Officials' press conference on 30 May this year, called to explain policy on the cease-fire. From left, Malachy Toal. Malachy McGurran, Ivan Barr and Sam Dowling. Following the "laundry" revelations about British army spying in Belfast, the Offical IRA have issued an important statement. It threatens to call off their cease-fire and may indicate their return to a more militant policy. In spite of Operation Motorman -the invasion of the Free Areas - the Officjals had maintained their cease-fire, insisting that civil war had to be avoided. This stance had in turn been in sharp contrast with their previous policy of armed operations which included the shooting of Senator Barnhill and the Aldershot bombing.
This article takes up some of the political problems which explain the zig-zags of the Officials. It discusses various questions raised by the September 1972 issue of their paper, the United Irishman, which carried to extremes some of the trends developing in the paper.over the preceding months. We will not be diverted by the many quite apolitical attacks on the Provisionals and on left-wing critics of the Officials; characterisations of the Provisionals as "this cancerous growth, spawned by the moneygrabbing gombeen mind of Jack Lynch and Fianna Fail; and statements such as: "The Provo/ Trots saw a war of National Liberation where there was none, they supplied socialist jargon to justify the bombing of children, they turned Civil Rights into Civil War and they are revealed today for what they always were class but rather a psychosis of the middle class"
These attacks are merely symptoms of the political crisis within the Officials. They are an attempt to close ranks by whipping up anti-Provoism, and to deal with internal critics by associating them with "Trotskyism" -which they dub as simultaneously an importation of "failed" ideas from England, and a capitulation to the Provos. That the United Irishman gives space to such nonsense is eloquent testimony to the internal crisis being caused by their wrong policies.
ONE STEP FORWARD:
THREE STAGES BACK.
The Irish Republican Movement took a great step forward when, in the '60s, its leadership took up a socialist position based on a Marxist view of society. Unfortunately they saw Marxism as a mechanistic system which could produce an automatic answer to any political problem. based on this formal method, was that the struggle in Ireland would move through three successive and separate stages; the struggle for democracy in the North, the struggle for national unity, and the struggle for a socialist Ireland.
This was wrong on two counts. Firstly, the necessary conceptual distinctions between the different elements of the struggle does not imply that they are insulated from each other, or that they develop along a linear path; in fact they interact with each other, and one aspect of the struggle serves to aggravate the crisis which brings the others into prominence. Secondly, the reality of the situation in the North was that these three elements were interlinked in an especially contradictory way, and that the mere posing of a mass struggle for one immediately brought to the fore the struggle for the other elements.
To be concrete, the Six Counties represented a very special form of bourgeois state which could only exist by basing itself on a set of sectarian institutions, which, through the Orange ideology, a mass base for the Unionist Party.
stantial challenge to any aspect of that delicate system immediately created the possib-, ility of destroying the state. Thus the mobilisation of a mass struggle for democratic rights could only advance to a very limited extent before it challenged the existence of the state, and opened up once more the папола: g ucsuon.
sparked off which if it is to be won poses the problem of effectively drawing the mass of the workers and small farmers in the whole of Ireland into struggle behind the Northern minority.
solved if the achievement of national unity and the defeat of British imperialism in the North becomes the central and unifying factor of a generalised mass struggle North and South, in which the particular demands of different sections, (urban workers, small farmers, the Gaeltacht, etc.) are welded together into one revolutionary struggle In this schematic outline, it can be seen how the "stages" of the struggle are intimately linked. Of course, understanding this does not in itself solve the problems of revolutionary strategy, and while the escalation from the democratic to the national struggle was achieved fairly quickly, and a leadership capable of driving it forward thrown up by the struggle itself, the transformation to a socialist struggie is much more difficult. But unlike the Official leadership, who see everything in formal and abstract terms, such an approach poses the problems of the Irish revolution as a linked struggle resolves itself into the need to defend the ghettoes, which in turn becomes a struggle to smash Stormont, and the British Army. And the socialist phase, far from being a remote and academic problem, is posed immediately in the need to extend the struggle to the Because the leadership of the Officials insisted all along that the struggle was only about democracy, and had to be restricted to Civil Rights, they were unprepared when the crisis reached its sharpest point in August 69, and could not play the role they should have played in the defence of the Catholic areas. But following August 69 they compounded their error by setting their faces against the developing national struggle which quickly escalated to a guerrilla war against the British REFORMIST PROGRAMME Today the effects of this series of errors can be seen in the deepening of the negative trends in the politics of the Officials, and the consolidation of their organisation around The September 1972 issue of their paper, the United Irishman, demonMonotonously it repeat s, on page after page, the same three simplistic themes: that the struggle is simply one for Civil Rights, that the Provisionals are mad sectarian wreckers, and that the "Trotskyites" are Maintaining the argument that the struggle in the North is solely about democracy the Officials say: "We do not want civil war. We repeat again and again that the issue in the North of Ireland is CIVIL RIGHTS NOW. On that there can be no compromise and no We do not want prevarications; we do not want stalling; we do not want bombing: we do not want sectarian killings. We want full guaranteed democracy"........
"Britain's strategy for Ireland, then, has been very basic: the minimum of concessions on civil rights and the maximum of British control over the Irish people and their economy".
And in another article entitled "Why Britain Won't Give Civil Rights", they say: "Civil rights means for us the full freedom of political activity, the opportunity to work for the creation of working class unity and for the winning of a sizeable section of the Protestant working class to support of the fight for national liberation and socialism. Civil rights is basically, then, a struggle to smash the patronage system of unionism and win the freedom to operate politically and the freedom to advocate the sort of Ireland we believe is necessary". CIVIL RIGHTS OR CIVIL WAR? There are three dangerous elements in this argument. Firstly, it is true that the British have refused to grant the demands of the Civil Rights Association, for such simple conbecause they are opposed to civil rights. On the contrary, they have been anxious to "normalise" the North for a long time. is indeed essential for their long term plans to re-orient their relationships with the gombeen bourgeoisie in the South. They resist such demands because they are trying to re-establish stability, and they know that concessions to the Catholic minority on that scale would deepen the mass Orange resistance. So they balance delicately, while trying to achieve their main priority at this time; the de-mobilization of the catholic resistance. If they achieve this, through militarily smashing the Provos, and/or exhausting the minority, it is quite possible that they will introduce sweeping reforms in the North, as a means of sealing up the crack in the dam which nearly flooded them. Such reforms would aim at buying off the catholic resistance, and eliminating some of the structural factors which have made the catholic revolt so powerful. It is doubtful, even given the above conditions, that Britain could actually solve the Northern Ireland problem, through internal reform, but at least they could create a period of stabilisation.
In this situation the Officials schema would have two disastrous results. It would mistake as a victory for the minority, what would in fact be a consolidation and strengthening of British imperialism. And, more important, they would not be prepared for the inevitable smashing of the resistance organisations which would accompany such go down along with the Provos, PD, et al., unable to advocate any "sort of Ireland".
Secondly, the conception that all that is required to win over the Protestant working class is the opportunity to propagandise to them in a democratic state is utopian. It is not lack of facilities to convince them through argument, but the material basis for sectarianism existing in the institutions of the state, which polarises them away from the national This view is coupled with the following statement: "The Provos have blasted away what slim hopes there were: of working class unity in this generation, and have given birth to the Protestant reaction of the UDA, UVF and other more vicious forces like Vanguard and the Tartan gangs". It is difficult to imagine a more mistaken or dangerous view. By singling out this one factor as responsible for the inflamation of sectarianism, the United Irishman mis-estimates the political situation in the North and the real significance of developments within the gers of mindless Provo-bashing, when the difficult and complex situation in the North The main factor in the mobilisation of the UDA, UVF, Vanguard, the Tartans, etc. is the crisis precipitated within Unionism by Direct Rule. This is a new phase of the general crisis within the political and ideological institutions of the Six County state created by the struggle over the past three to four years. It does not represent a strengthening of sectarianism (although it provokes heightened sectarian tensions), but since it is caused by the loss of control over a state security apparatus, and the threat to the Protestant ascendancy, it is a response from a weakened position. This weakness is further accentuated by the fragmentation of the former Unionist monolith into a number of warring factions. It is accompanied by a deepening feeling of despair amongst large sections of the Far from working class unity having been "blasted away", this generation is closer to it than any generation in the last sixty years. But it will only be possible to create unity when a sufficiently large section of the protestant working class has lost all faith in the traditional ideology and institutions of Orangeism, and realises that only acceptance of their common lot with the working class in the rest of Ireland can give them any The Belfast strike of 1907, and the unemployed riots of the Thirties, represented the breakdown of sectarian barriers between workers, during a time when the protestant ascendancy was so secure that the maintenance of its ideological hold through the sectarian institutions had somewhat relaxed. The economic interests of catholic and protestant workers brought them together fleetingly; but this was enough to re-mobilise the sectarian institutions, and re-assert their ideological hold over the protestant workers. Today when these institutions are shattered, and debilitated, the possibility of real and lasting working class unity is much closer.
But it can only come about if the catholic minority and their organisations remain firm and press forward with their struggle, and they are backed up by the mass of the Irish people. Within this context there can be a discussion about which tactics give best hope of getting across to protestant workers who have gone furthest towards breaking with
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