The peace agreement drawn up after hours of exhausting talks in Belfast on 10 April holds out the pospect of an end to the 30 years war in Northern Ireland. That should recommend it to socialists even though little else about it does. It certainly isn’t a solution to the conflict. At worst, what it does is institutionalise the sectarian conflict at the heart of Northern Ireland society. At best it provides a new framework within which the leading communal politicians on each side can manage that conflict.
It is very clear that the Agreement reached at Easter is only a beginning and the main obstacles will occur long before any assembly meets. In May the Paisley Unionists and greenest Nationalists will attempt to win a No vote sufficient to undermine the deal’s credibility. They won’t win the referendum, but the size of the No vote will be treated as a platform from which they can build. A few weeks later comes the flashpoint of Drumcree which at the moment promises to be as dangerous as ever. Then there are the elections to the Assembly. If Unionist scepticism and doubt has been carefully nurtured by the likes of Paisley, we could see a tranche of anti-Agreement loyalists elected with the aim of wrecking the work of the Assembly. The model for this is the campaign to bring down the 1973 power-sharing Assembly set up through the Sunningdale Agreement.

Of course it’s possible that the deal could survive these tests, and socialists have every reason to hope that it does. For all its limitations, there is only one alternative to this Agreement here and now, and that is a return to sectarian war. In the longer term, the alternative to the communal conflict institutionalised in the Agreement is the united working-class movement committed to a democratic settlement. Sectarian war makes that development much more difficult, in the last 30 years, in fact, impossible.

A framework for managing the communal differences through layers of constitutional structures has all the limits of the top-down legalism that it is — it represents a continuation of the long bourgeois attempt to create transnational structures which supersede what they consider to be an irritating and irrational national problem. It is not therefore our solution or method. That should not make us neutral, however. It is better for the Irish working class and, more importantly still the prospects of organised class unity in the North if the sectarian differences which are not going to evaporate as a result of any constitutional arrangement are minimised and given democratic channels. The simple fact is that more communal polarisation means less workers’ unity, and a return to war means more polarisation. Socialists should not abstain in the Northern Ireland referendum. They should argue for a Yes vote.

Those who have collapsed many years ago into Irish nationalism will not do so, despite the fact that their heroes of old Sinn Fein (whose judgement at one time could not have been questioned by British socialists), will most likely be calling for a Yes vote. Even on the more healthy sections of the far left, there is ambiguity. The SWP attack the agreement for not solving the problems of unemployment or low pay, but make no comment in their “What we think” column on how their Irish comrades should vote. The Socialist Party, in a reasonably good analysis from old hand Peter Haddon, take refuge in similar abstraction, and have nothing to say one way or the other about the referendum. This, despite the fact that the analysis of both groups implies that things will be better, or at least not worse, if the Agreement is not scuppered. We should call for a Yes vote.

We should welcome the marginalisation of sectarian paramilitaries if it occurs, and we should encourage the trade union and labour movement to relate to the new structure as an independent political force and expose the inability of communal politics to deliver anything to the working class.

Pat Murphy

No, we should not say Yes

To advocate Yes is to do more than express the wish that the peace deal will succeed in driving the communal war-mongers to the margins of green and orange politics and create the conditions for the re-emergence of class politics. It is, to a lesser or greater degree, positively to endorse the agreement in all its details. This is not like a General Election where we vote for a party because of its trade union links etc, irrespective of its politics. The referendum is about a specific agreement. The details matter.

A Yes vote is a positive expression of faith in the agreement to really achieve what London and Dublin and the various green and orange political parties say it will. It is to accept that the political issues and alternatives are as defined by the authors of this agreement. We may hope for peace and “normalisation”; it does not follow that we endorse the agreement, or express political confidence in those in London or Dublin and Belfast who have cobbled it together. I think a Yes vote implies all that, even if we don’t intend it to. Many people will vote Yes as a vote for “peace”: the question is — is it? And can Workers’ Liberty treat it as only that?

I share Pat Murphy’s “hope”, but make a more pessimistic and provisional assessment of the Agreement. It has a better chance and a much broader range of support than any previous effort. But it may fall apart like numerous other efforts at a solution in the last 29 years. The militant chauvinists on both sides may make it impossible for “reason” to prevail. There have been a number of lulls which seemed as if they had to be the end, and yet were not. The “unreasonable” people on both sides made it go on.

A new “Provo” movement — Continuity IRA/Republican Sinn Fein has taken shape alongside the Adams movement and is growing. The Continuity IRA can pursue the old Provo strategy, operating in tacit alliance with Ian Paisley, leader of the second biggest Unionist party, the DUP, who opposes the deal. They have the power to bomb and kill and they may destabilise Northern Irish politics.

Nothing is fixed, none of the elements in play reliably stable quantities. The IRA/Sinn Fein may — whatever they want — be excluded. The Trimble Unionists will be under — and will exert — much pressure to insist on IRA decommissioning of arms. The IRA has said it will not decommission.

More fundamentally, even if it sticks, this deal is not a solution to the baseline conflict in Ireland — that between the two peoples, the two identities on the island and in the Six County state. This agreement institutionalises sectarianism and communalism within an artificial state framework, with a changing population ratio between the communities. That will be a destablising factor. It is possibly the seed of future communalist war. We can hope that in the context of a Europe knitting itself together, the communalist poison will drain out of the Northern Irish state in a short time. In that case we will have the benign scenario sketched out by John Hume. Emphatically, I do not believe the poison will drain away quickly. The new Belfast Orange-Green Northern Irish government institutions will be sectarian “war by other means”. It will not create conditions conducive to the emergence of working-class politics that span the communal divide. Communal-sectarian watchwords will still occupy the space of better politics.

We should not positively endorse this deal or express belief that it is an acceptable solution that will “work”. It is better than war. But our political role is that of the irreconcilable critic and oppositionist.

But what, it can be asked, of responsibility? Shouldn’t we act to make it work, in however humble a capacity and take responsibility with a Yes vote? One could say — “vote Yes, without illusion” and then make all the critical points necessary. Far more logical and clear cut is to criticise and refuse to take the responsibility that is implied in advocating Yes, even “critically”.

And if, it has been asked, acceptance or rejection of the “peace” depended on our vote? That way of posing it is false and fantastical. Then we would be in a different situation: we would have enough support on the ground to pose our own options and proposals. We would not then accept the gun-to-head posing of the lesser evil any more than we should accept it now.

The root issue, I think is this: what is our proper political stance? We are: “the party of intransigent and irreconcilable opposition” [Trotsky]. We do not want Britain to pull out of Northern Ireland without a viable political settlement. We have polemicised against people who shout “Troops Out Now”. I have never understood that to mean that we give positive support to or express confidence in the British troops, or the governments which control them. When we reject anarchist nonsense slogans such as “smash the bourgeois state now”, we do not thereby endorse the bourgeois state, but fight it and work to “smash” it in our own way, in our own good time — when the working class is ready to substitute its own semi-state. We reject the Provo war and I hope this agreement puts an end to it. But we cannot endorse, or seem to endorse their bourgeois-communal alternative.

As Marxists we analyse the reality as it is, try to find our feet in it and ways of getting from here to the socialist goal we work for. We do not endorse or seem to endorse their politics even when we concur with them as here on the desire to end the war in Northern Ireland. We have our own standpoint and our own politics. We do not accept the gun-to-the-head choice of lesser evils they normally offer: to do that is to forgo politics outside their frame. The lesser evils are also theirs. We settle for neither their lesser nor their greater evils.

Here it is very much a question of our fundamental revolutionary socialist working class posture towards official society and those who shape its destiny. To say No where they say Yes, and Yes where they say No, would be to define ourselves as only their negative imprint. But even when we both say Yes or no, our Yes is not theirs. We say Yes to peace. But we should not say Yes to the idea that this new arrangement is the answer.

I will quote Trotsky’s account of a disagreement he had with Max Shachtman in 1937 on what way a Trotskyist deputy in the Spanish Republican Cortes (Parliament) would vote on providing money for the war during the Spanish Civil War. Trotsky was for the victory of the Republic, and for the Republican soldiers at the front being armed against Franco’s fascists. But even so Trotsky said it would be wrong to vote money for this war because it would politically mean a great deal more than giving guns to the soldiers.

A Yes vote means politically a great deal more than a vote for Northern Irish peace.

Trotsky: “On September 18, 1937 Shachtman wrote me:

…‘You say, “If we would have a member in the Cortes he would vote against the military budget of Negrin.” Unless this is a typographical error it seems to us to be a non-sequitur. If, as we contend, the element of an imperialist war is not dominant at the present time in the Spanish struggle, and if instead the decisive element is still the struggle between the decaying bourgeois democracy, with all that it involves, on the one side, and fascism on the other, and further if we are obliged to give military assistance to the struggle against fascism, we don’t see how it would be possible to vote in the Cortes against the military budget… If a Bolshevik-Leninist [Trotskyist] on the Huesca front were asked by a Socialist comrade why his representative in the Cortes voted against the proposal by Negrin to devote a million pesetas to the purchase of rifles for the front, what would this Bolshevik-Leninist reply? It doesn’t seem to us that he would have an effective answer…’.

“This letter astounded me. Shachtman was willing to express confidence in the perfidious Negrin government on the purely negative basis that the element of an imperialist war was not dominant in Spain.

“On September 20, 1937 I replied to Shachtman:

‘To vote the military budget of the Negrin government signifies to vote him political confidence… To do it would be a crime. How we explain our vote to the anarchist workers? Very simply: We have not the slightest confidence in the capacity of the government to conduct the war and assure victory. We accuse this government of protecting the rich and starving the poor. This government must be smashed. So long as we are not strong enough to replace it, we are fighting under its command. But on every occasion we express openly our non-confidence in it: it is the only one possibility to mobilise the masses politically against this government and to prepare its overthrow.’” [From In Defence of Marxism].

by Sean Matgamna

II. Discussion

“Don’t make federalism an ultimatum”

“Just as it was no part of serious working class politics to counterpose socialism within the old UK to the Irish majority’s desire for Home Rule, so now it is no part of Marxist politics to counterpose a socialist Ireland to a democratic solution of the conflict that divides the people of Ireland. The problem is to create the conditions — working class unity — that will make it possible to win socialism”.

The above quotation comes from a discussion paper produced by a forerunner of the AWL in the mid-1980s. It sums up the approach we have taken to the Irish question since the late 1970s, when we ceased to allow ourselves to be guilt-tripped into giving unconditional support to the Provos’ armed struggle and broke from the far-left (and Bennite) consensus that the slogan “Troops Out Now” offered any way forward in the context of the Six Counties.

Thus, we advocate a federal united Ireland, with self-rule for the Protestant majority areas, coupled with closer, perhaps confederal, links between the UK and independent Ireland to reassure the Irish (Protestant) minority. Any “settlement” short of that is, in our view, almost certain to break down.

However, we do not have forces in Ireland, North or South. We have debated with many political groups and individuals from the North but no significant forces in Ireland have been persuaded to adopt our federal solution (though many serious people, including Billy Hutchinson of the PUP and some Sinn Feiners, have appeared to be attracted to it).

So how have we responded? Not by saying “anything short of a federal solution is a waste of time”. On the contrary, our late ’70s rethink also resulted in a change of attitude towards the many spontaneous and incoherent “peace” movements that have emerged in the Six Counties over the years and, in particular, working class initiatives like the CPSA’s strikes against sectarian attacks from “loyalists” and “republicans” alike. Our analysis led us to adopt a generally positive and sympathetic attitude towards such movements even though their declared basis was invariably a vague pacifist “anti-sectarianism” rather than any conscious desire for class politics. Similarly, we long ago declared the Provos’ military campaign to be futile and counter-productive and called for its end. We said this not because we were pacifists but because we recognised that Protestant and Catholic workers have to develop a dialogue and the beginnings of a modus vivendi in order for working class politics to come onto the agenda in the Six Counties.

We gave a cautious but unreserved welcome to the IRA and Loyalist ceasefires and the resulting peace talks. In January, when Sinn Fein were kicked out of the talks and it looked as though the entire process might well break down, we said: “It will be a set-back for the working class and for both communities in Northern Ireland if they [the talks] do [break down]... This is not because the peace talks will produce some miracle solution, but because the paramilitary ceasefire increases the possibilities of building a socialist movement in Ireland which can unite workers around a programme offering advance both to Catholic and Protestant workers” (Workers’ Liberty bulletin, 23/1/98).

Again, in March of this year, with Sinn Fein still suspended from the talks and the emergence of a “Continuity IRA” militarist opposition to Adams and McGuinness, we spelled out our position: “Socialists who want Protestant-Catholic working-class unity should welcome any moves that offer serious hope of a permanent peace and an end to blind-alley militarism. We can not and should not, however, take responsibility for either London or Dublin. We state what is and prepare for the future. We work for the development of independent working-class politics. The first step is to understand reality clearly and that means rejecting all delusions that “anti-imperialist war” can bring progress in today’s Ireland”(Workers’ Liberty bulletin 6/3/98).

As we all know, the talks did not break down and a hastily cobbled-together “agreement” emerged on 10 April. In the light of everything we have said about Ireland over the last twenty years, most AWL comrades assumed that we would call for a Yes vote in the referendum, North and South.

Being responsible is not, of course, the same thing as taking responsibility for policies and politics that are not our own. I do not believe that anyone in WL would wish to take responsibility for the “Good Friday” agreement. It is a fudge, deliberately intended to mean all things to all people: It only addresses the crucial issue of the relationship between the minority and majority communities in the Six Counties and Ireland as a whole, through bureaucratic arrangements for the proposed Assembly and North-South Council. Most importantly for us, it is a bourgeois “solution” brokered by bourgeois politicians, notably Clinton and Blair. My personal guess is that it will all blow apart — or at least, unravel — sooner or later. But it is not pre-ordained that the deal will fail. In any case, our attitude to the referendum should not be determined by our assessment of the deal’s chances of success. The very ambiguity of the deal makes the referendum essentially a vote for or against “peace”. And the only alternative on offer is a return to the military campaigns of both sides of the communal divide.

In this situation I was astonished to find Sean Matgamna and a few other comrades arguing against a Yes vote in the referendum on the grounds that “To advocate Yes is to do more than express the wish that the peace deal will succeed in driving the communal war-mongers to the margins of green and orange politics and create the conditions for the re-emergence of class politics. It is, to a lesser or greater degree, positively to endorse the agreement in all its details. This is not like a general election where we vote for a party because of its trade union links etc, regardless of its politics”.

Well, let’s unpackage that, as the cultural studies trendies would say: at the last general election we called for a Labour vote despite the fact that we disagreed with virtually every aspect of Blair’s policies. As for the trade union link, we stated that a Blair victory would be a “kamikaze victory” for the working class: Blair would use the prestige and authority conferred by victory to carry through his project of breaking the union link and dismantling the labour movement in Britain. And yet we still called for a Labour vote. Why? Because the working class, to some degree, had illusions in Blair and because another Tory victory would have been the worst possible demoralising blow to our class. In any case, it was not (and is not) pre-ordained that Blair would succeed: a revitalised, confident working class could stop him in his tracks. And in our estimation the best way of bringing about that situation was to call for a Labour vote (even in constituencies where more “left-wing” candidates were standing) and to go through the experience of a Blair government with our class.

It seems to me that the parallels with the referendum on “peace” in Ireland are perfectly valid — except that even the dourest pessimist couldn’t describe a Yes vote as a “kamikaze” vote by our class. And I fail to understand why it is impossible to call for a critical Yes vote in exactly the same way that we call for a Labour vote at a general election. Sure, you can only shout as loud as your voice and some people will only notice that we say Yes (or “vote Labour”) and not notice our reasons and criticisms. But that’s an argument for never calling for a vote for anyone or anything except ourselves and our own programme.

Sean, quoting Trotsky, says “We are “the party of intransigent opposition” even when we see some possible good in what our class enemy is doing... when we reject anarchist nonsense slogans such as “smash the bourgeois state now”, we do not thereby endorse the British state, but fight it and work to “smash it in our own way, in our own good time — when the working class is ready to substitute its own semi-state”. Agreed! But the referendum in Ireland wasn’t about endorsing a state or a government: it was, essentially, about a deal that has at least a chance of ending the military campaigns of the main paramilitary forces on both sides of the communal divide and thereby gives the working class a chance of developing the unity that is a prerequisite of it becoming a revolutionary force in Ireland.

Trotsky’s argument against Shachtman was that “To vote the military budget of the Negrin government signifies to vote him political confidence”. Again, the referendum is quite clearly not (and not seen by anyone as being) a vote of confidence in the Blair, Ahern or, indeed, Clinton governments: it essentially is a vote for peace, conciliation and dialogue within the Six Counties and as such can only benefit the working class. Plainly, we can not be neutral, much less advocate a No vote.

And yet if Sean was consistent in his analogy with voting for Negrin’s military budget, he would advocate a No vote. It would place us alongside the most bigoted loyalists and the most irredentist ‘republicans’, but no matter: if this is a matter of principle (and despite Sean’s claim to the contrary, it seems to me that his argument only makes sense if it is) then we shouldn’t worry about the company we keep. In fact, Sean and his co-thinkers are unwilling to follow through with their own logic and end up arguing for abstention. (Well, I think they do: Sean ducks the issue with sophistry: “If what we say could make the difference, then we would be in a different situation: we would have enough support on the ground to pose our own options and proposals” Why bother making any practical choices anywhere outside of the National Union of Students, then?).

In reality, Sean’s refusal to call for a Yes vote in the referendum makes a nonsense of what he has been saying about Ireland for the last twenty years and more: it is irresponsible posturing of the worst kind, a disservice to serious working class people in Ireland. At least the “Committee for a Marxist Programme” can cite “permanent revolution” as their excuse.

Jim Denham

“A poor compromise but progress”

Three arguments have been put against voting Yes in the recent Northern Ireland referendum. The first one concerns the details of the Good Friday Agreement.

The details, are very bad: it preserves the six-county state, it fails to alter the RUC in any meaningful way, it does not define the democratic issue as being one of allowing autonomy for the Protestant majority areas, combined with the right of the Catholic majority areas to be unified with the South, instead there is devolution and power-sharing for the sectarian set-up of the Six Counties entity. A range of working-class concerns in the social and economic fields are left unaddressed.

There are good reasons here to refuse to vote Yes but the Agreement has to be looked at comparatively. Everything that is wrong with the deal is also wrong with the constitutional status quo — direct British rule from Westminster. The question for socialists is: is there anything in this deal that constitutes a sufficient improvement to warrant voting Yes?

It is, as Sean Matgamna has put it, “not a matter of principle”. (However, Sean does not quite hold to this view.) On balance, I think that the Agreement does constitute progress: it is a compromise on the constitutional question, though not our kind of compromise. The recognition by those voting Yes of the need for a constitutional compromise is the key positive impulse to which revolutionaries who are also consistent democrats should be relating. For that reason above all it was right to advocate Yes. We should remain implacably critical of it, explain why we have no confidence in it working, and clearly state our alternative to it.

Equally, it would be wrong to advocate Yes in isolation from our general propaganda on the national conflict there.

The second argument against voting Yes is that it means to swallow the Agreement hook, line and sinker. To vote is to endorse all the details, express political confidence, settle for the proposal put to the vote and take responsibility for it. Do we take the view that a critical vote is impossible? WL advocated a vote for John Prescott in the Labour leadership election, Rodney Bickerstaff in UNISON.

The assertion that voting equals taking responsibility has not been properly explained. Clearly we always try to vote responsibly. However, we do not accept responsibility every time the things we voted for produce undesirable results, certainly not when we made all the relevant criticisms at the appropriate time.

It may be said that if you say vote Yes to the Agreement then no-one will listen to anything else you have to say and assume you support it uncritically.

Are we also to “take responsibility” for our answer to the question, “Which is the lesser evil? A Yes majority or a No majority?”. Sean, who expresses the view that a Yes majority is a lesser evil, would either be compelled to lie and say that they were both equal evils or tell the truth and — by risking the conclusion to vote Yes being drawn — thereby take responsibility for the Agreement.

The point here is that we can control the balance of our propaganda. We can give correct weight to “vote ‘Yes”’ within that overall balance.

A third argument is put: we don’t vote for the bourgeoisie. As Sean puts it, “it is very much a question of posture. I mean our fundamental revolutionary socialist working class posture towards official society and those who shape its destiny.” (So much for “not a matter of principle”.)

Refusal to back capitalist parties in elections is not about keeping ourselves pure. Backing capitalist politics is always a missed opportunity because it diverts the labour movement from what should be its key focus, to secure political representation for itself.

There was no possibility of the working class using this referendum to seek its own political representation. The labour movement could not do the equivalent of standing its own candidates — alter the question on the ballot paper. A radically transformed and strong labour movement in Northern Ireland in the future may (with the right politics) be able to impose, through concerted political action, a solution to the communal conflict, but that is another matter entirely and does not depend on abstaining now.

It may be right, in some circumstances, to propose that the working class makes the referendum unworkable by mass disruption. The anti-Yes comrades do not propose this because they know it to be fantastical, they also realise that the Agreement is not being imposed on a working class which itself has a better policy.

We are not always for abstention in referenda called by bourgeois governments. WL called for a double Yes vote in the referendum for a Scottish parliament. The parliament was proposed by imperialist bourgeois politicians. The main campaign for a double Yes was a popular front of Labour, Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party. But we were still for voting Yes. Why? Because a Scottish parliament represents a limited but real democratisation of the government of Scotland which, to a considerable extent, is already administered separately from England and Wales through the Scottish Office. i.e. It is a better option (or lesser evil) than continuing the constitutional status quo. This is not to say that it is a solution, that we have political confidence in it that we take responsibility for it, that we endorse it in all its details or that we are settling for it.

Whether to vote Yes or not is really of secondary importance. We should establish the basic rules for our approach to such questions:

l it is possible to vote critically

l it is permissible to vote Yes or No in a referendum called by a bourgeois government

l the decision on which way to vote and whether to vote is a matter of assessment and judgement of the issues involved and what is at stake.

Dave Ball