'The IRA i the militia oppressed

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state for decades, and then during the Spanish civil war joined the Popular Front government of the Republic (which repressed rank and file anarchists).

The anarchists denied the state: but the state is necessary. It cannot be abolished at this stage of social development. It must be either the bourgeois state or the workers' state.

The Spanish civil war convinced some of the anarchist leaders that the state was necessary. But then they could only relate to it by betraying themselves. Having no programme capable of dealing with reality, they accepted the existing state and became its prisoners.

For these reasons the 1983 Ard Fheis opened an incipient split in the Republican movement.

Significantly, Martin McGuinness, one of the new leaders, Adams' work with the Labour Left in Britain. In an interview with the Irish Times, Adams' attitude was subtly conveyed, and it was plain that he saw what happened in London as counterposed to the demands of a 'political' approach, and in no way a fair political/military exchange for it.

Whether they are a deliberate widening of the incipient split which plainly existed at the Ard Fheis, or no more than an inevitable element of incoherence produced by the attempt to bond together conflicting strategies in the present Sinn Fein, the bombings almost certainly represent an increasing divergence between Adams and other currents in the movement.

The final question is how to evaluate the new socialist Sinn Fein.

Sinn defines ership and militia of the oppressed Catholics, and for that reason deserves the support of British socialists against the British state in Northern Ireland. But there should be no illusions about its socialist pretensions.

Traditionally populism is, as we have seen, a movement with socialist aspirations but confused ideas. The Social Revolutionaries in Russia, for example, refused to distinguish between workers and peasants. All were 'the people' They had neither a stable, coherent class analysis of society, nor, as a consequence, any adequate conception of how socialism was to be brought about. They failed to identify the industrial working class as the force that can bring about socialism.

Such organisations are inevitably the tool of non-working### Coherent It is derived not from any sort of coherent Marxist or working-class conception of socialism, nor even from the fashionable Third-Worldist and Stalinist stages theories about fighting imperialism first and 'then socialism'. It is rooted in the tradition which is common to Republicans of Left and of Right.

This tradition implies communalism in Northern Ireland, and linked with socialist objectives it is Catholic communalist populism, not socialism. That is what it would be even if it got mass support in the South, and yet still failed to win the Northern Protestant workers (or a large chunk of them).

The Provisionals' populist confusion on the class definiCatholics. deserves the support of British social against the British state But there should be no illusion aboul its socialist pretensions'

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Socialist Organiser no. 160 January S 1984 Page 12 Where we stand