Weekly Worker 590 Thursday September 1 2005

Letters

Sinn Féin Marxists

Liam O Ruairc’s review of the historic process of the republican movement is timely. Particularly for me, since I am currently writing my autobiography and am engaged with the material and memories of the mid and late 70s. While Liam’s stuff is clearly accurately based, it doesn’t gel to me with the feeling and sense of the period, and I wonder just how far Liam was actually part of our struggles then?

One small correction: Eire Nua was not ‘adopted’ in 1980, though it may have been relaunched then. Actually it was drafted at the back end of 1972 and came out in 73. One of the more subversive and progressive Labour Party Young Socialist constituencies (Goole) actually proposed the entire programme as a resolution to the LPYS 12th annual conference at Skegness that year. The LPYS, dominated by Militant, was so thoroughly sectarian and ignorant of the conditions on the ground in Ireland that it duly appeared in precise form on the printed agenda.

The length of the resolution, it being Sinn Féin’s entire programme, was too long for the whole thing to go on the formal printed agenda but they agreed if we printed the hundreds of copies required they would circulate them. Which they did - every LPYS branch in Britain received Eire Nua as Goole constituency’s LPYS resolution on Ireland, seconded by Doncaster, and paid for by the Labour Party and YS. And they hadn’t got clue what it was until we took to the rostrum!

There were loads of Marxists in Sinn Féin. SF Britain was led by Irish workers in British industry, many of whom were Marxists and trade unionists. Marxist individuals were the majority of the northern armed wing, particularly from the occupied counties. Sinn Féin wasn’t a Marxist organisation, however, there were all sorts of weird and wonderful philosophies in there, I recall an ard fheis where a resolution was submitted and debated calling for the restoration of the ancient Celtic kings of Ireland!

Sinn Féin made clear to the united Troops Out Movement conference of 78 in London that the republican movement valued greatly the contribution of Karl Marx to the struggle for Irish freedom. They also noted, by the way that James Connolly was the most influential founding figure of the whole movement, and he, of course, was a Marxist. Do you think the members of Sinn Féin and the IRA hadn’t taken time to study Connolly and his works and understand his background and politically formative years and influences? Such ideas were the currency of debate within the movement at all levels.

I think Liam’s conclusions on the prisoner issue are a leap too far. You have to remember (and this is why I wonder about what he actually recalls of the climate and social-political atmosphere of the period) just how difficult it was to raise the question of Ireland for any sort of sensible debate and rational argument among the working class here.

The hatred and chauvinist backlash led by The Sun and News of the World and the TV made even the mention of the IRA very dangerous. It was essential for the issues of the prisoner struggle and campaign to get beyond the Irish and far left ghettos. We consciously were trying to reach out to people who wouldn’t contemplate the slogan ‘Troops out’, let along ‘Victory to the IRA’, to make a stand on common justice, human rights and basic levels of civilised behaviour. It was a way of trying to stop more men dying, to stop the prison torture, but also it was a way of breaking down some of the mental barriers to considering what was actually going on over there, and what lay behind this whole struggle.

We did much the same on the issue of the sacked and victimised miners following the 84-85 strike: we tried to open up areas of dialogue among people, organisations and communities we wouldn’t have been able to reach. I tell you, campaigning for the republican prisoners and their families, raising money, getting petitions signed and gaining regular subscriptions round the solidly working class pubs and clubs of Doncaster took a heart like a lion, and a fair number of people drew the conclusion this was de facto support for the IRA anyway, but without this ‘broadened’ platform, this humanitarian element, we would have been confined to some smoky little back room in an obscure part of town.

Now maybe that experience led some in the current leadership to see a possible alternative road for the whole movement, I don’t know, but that need not have been the outcome of this particular tactic. We considered it breaking out of the isolation which most of the left groups hounded us for.

There was a political struggle within Sinn Féin. It wasn’t always overt and from their side I’m not sure if Gerry and co actually sat down and elaborated a programme and strategy to steer the movement away from a dynamic socialist republican campaign towards where we are now, but nobody can deny systematically that is what they have done.

I now believe that key to that process, whether conscious or incidental, was the decision to close all British Sinn Féin cumann around 1981. I am convinced this was to stem the growing far left influence of Irish and part-Irish workers based in the ex-pat Irish communities of London and the big northern industrial cities.

I recall the James Connolly cumann (Tyneside) debating their resolution to the ard fheis in the late 70s on morality and the family and debating if we could submit Engels’s The origin of the family, private property and the state as our resolution in the way Goole LPYS had with Eire Nua. We decided instead on something somewhat lesser, but based clearly on the same notion.

Wherever the Provisional republican movement is now, and I think it is lost, it had everything to play for in the first 20-odd years of its existence. I think some sections of the far left are actually quite relieved it’s gone the road it has, as they think it’s a cover for their own inaction and vacillation while the battle was raging. As I said in my last letter on this subject, history is already being rewritten: the whole contribution of that struggle is being devalued and obscured to make it seem wrong-headed and futile.

Whatever comes to be said, and hindsight is a great thing, that will never be the reality of what actually happened.

David Douglass
Doncaster

IRSP rupture

As an Irish socialist with little knowledge of the internal operation of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, I have noticed that, yet again, there appears to be an internal rupture within its ranks. As the IRSP (similar to others on the left in Ireland and England) have usually sought to ‘demonise’ any minority current within its ranks and expelled them, it’s hard to get a picture of what the internal dispute is about if you are outside the organisation.

I have read some material on the history of the IRSP (usually written by individuals hostile to them) and it’s particularly difficult to understand the ideological rifts that caused previous splits, because they seem to be centred on personalities rather than politics. On top of this is the fact that it is hard to work out where the Irish National Liberation Army and the IRSP separate.

John Martin states the IRSP suffered attacks from the Irish People’s Liberation Organisation and the “Torney gang”, but from what I have read both these groupings were splits from the INLA - the internal feud was between the INLA army council faction and the INLA GHQ faction. I read an interview with Torney in the book The INLA, where he was described by the author as the chief of staff of the INLA. It’s understandable that socialists outside Ireland are bewildered when Irish socialists find it all so confusing.

Anyway, I think the problems of the IRSP and its development have been connected to a problem that dogs all republican groups in Ireland - the relationship between the political organisation and the military wing. Does the military wing act as a subordinate to the political organisation or the other way around? The IRSP, if like other republican groups, have an overlap of membership between both and I believe that the nature of a healthy democratic Marxist organisation coexisting with an army with hierarchical military structures is not compatible.

The IRSP should re-evaluate the necessity for a military wing - as the conditions in Ireland don’t appear to require them at the moment - at least the relative inactivity of all military wings (I assume they all are currently on ceasefire) with the exception of ‘fundraising’ and this only criminalises the political wing in the eyes of the working classes. At the very least, the IRSP should separate completely from the INLA if it is serious in becoming a mass party of the working class.

John O’Neill
email

Class War spy

We were surprised to read the comments of David Shayler about Class War (Weekly Worker August 11). Shayler has made various (often inconsistent) comments about us in interviews and in writing for some eight years now.

His description of a Special Brew-guzzling class warrior, who spent six days a week as an anarchist, holding Class War together with his administrative skills, before returning to his wife and family for Sunday dinner, has one major fault. Nobody who was in Class War in the early 90s can remember such a figure. Put simply, this person did not exist.

Although Shayler ignored correspondence from Class War on this matter, we were able to put our comments to him at a public debate he had with researcher Larry O’Hara at Conway Hall on June 21. Shayler quickly abandoned his position, commenting that the person was in fact a “roving anarchist” involved with various groups and so it would be no surprise if people in Class War did not know him. How this fits with his earlier claim that Class War collapsed without the input of the Special Brew guzzler is a mystery to all who have followed Mr Shayler’s trajectory for more than five minutes.

Your author may be right when he says that in the 20th century the British left was “crap”. Taking an unquestioning attitude towards Mr Shayler and his partner, Annie Machon, is not only crap: it is plain daft. I guess we can see Shayler’s comments as a back-handed compliment. There were serious disagreements often in Class War over those years, but we didn’t spend our spare time grassing one another. And if we were spied on (which, of course, is likely - we would like to know the true details), our method and culture is robust enough.

James Walsh
Luton Class War

Scum

I don’t give a damn whether or not George Galloway is a “traitor” to the British state (Weekly Worker August 11). What I know is that he’s a traitor to the working class of Britain and, more importantly, the Middle East. He should be held to account by the workers’ movement and punished accordingly.

Why should we support him? After all, he’s an anti-semitic, pro-islamic-fundamentalist Nasserite-Stalinist. Socialists are under no obligation to support scum like him. And I hope that readers of the Weekly Worker do not.

Jim Denham
Alliance for Workers’ Liberty

Lunatic

David Morgan writes that Dr Mohammed Naseem, Respect candidate for Birmingham Perry Barr at the last general election and the coalition’s single biggest financial contributor, is under attack because of being “part of Respect and the Stop the War Coalition - organisations that present the main peaceful political challenge to Blair” (Letters, August 11).

This may be why the bourgeois establishment attacks Naseem (if indeed they bother) - but revolutionary socialists, labour movement activists and even consistent liberals attack him for entirely different reasons. Naseem is a leading figure in an organisation called the Islamic Party of Britain, whose political positions include opposition to “intermarriage” between people of different religions and the introduction of the death penalty for “displays of homosexual lewdness”. The group also praises the Taliban regime for establishing “protection for ordinary people in Afghanistan” and claims that the 7/7 bombings were the work of Mossad. (Have a look at http://www.islamicparty.com if you don’t believe me!).

To equate this far right lunatic with muslims and people of muslim background in general is a racist insult - and to support a coalition which could adopt him as a standard-bearer is a betrayal of socialist principle.

Sacha Ismail
Alliance for Workers’ Liberty

Dash for cover

Experiencing the denial of the importance of party is like trying to deny the science of climate change. What I have experienced in the Socialist Workers Party first hand is the ‘elephant in the room’ - the great unsaid (though I doubt most would understand what to say). It’s not that there is no point in the next action, event or whatever. It is the sheer, unquestioning belief in the party leadership - there is never any questioning of why we are here, what we are doing: questions that should be important.

Those questions need asking if the SWP is not going to implode, and dissolve itself in a Menshevik reformism. SWP organisation is going to be third behind Stop the War and Respect activities (where Respect is strong: ie, in east London and Birmingham) for the next year, as John Rees impatiently drags his comrades (think of the horrific beach scene in Saving Private Ryan) to safer ground before the next dash for cover.

How long will this go on for?

Gavin Anderson
London

Belgian threat

Eddie Ford says: “Such an attack on basic democratic rights affects us all - principally, working class, revolutionary and far left groups ... First Hizb ut-Tahrir/al-Muhajiroun, then the CPGB?” (Letters, August 11).

No, not CPGB et al. Why? Well, one group comprises bearded men who sit around, planning the downfall of the west’s current system and have access to a large network of supporters, money, community support, weapons, training, specialists and tacit encouragement from various governments around the world - not to mention support from millions of people globally. Added to this, they have media-savvy and young men prepared to do anything - even die - for their cause, as well as various members in jail.

The other comprises a group of bearded men who sit around planning the downfall of the west’s current system by comparing quotes from long dead thinkers, having circular arguments and discussing what someone really meant back in 1895 or 1915. All with effectively zero support in the wider community at large.

I wouldn’t worry about these measures being used against the CPGB and its ilk. Communists are currently the least most threatening group in the UK. Belgians rate a higher threat level than a bunch of fractured, bickering, disconnected theorists.

Hutch Hampton
email

CPGB jokes

I read with amusement Mark Fischer’s application to join the Communist Party of Britain (Weekly Worker July 28).

I think I also spotted quite a few more jokes reading your website at a preliminary glance ... “Make history capitalism” badges? “Without organisation the working class is nothing; with the highest form of organisation it is everything”? “Legalise all drugs” - now there’s a serious policy!

I am also considering taking another job working for MI5 and find Mark Fischer extremely informative - a shining wit and a first-class analyst.

David Connolly
email

Damaging

I strongly disapprove of your slogan, ‘Legalise all drugs’. I have been an alcoholic for many years, and I know that this will eventually kill me. I know that in moderation alcohol can help to overcome suffering, but it is more often damaging.

Communists have succeeded by working very hard and making great sacrifices, not by abusing drugs. I hope that you can provide a better diet than this for those almost willing to give up their property in order to create a new philosophy, to create a new psychology - and a new society, should this be genetically possible.

Kay Thompson
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