Protestants' claim to nationhood separate from that of the rest of the Irish is the failure of their working class to produce its own Socialist Unionist Party (apart from the pathetic North period (most notably, the Larkin-Connolly IT&GWU, 1907-11; the years 1919-20) in which national and proletarian militancy co-existed. In each case, there was a failure by the Irish working class as a whole to find leadership (at once qualitative and quantitative) such as would unite these strands.

The national struggle, the fight to achieve state power, was left to the national bourgeoisie, while British imperialism and its Unionist bourgeois allies were able to appeal successfully to the Protestant workers who could expect from their own religious kind a certain place in the sun that the national bourgeoisie could not guarantee.

There remain two other points to be considered. Both were made by Jim Denham.

In the first place, it is true that, in presenting his Alma Ata Iheses on the process and strategy, Trotsky stipulated that the latter arose from the objective conditions of combined development in ountries with a large peasantry and a relatively small working class.

It is also true that Trotsky Class Fighter - monthly paper, organising the struggle of youth against the Tories. 25p including postage from 214 Sickert Court, London N1 2SY. of the peculiar course of its area's industrialisation. Had Trotsky considered this, he might or might not have considered permanent revolution to be relevant to it. We do not know.

Preconditions

At the same time, it is t rue that another of Trotsky's F conditions for the strategy i waS its leadership by a Bolshe svik party and that, since 1917, the successes of the process b ave been achieved, if unsatis! factorily, without such leaders! rip. As Lenin said, quoting Goet ine, theory is grey, the tree of 1 ife, green.

Last and by far the least is Jim Denham's correction as to Militant. It may be true that ; its supporters bandy Perman lent Revolution in Britain. They are considerably more circumst sect here. It seems likely that tl heir loyalty to the strategy is on the same line as Gerry Hea ly's loyalty to the Dialectic and to the Transitional Programme: standard to brandish, rat ¡her than a means to effective acti being BEWARE. Tory axes are again it's the south whe Thateber and het itunes three-quartets also face sever cut LSo at present fe d les this wolfe measure *their rent allowances.

Share in store and that's not all thee return fir Victonian ate. ktep drug forces beland st. CRUISE regard dude inoney and Tames that workers are is emineng trut afte for the briak-up of ther tammuls Already they fate MIp 44 - Mine st INSIDE LIFE YTS

Scan page 14

no.147 September