1969: When IS and PD turned to tailing after the Republicans

Submitted by AWL on 14 April, 2008 - 8:20 Author: Sean Matgamna
Ireland

This series: The Northern Ireland crisis of 1968-9 and the left

Part 13

The eclipse of People’s Democracy [PD], which had had a high profile as the left wing of the civil rights movement in 1968-9] as any sort of organised force during August 1969 revealed that all the talk of PD as a mass movement was delusion, a confusion of its reflection in the media with political and organisational substance.

The leaders of IS [forerunner of the SWP, which had links with the PD leaders] were slower than PD itself to realise this, and that things had changed fundamentally in August. While Socialist Worker continued to talk of a civil rights movement, Farrell and his friends concluded that the old civil rights movement was finished.

They turned PD into a structured small socialist campaigning and propaganda organisation. The exposure of what PD was in the Cameron Report that came out in September 1969 left them little choice.

Disaffiliating from the Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign in November 1969, PD continued its turn to the Stalinist-led Republican movement that began in August. IS dutifully followed in PD’s wake.

The main text for this was an article in Socialist Worker on 4 September 1969. These were the general politics with which the IS leaders faced the 6-7 September 1969 conference. After the conference, on 11 September, Stephen Marks commissioned by the EC, spelled out their line on British troops.

In SW’s new, post-August political phase, trends that had been there all along were now developed with a new clarity, Other trends were there too. To some who have followed the story so far, the IS leaders, with their naive and unbridled subordination of all principled political considerations to calculations of organisational advantage, by way of their connection with PD, may seem like political simpletons — but simple and straightforward, they never were!

The SW front page of 4 September was headlined: “Labour Backs Police Regime at Stormont.”

By then it was plain that was not what Britain was doing — except in the sense that it was not going to abolish Stormont. The idea that Britain was backing the specifically Protestant-sectarian police-state character of the old Northern Ireland, which was what the headline said, was the opposite of the truth, and anyone paying attention could not but know that.

It was not the role of a socialist paper to give the British Government credit in advance for making desirable reforms, but it is always the duty of any socialist paper to grasp what’s happening and report it: otherwise it can not do its prime job of teaching people to grasp the realities of class society.

SW was giving great credence to the troops which the Labour Government controlled; yet in its 4 September headline it said that those who controlled the troops were intent on maintaining not only Stormont but the old Orange police state.

Of course, SW had been saying for some months that troops would do just that, back up the Orange diehards. So the current role of the troops — soon to be described by SW as giving the Catholics a “breathing space” — was a blip in the role they must fundamentally play?

A strap line above the headline warned: “Callaghan: Soft Soap but no real action”. If that was taken as not just agitational noise and bluster, but as bearing meaning, then it was a call for “real action” by the British government — for British direct rule, which was the only “real action” in political play which “Callaghan” [the Home Secretary, James Callaghan] was not obviously and openly doing.

In that same Socialist Worker, 4 September 1969, just in time for the upcoming International Socialists Conference (6 and 7 September) a man shot dead in a fight with British forces in Dublin 49 years earlier, in October 1920, came back to life — as SW’s new analyst of Irish affairs, no less: “Sean Treacy.” His politics hadn’t changed much, if at all. He was still militantly nationalist and Republican, of course — what else could one expect? — yet still definitely on the left (the Republican circle to which Treacy had belonged were, according to their comrade Earnan O’Malley, on the left side of Republicanism).

Under a strap line, “Illusions and Utopianism on the Irish Question”, Treacy’s first piece in SW was headlined: “Ulster’s Jackboot Tyranny: why the British Left Must Back Catholic Workers.”

It set out to denounce the rest of the British left for insufficiently supporting “the independence struggle”, the “Catholic workers” and their “fighting organisations”, and “Republicanism”. All this is background music for IS’s switch to endorsing British troops! We shall see what Treacy means by “the independence struggle”, and the perspective he builds round that phrase.

Back Catholic workers? He means the Catholic community in Northern Ireland. But the British Government too “backs” the Catholic community, including the Catholic workers — in its own way. What more is SW demanding? The important difference is that Westminster, while insisting on reforms, is not backing the Catholics in a narrow, exclusive, Protestant-demonising, sectarian, way, and SW is.And, of course, it is not abolishing Belfast's Stormont government.

Remember that SW agrees with Callaghan on Partition. For IS, that is settled until the workers North and South win power and choose to unite the two Irish states. With all his talk of “the independence struggle” and “Republicanism”, Treacy never disavows that stance.

Treacy: The “growth of the civil rights movement” and “resistance to the Unionist regime” embodies for British socialists “immense responsibility and great opportunities... It has also put to the test the relevance of their Marxism.” Forty-nine years dead and only just reborn — and already he’s mastered IS cant! Probably John Palmer, reputedly some sort of family relation of Treacy’s, gave him a crash course.

What is happening in Northern Ireland? “The ruling class is [attempting to] maintain the status quo in Ulster.” The British Government has taken over, but only to preserve the “Unionist jackboot” regime. Poor Treacy is obsessed with the Unionists.

Nor has Treacy had a chance to catch up with the British press. He says the British press presents both sides in Northern Ireland as “religious” and “equally irresponsible and sectarian.” In fact, it doesn’t; it is pretty solidly pro-Catholic, except perhaps the Telegraph. SW, of course, knows that there is nothing at all “irresponsible” or “religious” on the Catholic side.

Oddly, Treacy doesn’t point here to the national oppression which is the root of everything the Catholics fight against in Northern Ireland as the fundamental, all-shaping issue, as he might without departing from the truth. His intense Catholic nationalism still does not question Partition.

The 26 County’s Fianna Fail Party too, he notes, stresses the “Catholic” element in the oppression of the northern workers and, worse, says that they want to join “the Southern regime, seeing it as the legitimate heirs of the struggles for national independence.”

Fianna Fail’s pretence of Irish nationalist virtue must be exposed! How? By demanding that the Southern Government “open the arsenals” to the Northern Catholics and those in the South who need guns to go to their aid.

With the British army now in open control of Northern Ireland, that would inescapably mean the Dublin goverment arming some of its citizens to go and fight the British Army as well as the Unionists — wouldn’t it? And Fianna Fail’s refusal to do so would expose it, with reasonable nationalist-minded people as distinct from unthinking chauvinists, as not “really” nationalist?

This Treacy seems unable to comprehend that the British Army is now in control in Northern Ireland . Still in shock, probably. Or maybe he is too fixated on the Orangemen to notice that they no longer have uncontested control in Northern Ireland.

For his first Socialist Worker assignment, Treacy has been set to criticise the SLL [led by Gerry Healy, the biggest and most active would-be Trotskyist group in Britain at the time] and Militant [forerunner of the Socialist Party and Socialist Appeal].

“Socialists who oppose calls on the Free State to arm the northern workers have to understand the relationship of their regime to the struggle for national independence.” There is a struggle for national independence in Ireland? This is news to Socialist Worker readers, who have been told that the border must remain until socialism. Treacy brings in “national independence”, but not by questioning the previous acquiescence in Partition — instead, by blurring and blending “national independence” and socialism as if they are the same thing.

Evidently Treacy has been influenced by the Republican movement of 1969, who have been marching around Dublin — and in London, Treacy’s relation, John Palmer marching with them — calling distractedly for guns. Pity this man Treacy wasn’t reading SW in June, when no one gave Eamonn McCann an argument in reply to his repudiation of the “southern arsenals” demand.

And how does he think the 26 County State will deliver the guns to the Northerners, when the rebellious Catholic-Nationalist areas are tightly surrounded by British troops? Newly revived, Treacy has not had a chance to think of things like that.

He is angry with the SLL’s Newsletter, and with the Militant, for opposing the call to “open the arsenals” in the South. Newsletter and Militant, he writes, reflect “ruling-class propaganda”, and make “banal analogies”. They go on as if class struggle “is in some mysterious way quite unconnected with the struggle of the Republican workers against Orange Unionism...”

He hasn’t time to spell out how exactly they are connected. He leaves the reader with the impression that they are the same thing. Here he is, like John Palmer, a “Catholic Economist”, someone who sees the Catholic struggle as sufficient for socialist politics in the same way as the “Economists” in the Russian socialist movement of around 1900 saw working-class economic struggle as all-sufficient.

He also hasn’t understood that the only way that the impetus of the communal/national Catholic struggle against “Unionism” can mesh into class struggle is if the Catholic workers are politically independent from the Catholic middle class, and if they advocate a rational programme for a democratic modus vivendi between the Catholic and Protestant populations in Northern Ireland and on the island — that is, if the Catholic struggle is integrated into a coherent working-class programme as one of its democratic aspects.

A “very British” lack of understanding of the national question in the Irish struggle leads left wingers “into the ruling class trap”, declares Treacy! But Treacy doesn’t himself tell the reader what the national question is, what is to be done about it. He doesn’t notice that the national question — concretely, partition — has not been one of the objectives for which Northern Catholics have mobilised. He doesn’t know that IS de facto supports Partition.

If we’d only had Sean Treacy over here early in 1969 when the Trotskyist Tendency [forerunner of AWL] needed his help to convince Cliff, Palmer and the rest of the IS National Committee that the national question couldn’t be avoided! Better late than never, and at least we’ll have his help against the EC’s panic-stricken dropping of its old “Troops out” focus. Won’t we?

Treacy: “The Newsletter bemoans that ‘the authorities want to take away the right to demonstrate from both Catholics and Protestants.’ No socialist can equate the rights of civil rights marchers against the jackboot tyranny of Unionism with Paisleyite mobilisations for onslaughts on the Catholic community”. True, indeed; yet here it is a roundabout way of implying that the troops do only good for now.

“Socialists who oppose calls on the Free State to arm the Northern workers have to understand the relationship of this regime to the independence struggle.” The Free State government would arm only the Northern workers? Treacy doesn’t know that Free State plain-clothes army officers already in Northern Ireland are throwing Dublin’s support, money, guns, influence behind the right wing, Catholic and small bourgeois forces in the Catholic areas? Hasn’t had time to hear the rumours, probably. Or maybe he knew and has forgotten it, or heard it in some newspaper office and knows you can’t believe a word a bourgeois journalist says.

Treacy hasn’t had time to read the files of SW, either,or taken it in that the IS line is that partition must continue until all Ireland is socialist? Or maybe this is a hidden polemic against Cliff, Palmer, Marks, and the EC?

Palmer (sorry, Treacy): The idea that Catholic and Protestant are equal leads the same “left wingers to sing the praises of interdenominational vigilance committees set up ‘to establish peace and law and order’.” The Vigilance Committees are only an attempt by factory owners to preserve their property.

But, whatever their motive, wasn’t it to the good if they damped down and limited Catholic-Protestant sectarian conflict? Isn’t the attitude here the same, essentially, as the earlier hostility to the reforming liberal Unionists as the “main enemy”.

No— remember, this isn’t sectarian conflict. Not in any degree at all. All the left-wing talk of the Newsletter and Militant, Treacy insists, is only a way of refusing solidarity to “the fighting organisations of the anti-Unionist resistance movement.”

What “fighting organisations”? Perhaps the ad hoc neighbourhood groups that fought on the barricades? Those are now dissolving under the pressure of the priests, bishops, London Labour ministers and NI politicians. The precondition for that is the presence of the Army, of British soldiers drawing "peace lines"where barricades had been, and themselves manning them — the alternative to the barricades for Catholic areas which still feared attack by the Paisleyites.

Or does he mean the IRA? He will criticise the IRA leadership for its feebleness in mid-August, but that is not all of the IRA.

In fact there were important movements (of which the Vigilance Committees were part) to smother sectarianism — amongst workers, for instance, in the Belfast shipyards. On the initiative of the shop stewards, a mass meeting of workers in mid-August decided to keep sectarian conflict out of the yards. And they did.

One of the few things the IS leaders and the Trotskyist Tendency agreed on was in seeing such things as not fundamental to the situation. That was true, but I now think we undervalued them, seriously. I will discuss that separately.

Treacy: “Of course, the objective class position of the Protestant and Catholic workers is the same, even though Protestant workers are relatively privileged. But Marxists cannot ignore the subjective factor of political ideology.”

As with many US white workers “false consciousness” places “ large numbers of Protestant workers... on the side of reaction.” If revolutionary socialists refuse to “back Catholic workers... even within the terms of the present struggle”, then they “retard the political evolution of Protestant workers.”

This might make sense if only we knew what he was talking about, or if he could tell us what, politically, he proposes. It is a pity Treacy doesn’t know about the disputes in IS before August — and a pity that John Palmer neglects to tell him about them. For instance, about IS's dogma that both parts of Ireland have to be socialist before the border, and the artificial character of the 6-County state, which pits Protestant against Catholic murderously against each inside a needlessly narrow, can be raised.

Anti-Unionist struggle means what? Opposition to the very existence of the 6 County Unionists, that is to the Protestant community? Treacy’s new comrade Stephen Marks will soon, in SW, dismiss them as “colons”.

Only to the Unionist Party? Back which Catholic workers — politically speaking? Only the workers? For what goals? Irish unity? What else can the “independence struggle” mean? The “independence struggle” and the socialist working-class struggle are the same thing? This Treacy is something of a populist-nationalist-socialist, in the manner of the old Russian Social-Revolutionaries.

Unlike the Protestant-Unionist workers, the Catholics’ “ideology” is sound, or adequate? How, in political, social, “ideological” terms can the struggle of the Catholics educate the Protestant workers? Educate them to Irish nationalism? Catholic nationalism? Socialism? But, except for a handful, the Catholic workers are not socialists.

What does all this add up to?

Treacy is elaborating a new line for IS by ignoring the recent history of the group. That’s what he has been resurrected to do. After all, John Palmer, say, couldn’t do it with any credibility.

But at least Treacy understands the need for a Marxist party — sort of. What is most urgent in Ireland now “is the establishment of a revolutionary socialist political centre”. Thousands “of militant Republican workers “are moving left”. Marxists can “accelerate this process by having a clear, distinctive political identity.”

But Sean, astóir — what is happening now is that IS, following PD, is abandoning its distinct political identity, in so far as it had one, and trying to merge itself politically with the Stalinist “left” Republicans, mimicking them, adopting their terminology about national resistance, etc.

PD itself had no distinctive public political presence — and indeed very little presence at all — in mid-August. The IS leadership thinks that the way to win the thousands of republicans turning left is to mimic them! That’s what you are called back to life to help them put over, Sean.

This is a political conga-dance, PD holding on to the nether parts of the Stalino-Republicans and IS desperately holding on to PD.

Treacy: For revolutionary socialists “it is their duty to give the political lead which can help turn the struggle from a defensive one against extreme reaction to an offensive one against the bastions of capitalist power — north and south.” Inspiring phrases! Abracadabra! All will be changed, changed utterly! This is very good news indeed — if it is true.

But maybe Treacy has let himself be influenced too much by the “method” of the SLL. How does he think all this wonderful work can be accomplished? It has to be one of two things. Either he is talking about the long, long, long term, many years or decades. Or he has some idea of how this can happen soon — of things to do to bring it to immediate life.

Does he? No! The SR-anarchist phrase-shouting disguises that — perhaps for Treacy too.

What does he conclude from the perspectives he outlines? Treacy: “Irish Marxists cannot therefore, stand on the sidelines of this so-called ‘communalist’ struggle. They have to be unconditionally Republican.”

But hold on, comrade Treacy! The “communalist” struggle — the struggle of the Catholic community — is identical to Republicanism? Only if Republicanism here is a vague, almost sub-political tradition, a communal identification more than a programme. In fact, that is what it is in Northern Ireland now.

“Republican” is a euphemism. Treacy means Catholic, as the Catholics are. He means Catholic nationalist, in any of its wide range of manifestations, up to rabid sectarianism.

Marxists, he insists, must draw lessons for the Republican workers “from the political attitudes” of the “utterly discredited official middle-class republican movement... The leadership of the IRA has been unable to back their Marxist-sounding words with action.”

Treacy has picked up the mood of revulsion in Catholic Ireland at the unpreparedness of the IRA leaders for the August eruptions, and their bluster to try to disguise it — the revulsion that will lead to the splitting off of the conventionally-minded, very Catholic and in general right-wing Provisional IRA in about 10 weeks’ time.

But what “action” does Treacy say the Marxist-sounding words of the IRA leaders should have led them to? Organise a serious invasion of the Six Counties from the South? Have more guns in stock in Northern Ireland? Have anticipated the eruption? (But those others who speak “Marxist-sounding” words, the leaders of IS for instance, didn’t foresee it either! Far from it.)

Treacy is not entirely unaware of inadequacies on his own side. He now, without naming them, offers advice to PD: “It is the duty of Marxists working with Republicans to make absolutely clear their Marxist perspectives, even at the cost of initial distance from them.” Indeed. But first they must have them — have “Marxist perspectives” rooted in an analysis of the reality in which they exist.

IS has none — other than militancy and mimicry. How, politically, could the politics of verbal adaptation to Republicanism (and to the Stalino-Republicans) offer an alternative to the amorphous nationalism-republicanism-sectarianism that is the dominant political creed of the Six Counties Catholics? Treacy neglects, as we have seen, to say what exactly “the independence struggle” which he invokes means...

Treacy: Marxists have to work through mass movements such as the trade union based Citizens’ Committee. “For the opening up of a Second Front in the South... The defeat of the Southern Green Tories, including the seizure of British factories and estates in ransom against Irish lives in the North, would enable the beleaguered Republican communities to break out of their ghettoes.”

This incoherent welter of good-sounding, empty, politically deceptive phrases — what Lenin called “phrase-mongering — shows that Sean Treacy, alas, though a socialist, is here more like a survivor from the Russian Social Revolutionary Party than a Marxist.

Defeat the Green Tories? Overthrow the capitalist class regime in the 26 Counties? For sure that would transform the situation and open up possibilities that for now can only be dreamed of. This is going to be done in the more or less immediate period — how?

If nationalist-minded workers seize a few British-owned enterprises in the South? The Irish bourgeoisie is in itself a feeble, shadowdy, only gossamer-flimsy thing? Not a ruling class capable of putting up a serious fight? It will quickly dissolve before a “left” (in fact, Stalinist-populist-nationalist) Republican onslaught?

It is difficult to know what is being said here. Seizures of British factories would trigger a general rising of the Southern working class against capitalism? How would such seizures of a few factories and farms help the Northern Catholics break out of their ghettoes, either social or political?

Ransom for “Irish lives”: to make the British or the Unionists do what? Does Treacy believe that his readers see Britain as slaughtering Catholics left right and centre in Belfast and Derry, in close alliance with the RUC and the B-Specials “Ransom for Irish lives”: and what are the Orangemen? Not Irish?

In fact seizures of British factories in the South in political solidarity with the Northern Ireland Catholics could not but alarm and inflame Northern Protestant-Unionist workers. Unless the Protestants were to melt into thin air, or surrender, this too is just a variant of calling for civil war.

To achieve any of the objectives of the 6 County — or 32 County — Catholics, such civil war would have to go on to conquer the Northern Protestants, using as much force as necessary against the Protestants and the British Army. It would mean repartition of Northern Ireland. Politically this is “SR-anarchist” political gobbledygook!

Treacy: In Britain Marxists “must be the most consistent supporters of solidarity at all levels... The Northern resistance movement must not be placed in the hands of its ‘friends at Westminster’.”

In fact the means of getting Northern Catholics to trust Westminster is the army, which will persuade the Catholics to abandon self-reliance and trust its defence against sectarian attack to “the impartial soldiers”. Therefore, in the context of IS’s overall politics, which soon see it openly championing the troops as the barricades are coming down in Belfast, this talk of combatting trust in Westminster is also is gobbledygook.

Treacy accepts most of the politics of the Northern Ireland Catholics’ “friends” at Westminster, the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, which speaks for about 100 Labour MPs. He seems even to agree with them about direct rule, though he never uses that expression, and SW will never explicitly advocate it.

The Communist Party and its Connolly Association, he says, “peddle illusions... in the willingness or ability” of the Labour Government “to effectively remove the source of oppression and discrimination in Ulster — Unionist political power.”

The problem is that that power has mass support in the Northern Ireland majority. It will take 40 terrible years to create a Protestant willingness even to share power within Northern Ireland. In 1969 what Treacy advocates means, can only mean, either direct rule from Westminster, which is what the Labour MPs want, or a united Ireland by conquest, or re-division of the 6 Counties.... “From below” here means the latter, by civil war.

What does Treacy expect? He sees the possibility of a “mass campaign for direct solidarity with the Northern Ireland Civil Rights movement (including the possibility of widespread industrial action)”. By contrast the Connolly Association “attempt(s) to channel the movement towards Parliament”.

PD will soon tell IS that the old civil rights movement has no future. The fundamental "civil right" the Catholics lack, and which IS has tried yo ignore, will now quickly become the central question in NI politics. Treacy: “Socialists and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association must not add to the confusion which [the SLL and the Militant] have sowed in Britain” (We have our own, thanks!) We must press for “a united campaign based on the organised strength of the British and Irish workers to back the resistance movement in Northern Ireland”.

Resistance to what? The Unionist state, after the British Army has politely gone home, after the Catholics are armed and tell them to go... (As SW 2 weeks later, when IS finally gets around to expounding its ideas about the troops, will foolishly put it!)

Treacy/Palmer: “This is an integral part of the struggle in Ireland to regroup revolutionaries in the fight for a socialist workers republic.”Ah! This is just a piece of “positioning”...

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