Voice From The Back: The benefits of globalisation (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the December 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The benefits of globalisation

“America’s steel industry is in a mess; only a week ago, a veteran foundry, Bethlehem Steel followed two dozen of its brethren into Chapter 11 bankruptcy . . . The company blamed its plight on a tide of cheap imports and this week Pittsburgh-based US Steel announced third-quarter losses of $23 million. …. President Bush in June announced he would take action under section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974, an obscure law that permits global safeguards to industry. Unlike anti-dumping measures which require proof of unfairness, section 201 permits the erection of tariff barriers to provide temporary relief from import competition.” (Times, 24 October)

So, behind all it’s bombast about free trade and the benefits of competition, the US government reveals yet again a truism about capitalism. Capitalists are in favour of free trade when they are winning but against it when their competitors are winning.

It’s a dog’s life

Something of the madness of capitalism in general and post-disaster New York in particular can be gauged from Chris Ayres’s Wall Street Diary in the Times (25 October).

“A bomb-sniffing dog can take as much as $2,500 (£1,760) back to his kennel for a 16 hour shift. With the dogs working seven days a week, this adds up to an impressive $912,500 per year.”

A great deal more money than the wages of the heroic New York firemen who perished in that recent disaster, or indeed, for that matter, any of our readers.

It ain’t half hot, mum

In this column in May we reported that British police forces were interested in the development of an American crowd control vehicle that zapped demonstrators with microwaves. The good news for control freaks everywhere is that the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in New Mexico have recently completed tests.

“The Air Force now wants to use this Active Denial Technology (ADT), which it says is non-lethal, for peacekeeping or riot control at “relatively low range” – possibly from low-flying aircraft. … AFRL says that the 3 millimetre wavelength radiation penetrates only 0.3 millimetres into the skin, rapidly heating the surface above the 45 degrees C pain threshold. At 50 degrees C, they say the pain reflex makes people pull away automatically in less than a second – it’s said to feel like fleetingly touching a hot light bulb. Someone would have to stay in the beam for 250 seconds before it burnt the skin, the lab says, giving ‘ample margin between intolerable pain and causing a burn'” (New Scientist, 29 October).

Wow, is this tempting, or what, for repressive regimes everywhere? Burn, baby, burn.

Gerry in Wonderland

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” A similar disdain for language would seem to be shared by Lewis Carroll’s character in Alice in Wonderland and Gerry Adams.

“Mr Adams said, ‘The IRA is not a terrorist organisation. The name terrorist is bandied about willy-nilly. Clearly what happened in the USA recently was a terrorist act where civilians were deliberately targeted. In any war terrible things were done. In my view the IRA has never deliberately targeted civilians'”.

Pressed on whether the IRA had never placed bombs in shopping districts he said, “Well, it depends, it depends, you see.” He then added: “It’s quite academic.” The Herald (6 November)

Not really all that academic though if your kid has been blown up by some mad zealot, is it, Gerry?

A strange democracy

In an apparently surprising turnaround Michael Bloomberg was elected Mayor of New York last month. Surprising in that he was standing as a Republican in a city where five out of six voters are registered Democrats. Surprising also in that until about a year ago he was a Democrat. He has had no previous political experience Blatantly he only became a Republican to stand for mayor and used the campaign slogan “A leader not a politician.”

His 51 percent share of the vote becomes less surprising however, when you realise that Mr Bloomberg is a billiomaire and spent a staggering $60 million on his campaign. In other words he bought the office of Mayor of New York. A strange “democracy” indeed.

Praising Karl Marx

Socialists are used to the works of Karl Marx being dismissed or ignored by capitalism’s academics, so it is a pleasant change to read on page 166 of Steve Jones’s Almost Like A Whale a brief compliment to Marx:

“Karl Marx got it (as usual) more or less right: ‘what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality’. His statement brings out the pragmatic nature of evolution, in a hive or anywhere else. Bee society has no plans.”

From rats to riches

A short news item from  Rio de Janeiro speaks volumes about the ingenuity of the working class and the madness of capitalism. “Rats in the Brazilian city outnumber human beings ten to one and people are being offered about £1.30 for every 2lb of dead rat found. Officials are using poison and will collect carcasses – despite fears that poor people will begin rearing the rodents.” (Times, 10 November).

The politics of madness (2001)

From the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Provisional IRA’s guns have been almost silent now for some seven years. The spin doctors of republican terrorism have now got their snouts in the political trough – two of them government ministers mouthing the same sort of nostrums and excuses as their erstwhile unionist opponents. The power of Sinn Fein over their paramilitary first cousins in the IRA has been demonstrated by the fact that, despite the opportunist manoeuvrings of their political wing, their cease-fire has held largely intact.

It would have been a bold political prophet who would have predicted in 1970, when a few die-hards of the pure faith of Pearse and Connolly established the Provisional IRA – in contradistinction to the more quiescent policies of the Leninist “Official” IRA – that the new movement would achieve such lofty peaks in the small range of Northern Irish politics.

Today, the mouthpieces of the Provos have become the epitome of political respectability. People like Adams are welcome guests of the Irish government. They can speak man-to-man with Blair and they are been in the White House. Now, internationally recognised political celebrities, they can be heard arguing the case for what they contend is the road to a permanent peace.

Slaughter of the innocents

Of course, there was a price to pay. Thousands of people have died, most killed by the Provos. The lives of many young men and women have been marred by years of imprisonment. Still others have been tortured and murdered on the authority of kangaroo courts. Additionally, the quite fearsome atmosphere of hatred and division that stalks Northern Ireland at present is in no small way the product of the IRA’s violence – the alleged purpose of which was to establish unity between the people of Ireland irrespective of religion.

In the recent elections that division was emphasised: Most of the Catholics who voted did so for Sinn Fein, allowing the republicans to claim that they were now the larger of the two nationalist parties. Sinn Fein celebrated with an orgy of flag-waving triumphalism remarkably reminiscent of the behaviour of their traditional enemies. Adams and his political cohorts are astute enough to know that a resumption of IRA violence would dramatically reduce their electoral fortunes and scupper their strategy for becoming an effective all-Ireland political force. There was another vital point that might have made some thoughtful republicans see their electoral victories as somewhat Pyrrhic. What they had done to the moderate nationalists of the SDLP, the virulent forces of Paisley’s miscalled “Democratic” Unionist Party had done to the more accommodating representatives of Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party.

The leader of the traditional Unionist Party, David Trimble, is an Orangeman with a past. In the early seventies he was associated with the neo-fascist Vanguard Unionist Party. A few years ago he danced a victory jig with Paisley on the Garvaghy Road while the police forcefully cleared a path for the Orangemen to march. But Trimble is a lawyer with strong political aspirations and, as the leadership of Sinn Fein were becoming aware that there was no real future in violence, Trimble was coming to the view that there was political kudos in the politics of accommodation.

John Hume, the leader of the SDLP, and Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein were already working on the detail of that accommodation. At the same time, while declaring in the House of Commons that talks with republicans would upset his digestive system, John Major’s emissaries were in secret talks with the Provos – without Adams advising Hume or the British telling their “peace partners” in the Irish government.

Eventually, the various strands of a possible agreement was arrived at and presented jointly by the British and Irish governments as a framework for peace. Weeks of frenetic discussions ensued in which the real social problems of the majority of the people were never mentioned. The discussions were about flags, about the religion of the members of the police force that enforces capitalism’s laws, and about reflecting the close co-operation at governmental level already existing between capitalist enterprises north and south of the border.

There was much talk by the republican side about “equality of esteem” but it was pure political vapour, the same absolute rubbish that Sinn Fein’s military wing thought justified the slaughter of the innocent for nearly thirty years. It was wholly unrelated to the lives of working class people irrespective of religion or whether they lived north or south of the Irish border. Inequality is a vital part of the mechanics of capitalism; Sinn Fein’s perception of equality of esteem simply means that they want workers who are Catholics or nationalists to share equally in the inequalities of capitalism as it exists in Ireland.

Hotchpotch of ambiguities

The so-called Good Friday Agreement was a hotchpotch of ambiguities written in convoluted language calculated to deliberately obfuscate disagreements and placate the more threatening opponents of compromise. Worse, it was a sectarian charter, institutionalising the very bigotries that has traditionally helped to feed conflict and division in the province. Both sides would give a little and take a little and life would go on with the majority of the population still enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous capitalism. There were to be rewarding political positions for yesterday’s hard men and women with all the trappings of low-grade power and a generous modicum of economic affluence. For some, the struggle was paying off.

But there were those who felt aggrieved either because they had been left out, or wanted more or were so poisoned with hatred of their opponents that they disdained the idea of any compromise even if it contained the possibility of ending the killing. Paisley, the bellowing fundamentalist firebrand, and his “Democratic” Unionist Party were outraged. Theirs is a peculiar conception of democracy in which the majority, always providing it is a Protestant majority, has the right of absolute political domination over the those who are not Protestant and Unionist. The calibre of the DUP can be gauged by their silence when, during the recent election campaign, Paisley put his sanction on line dancing, making us aware that God didn’t like it and that it was the road to eternal damnation.

Still, the DUP went to the Assembly, sat in the Chamber with members of Sinn Fein, took the generous salaries, in some cases substantially incremented by local Ministerial salaries and in others by the generous salaries of Westminster MP’s. Being a party of principle, however, they refused to sit at the cabinet table with Sinn Feiners but did sit with them on Assembly committees and, of course, in many local government chambers.

Paisley, as always, was demanding the political head of anybody who would countenance the remotest idea of co-operation with republicans. Together with the Orange Order and the majority of Trimble’s own Westminster MP’s, they were frantically engaged in promoting the idea that Protestants were being increasingly denied their traditional “rights”. The “rights” referred to are mainly areas of largely cosmetic privilege or blatantly sectarian discrimination designed to kid working class Protestants that they were a privileged section of the community. The main stumbling block, however, was the failure of the IRA to decommission its weapons.

The weapons issue was, and is, a vital ploy in the power struggle between the Paisley Unionist and the Trimble unionists for the hearts and minds of the Protestant community. IRA guns are, in the main, silent; some of their arms dumps have been inspected and sealed by the body of international commissioners established to oversee paramilitary arms decommissioning and there can be little doubt that most of the rest of their arsenal in the Republic has been compromised.

On the threshold of the last election, in the hope that his action would forestall advances by the Paisleyites, Trimble announced that if the IRA did not show some evidence of actual decommissioning by the end of June he would resign his position as First Minister of the Assembly. Obviously Trimble was not really concerned at the trickle of arms the IRA might have conceded in order to allow him to retain his post. The gesture was intended to save him from his erstwhile supporters and, since he is the most accommodating Unionist leader, it might have seemed reasonable for the IRA to throw him a political lifeline in the shape of a few kilograms of Semtex or some ageing guns.

But just as Trimble is the prisoner of his backwoods supporters, so are Adams and the Sinn Fein leadership hostage to those wilder elements in the IRA who see any act of decommissioning as an act of surrender. Trimble must know that the IRA guns are a threat now only insofar as they might get into the hands of the political nutters of the Real IRA who want to continue killing and dying “for Ireland’”. He must be aware that Sinn Fein’s ambition is to win sufficient seats in the Republic’s Dail to enable the Party to become a participant in a future coalition government in the Republic. Ensconced thus, in government in the South and remaining a major player in the North, would extend Sinn Fein’s influence and power to a point previously undreamed of.

If the Northern Ireland Assembly is killed by the decommissioning issue, it will be a major impediment to the plans of the Sinn Fein leadership and a death knell to the political ambitions of the Trimble Unionists. Ironically, both parties need each other in the further pursuit of their disparate objectives. It is a need that underwrites the madness of what passes for politics in Northern Ireland.

Paisley has won a resounding victory, another one! The difficulty with Paisley’s victories is that each one seems to reverse the fortunes of his cause. It is more than thirty years since he and his bigoted cohorts started the battle to “save Ulster”. Over the years his party has gathered strength and now boasts that it is the true representative of the Unionist. But as the party progressed, the cause regressed because it is a throwback both in religious and political terms to the grosser lunacies of the sixteenth century.

Richard Montague

Sinn Fein follies (1989)

From the April 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although they would furiously deny any affinity with "Godless communism", Sinn Fein local councillors have developed a remarkable fondness for portraying themselves as latter day Peoples' Commissars, well versed in the theory and practice of revolutionary socialism. If, however, we ignore this self-delusion and examine the real views of the organisation (recently set down by its President. Gerry Adams, in Signposts to Independence and Socialism), it becomes clear that the Party is hopelessly and dangerously confused about the subject.

The main entry is the text of a speech delivered by him to an internal conference of Sinn Fein in 1986. This afforded Adams all the time and opportunity he needed to explain fully what his party means when it uses the term socialism, and for him to give us some idea what its implications would be. Instead, he contented himself with making only passing reference to what is supposed to underpin, in economic and social terms, the IRA's superficial "Brits Out" campaign.

This reticence of Adams to "come clean" isn't surprising. He himself admits that his party's "socialism" should be kept firmly under its hat, lest it offend the delicate dispositions of those “genuine republicans" who, while being able to stomach the wholesale slaughter of British and Irish workers in the name of Holy Ireland, are likely to develop political apoplexy should they detect that a victorious Sinn Fein might just interfere with the property rights of Irish capitalists.

Thus Adams warns:

. . . if the Republican Movement as a whole decides to style itself "Socialist Republican" this implies that there is no place in it for non-socialist republicans, or that non-socialist republicans are in some way second-rate, inferior or less genuine republicans.

He continues:

. . . if "socialism" is what is offered as the alternative, it cannot have the same popular appeal.

Elsewhere in the pamphlet Adams says of nationalism and socialism: "One without the other is useless — one without the other is impossible". Which renders all the above merely a euphemistic way of saying that Sinn Fein (being an open, principled and democratic party) should hide part of its views just in case those engaged in what it sees as useless and impossible work within the nationalist and republican movement should take umbrage. In short, Sinn Fein's much lauded "socialist principles" should be concealed and glossed over in favour of nationalist tactics.

In fact, Sinn Fein concealing their “socialism" is all to the good for it doesn't amount to anything and can only serve to confuse workers further on the subject. Behind the welter of nationalist claptrap, it is clear that they have merely fallen for the old sop of welfare state capitalism:

You must have your own government with the power to institute the political and economic policies which constitute socialism. Socialism is a definite system of society in which the main means of production, distribution and exchange are socially owned.

The only evidence Adams presents to support this baseless assertion is that this is the “classical sense of the term". In reply, we need only say there was once a "classical" proposition that the earth was flat.

In common with the rest of capitalism's half-baked Left-wing. Sinn Fein are utterly blind to the real problem. They see all evils only in the shape of private capitalism — the source of working class poverty is not to be found in the fact that we, as wage workers, are exploited by capital, but in the identity of capital's owners. Sinn Fein is concerned with the shadow of exploitation not its substance. Despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary, collected over the past century and more in every country in the world, they maintain that capital in the hands of the state performs the miraculous feat of transforming itself from the exploiter of wage labour into its servant!

At the present time large sections of industry in both the north and south of Ireland are nationalised. The Northern Ireland Electricity Service is in fact an excellent example of how Sinn Fein’s policies would work in their ideal state. Here is an industry that, unlike most state controlled concerns, actually pays its way (at the time of writing it is due to be privatised) and is highly profitable. Do the workers employed by the NIES really own any part of it? When their electric bills arrive in the post, do-they throw them in the bin safe in the knowledge that they don't have to pay for something which already belongs to them? What about those who don't work for the NIES? Is the fact that it is state owned beneficial to them?

Socialism in fact has nothing whatever to do with nationalisation, which is properly called state capitalism. Socialism is the complete negation of all forms of capitalism. It involves taking the means of production and distribution into common ownership and has no need for any means of exchange. As Marx put it as far back as 1875 in his Critique of the Gotha Programme:

Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers DO NOT EXCHANGE their products (our emphasis).

In a society based on state property, production can only take place with a view to supplying a market. The dictates of the market are the goods and services must be competitive and profitable. Competitiveness and profitability, however, are the very things which stand in the way of meeting people's needs.

It is not surprising to learn that Sinn Fein knows nothing about capitalism either. According to Adams, the Party is opposed to "big business", “multi-national investment" and "foreign interference". They see an end to these things as a necessary step towards their utopia in which the resources of Ireland

. . . are under Irish control and organised to bring maximum benefit to the people of a 32 county state in which Irish culture and the national identity are strong and confident.

The protestants of Northern Ireland are often derided, an rightly so, for their "wee Ulster" mentality. The ramblings of Gerry Adams in this pamphlet betray Sinn Fein for the "Little Irelan- ders" that they are.

Let's fantasise a moment and envisage Sinn Fein taking power in their united Irish state. What would they do about Ireland's foreign debt? Would they repudiate it on the grounds that Irish workers should not be expected to work in the interests of foreign money-lenders like the workers in "socialist Poland" currently do for western bankers? More to the point, could the self- proclaimed peoples' representatives in a Sinn Fein government repudiate the debt?

The idea is absurd! Ireland is not self-sufficient, nor will it ever be. Only a fool would suggest that a Sinn Fein government could simply repudiate all foreign debts and opt out of the world market. Unless Sinn Fein has an economic genius who has worked out a foolproof method of bartering in the world market, some of the produce of Ireland would have to be sold for capital with which to buy the produce of other countries

But there would be no markets in which to sell their goods. If Sinn Fein really thinks they are going to repudiate Ireland's debts to Germany, America, Japan, Britain, Holland and the rest, that they are going to nationalise foreign property in the shape of multi-national companies and then expect foreign governments to allow Irish goods in their markets, we repeat our assertion — Sinn Fein knows nothing about capitalism!

Sinn Fein's Socialist Republic of Ireland would be ostracised and ignored by international capitalism. So. where would the capital come from to buy the things Ireland couldn't produce itself? "We'll print it ourselves”, think the Little Irelanders, but as any economist knows, this is the sure road to real ruin. If a government resorts to the printing presses in order to buy itself out of trouble, the consequence can only be raging inflation. If a Sinn Fein government, in an effort to bolster its Mickey Mouse economy, were to circulate excess paper currency the effect would be as catastrophic as its ban on foreign investment.

As bad as things are now for workers in both the north and south of Ireland, the reality is that Sinn Fein's cure would be worse than the disease. Capitalism offers us little or nothing in the way of a decent life, but in Gerry Adams' Socialist Republic, we'd be lucky if we got our hands on a pair of matching socks — and only then, in exchange for a wheelbarrow full of Punts!

And to think, the IRA is blowing up children for this!

Murders and martyrs (1990)

From the July 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Irish Republicanism is a backward political tradition that has never had anything to offer workers in Ireland but murder and misery. It is anti-socialist in that it is a nationalist doctrine whose basic premise is that the social problems facing people in Ireland arise out of the centuries-old domination of Ireland by England and cannot be solved until the last vestige of this domination (including that of the English language) has been eradicated. Historically, it differed from the other forms of Irish nationalism in having as its goal the achievement of an Irish state with no constitutional links whatsoever with England—"the Republic"—and in its commitment to using physical force to achieve this.

Military dictators
The leaders of the IRA have always regarded themselves as the only legitimate government of the island of Ireland. This preposterous claim is based on the results in Ireland of the 1918 British General Election in which the republican party, Sinn Fein, won a majority of seats in the Irish constituencies. The Sinn Fein MPs refused to go to Westminster but met instead in Dublin and declared themselves to be the parliament of the Irish Republic that had been proclaimed in Easter 1916 by a handful of suicidal maniacs who had occupied the GPO in Dublin. The Irish Volunteers, a body of armed Nationalists that had been set up a few years previously, became the army of this Irish Republic, or IRA.

British imperialism refused to accept this unilateral declaration of independence and waged a ruthless war of repression against the IRA to try to maintain Ireland as part of the British Empire. In 1921 a Treaty was signed between the Irish Republicans and the British government under which Ireland was partitioned into two parts, one of which (six counties in the North East, mainly inhabited by pro-British protestants) remained part of Britain while the remaining 26 counties were granted independence, within the Commonwealth, as the "Irish Free State".

A section of the IRA regarded this as a betrayal by those IRA leaders who had negotiated and accepted it and pledged themselves to fight on—against the government of the Free State. After less than a year the anti-Treaty IRAers had to admit defeat and went underground, refusing to accept the Free State government as the legitimate government of Ireland and instead proclaiming this to be the Army Council of the IRA.

Despite all the splits and defections since then, this remains the position of the IRA: in their vision of Cloud Cuckoo Land Ireland is a military dictatorship under the rule of their high command. The IRA's claim to be the legitimate government of Ireland would be laughable in its conceit if it didn't lead to the IRA behaving like a real state and engaging in the killing of innocent workers as well as enemy soldiers.

It is not as if the IRA's goal had any relevance. The removal of the border between the North and the South of Ireland and the establishment of a united, all-Ireland Republic would, as a mere constitutional change, make no difference whatsoever to the problems of poverty, unemployment, bad housing, pollution and the like which confront workers, North and South, in Ireland. These problems are caused by capitalism, with its minority ownership and control of productive resources and its production for profit, and will last as long as capitalism does. Re-arranging frontiers is just as irrelevant to solving these problems as changing governments.

It has to be said, however, that if the IRA or its political wing, Sinn Fein, were to emerge as the government of any united Ireland the working class there would be in for a very bad time. The IRA/Sinn Fein record of utter contempt for democracy and their propensity to use the gun to settle political disputes and problems would make them harsh task-masters.

Fortunately, apart from a few areas in the North, the workers in Ireland show no sign of wanting to go down this rocky road. In the last all-Ireland elections to be held in which the Sinn Fein contested all seats on both sides of the border—the 1989 European elections, not the 1987 British General Election—although Sinn Fein obtained 9.2 percent of the vote in the North, on an all-Ireland basis they got less than 4 per cent, an accurate reflection of their lack of support amongst workers in Ireland and a clear rejection of their claim to have any mandate to do anything whatsoever, let alone murder, bomb and kill, on behalf of people living in Ireland.

From Republicanism to Leninism
The original Sinn Fein, set up by Arthur Griffith in 1905, was frankly pro-capitalist and anti-socialist but most later Irish Republicans took up the position that such questions were irrelevant: the first thing to do was to establish an all-Ireland Republic: everything else, including the nature of society, should be subordinated to this aim. "Let's get rid of the Brits first and then we will see".

Over the years, however, some Republicans have challenged this position and, basing themselves on some of the writings of the Irish Nationalist martyr James Connolly, have argued that the "reconquest” of Ireland from British imperialism has to involve the establishment not simply of an Irish Republic but of an "Irish Workers Republic". It was through this door that the Stalinist “Communist" Party of Ireland was at one time able to win some influence over the IRA.

In 1967 Sinn Fein adopted a "Socialist Republic” (even if the emphasis was on Republic) as its aim. By this they meant the same sort of state capitalist regime as then existed in Russia and Eastern Europe. This was part of a tendency at the time for the IRA to give more and more emphasis to political agitation rather than military operations. It was in fact the leadership's proposal to go further down this road by abandoning the traditional republican policy of abstaining from the institutions of the 26-county state in the South (regarded as an illegitimate creation of British imperialism) that led the IRA to split in 1970 into the ‘officials" and the 'provisionals'. The "provos" were mainly concerned about launching a military campaign in the North but among the accusations they levelled at the “officials" was that they were “communists", "Marxists" and “atheists". Insofar as these terms were meant to indicate that the Officials supported the state-capitalist regime in Russia and wanted to see a similar regime established in Ireland, there was some truth in the allegation. After further splits, the Officials eventually emerged as the Workers Party which has had some success in rivalling the Labour Party in the Dublin area.

The transition from Republicanism to Leninism can't have been that difficult. After all, both share the same organisational principles of a self-appointed vanguard and a military-style top-down command structure. The Workers Party, which has effectively abandoned republicanism, is also active in the North where it offers itself for working class support at all elections on a straight reformist ticket, much as the old Northern Ireland Labour Party used to. But it is no more socialist than they were and insofar as it talks of socialism it means state capitalism.

The case of Gerry Adams

Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, despite its militant "anti-communism" still lays claim to the socialist label. Gerry Adams, the darling of various leftist and Trotskyist groups in Britain, has on occasions stated his aim to be a "democratic socialist Republic". Sinn Fein's concept of "socialism", however, is so vague as to be meaningless and appears to amount to no more than a brand of social reformism perfectly compatible with the social doctrines of the Catholic Church.

In any event, Sinn Fein have no right whatsoever to associate the term "socialist" with their murderous, anti-working class policies. Fortunately for us real socialists, they appear to be going through a phase in which their socialist pretensions are being played down. We only wish they would repudiate socialism in the same clear way that they have repudiated Marxism:

  There is no Marxist influence within Sinn Fein. I know of no one in Sinn Fein who is a Marxist or who would be influenced by Marxism. (Gerry Adams, interview with Hibernia. 25 October 1979). 

  Sinn Fein, as its leadership maintains, is not a Marxist organisation, and indeed many of its members and leaders, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are committed Catholics. (Danny Morrison, Borderline, Vol 1, No 2, 1986).

These statements would be equally true if the word "socialist” is substituted for "Marxist".

Socialism is the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole human community and appeals to wage and salary workers, wherever they happen to live or have been born, to unite to end capitalism throughout the world. As such it is incompatible with, in fact actively opposed to, all forms of nationalism, British. Irish or whatever.

Adam Buick

Ireland — they died for nothing (1994)

From the December 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why should I want to go back   

To you, Ireland, my Ireland? 

The blots on the page are so black  

That they cannot be covered with shamrock. 

I hate your grandiose airs, 

Your sob-stuff, your laugh and your swagger. 

Your assumption that everyone cares,  

Who is the king of the your castle.  

Castles are out of date, 

The tide flows round the children's sandy fancy; 

Put up what flag you like, it is too late  

To save your soul with bunting.

So wrote Louis MacNeice in his finely anti-nationalist Autumn Journal. The same sentiments of contempt for the futile excitement of national folly were echoed in great plays such as Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey and The Hostage by Brendan Behan (revived recently in a superbly anarchic production by the Royal Shakespeare Company).

Now that the Ulster dust is settling and, in the words of one Irish politician, inaction is speaking louder than words, it is surely time for some reckoning to be done. Was it worth it? The bloody years of furious castle-building, which have left few castle-dwellers and no shortage of occupants for the slums and the cemeteries, were either necessary or they were in vain. Socialists say that they were pointless: that for workers to die for flags and anthems is to die for nothing.

First, the accounts — the inventory of the dead and destroyed. Before the British Left sloganise about the IRA’s heroic struggle and Bostonian bar-room rebels play remote-control murder with their pocket books, let us do a few necessary historical sums. Who has died and for what? Since the commencement of the current “troubles” in 1969 over 3,200 Northern Irish people have been killed. This is in a population of less than a million. The proportional equivalent in American terms would have been half a million political murders: ten times the number of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. 37 percent of those killed were shot directly: another 30 percent were killed in gun battles, cross-fire and ambushes; 24 percent died in bombings; just over 5 percent of the catholic dead were victims of the British army. Nearly 35,000 Northern Irish people have been victims of serious injuries, ranging from lost limbs, blindness, bullet wounds and brain damage. This amounts to almost one in fifty of the population. Since 1973 1,500 kneecappings and so-called crucifixions (being shot in the elbows as well as knees) have been carried out by the IRA and their mirror reflections in the loyalist terror gangs. Those who were so punished had no court of appeal at which to defend themselves. Many of those escaping such attacks are now in exile in Britain and elsewhere.

Barbaric inhumanity has not been the preserve of the terrorists. The British army, assisted by the RUC, and backed up by the laws designed to facilitate freedom of the state against the people, have carried out vicious beatings, strip-searches, shoot-to-kill exercises and sustained torture in their political prison camp at Long Kesh. These crimes are not inventions, but have been exposed and condemned by bodies ranging from Amnesty International to International Court of Human Rights. How many workers have been pushed into the arms of futile terror gangsterism by anger engendered by the military arrogance of the British state? It should not be forgotten that the soldiers killed while serving in Ireland, whose deaths have been counted as victories in IRA pubs from Belfast to Boston, were exclusively working-class men, usually drawn from the dole queues, often Liverpool or Glasgow catholics.

Statistics can blind their magnitude and, anyway, the prejudiced will refuse to be confused by mere facts. So let us ask some searching questions which involve times, dates and human faces, not just numbers. What liberation was served by the murder of two boys in Warrington last year when an IRA bomb ended their short lives? What defence of Irish culture was served by such reckless vandalism as the bombing of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast (a famous repository of Irish social history) or the murder some years ago of an old man whose reputation as a maker of instruments for traditional Irish musicians was destroyed when two IRA men shot him dead because he was a protestant? What freedom was being canvassed when socialists in Belfast attended a Sinn Fein meeting on the Falls Road and, after asking a question which confronted the rhetoric of nationalism with the reality of class, were threatened and forced to leave?

We socialists opposed unreservedly the broadcasting ban upon Sinn Fein and Co, but what of their ban on the right to speak out against them which has led to threats, beatings and kneecappings in the name of liberation? These are questions calling for answers; We do not expect to hear them from the Irish-American know-nothings or the slogan-chanting SWPers whose logic-defying position throughout all of this has been to give “unconditional critical support” to the IRA. But let those who have any genuine belief that blowing up workers is a means to freedom tell us how they answer these questions, or how they seek to evade the historical commitment to do so.

Message from America
During the last presidential election Clinton, in a bid to win Irish-American votes, promised to send a peace envoy to sort out the little mess in Ireland. Perhaps Ireland should have responded by offering to send Gloria Honeyford to clear up the riots in LA. The entire US involvement in Ireland has been motivated by cynical vote-seeking. When Gerry Adams was first invited to visit New York in early 1994 politicians seeking their share of the 40-million odd Irish-American votes were falling over one another to shake hands with this fascist. When Adams and Kennedy shook hands perhaps they swapped notes on their respective victims. Then Bruce Morrison, a man defeated for political office, was sent over to Belfast with Clinton’s blessing, to carve out a deal with Sinn Fein. The deal involved a promise of hundreds of millions of dollars of US capital investment in the north-east of Ireland. But what will these American capitalists be investing in? Not folk music sessions and the leprechaun-making industry, that’s for sure; they will only invest their money where there is a low-waged, disciplined workforce to be exploited.

On this recent visit to America Adams was treated as if he should be compared with Mandela. The truth is that Adams and his party, Sinn Fein, do not represent very much at all. Over 98 percent of voters in the Republic of Ireland do not vote for Sinn Fein even though they are quite free to do so, while in the north 90 percent of voters in general and 70 percent of catholics do not vote for Sinn Fein. So, the principal significance of Gerry Adams lies not in his mandate, but in his capacity to murder and mutilate.

While in the USA Adams spoke in Cleveland where one member of the audience, John O’Neil, asked him whether he regarded consent as being fundamental to any democratic political settlement and whether Sinn Fein was prepared to oppose the Irish constitutional link between church and state. Adams declined to respond to the points raised, instead offering some empty rhetoric about how the Americans were to be praised for throwing off British imperialism. (He failed to utter a word about American imperialism.) One catholic-nationalist in the audience turned to another and was heard to declare, “That fellow O’Neil must be Protestant.” “Worse than that”, was the response, “he is a Marxist!” So much for the radicalism of Sinn Fein’s US supporters.

The American government pretends to reject terrorism. Of course, they carry out legalised campaigns when they see it as being in their national interest, but they claim to oppose unofficial and unelected political killers. But with what credibility can Clinton's government rebuke armed terrorists, be they Bosnian Serbs or Libyan hijackers, when they have made it clear that the best way to obtain a hero’s welcome in the USA is to bomb your way to credibility? Who will take seriously American bleating about the nasty bombers of the World Trade Centre when Bill Clintstone's Barney Rubble, Al Gore, was televised shaking the hand of a man whose sole claim to power rests upon his association with precisely such tactics?

As ever, the myth of the New World Order rests upon the miserly economic and sordid political interests of a rich and privileged minority. The catholic and the protestant slums of Ireland north and south will never be served by such political game-playing.

The futility of Nationalism
From its inception, Irish nationalism was motivated by a kind of stupidity (“the delirium of the brave” as Yeats called it) which workers should not have touched with a barge pole, let alone a flag pole. Consider the words of nationalist nutcase and IRA hero Padraic Pearse, a leader of the Easter 1916 rebellion, who rejoiced at the sacrifice of Irish lives in the great imperialist war of 1914-18:

  Ireland has not known the exhilaration of war for over a hundred years . . . The last sixteen months have been the most glorious of Europe . . . The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for the love of country.

What benefit has any wage slave ever gained from a war grave? Even if there is to be a united Ireland, what possible gain does any worker expect to be offered by membership of a semi-clerical state in which citizenship amounts to no more than freedom to be exploited for a wage or a salary or unemployed and paid even less welfare money than is offered by the British state? This prospect might lead some fat New York catholic lawyers to dance a jig, but where will it leave the working class?

Both the IRA and the loyalist ceasefires are to be welcomed by all workers. Socialists want a situation under capitalism where we can operate to abolish the system in circumstances where bullets and bombs do not threaten us daily. But now comes the hard part. 600,000 Northern Irish protestants still think they are British and 300,000 Northern Irish catholics (give a few here or there) still think they are Irish. As long as these identifications are considered to be worth a candle there is a prospect of renewed conflict.

So, the merely negative achievement of ending the killing, much as it is to be seen as a step forward, is not where matters must rest. It is now time for workers to reach the realisation that their class identity, as used and robbed providers of profit to a supranational capitalist elite, is what really matters. To defeat this elite globally and not just in Ireland, calls for workers to exhibit the courage to transcend the identities inherited from capitalist history (Irish/British—catholic/protestant) and recognise that as workers who constitute the overwhelming majority of the population we have a world to win. It is on that basis that Irish history can proceed from the futility of national rebellion to the exciting opportunity of the social revolution by the many.

Steve Coleman

End of the long war (1994)

Editorial from the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we write, the shooting war in Northern Ireland would appear to be almost over. The relief in places like Belfast is almost palpable as people are freed from the fear of themselves or their loved ones becoming the victim of the assassin's bullet or the bomber's "mistake".

Three thousand two hundred people have died in the so-called "Long War", some 60,000 have been injured — some left limbless, some horribly disfigured, some vegetablised. The amount represented by damage to property would have provided a super home for every family in the province and vastly improved the social infrastructure — though, of course, outside of a war situation, governments would not regard spending on these essentials as being economically justified.

Who won? If winning can be defined in terms of making money, then lawyers, loss adjusters and that group of rapid-response builders who became known as the “hardboard millionaires" have had a good war. As far as the working class is concerned there were no gains whatsoever — whatever religious labels its individual members may wear.

Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein and consistent apologist for the IRA’s campaign of killing is euphoric in his ascension to the upper echelons of political chicanery. Writing in the Belfast Telegraph on 8 September, he assures us that he, and. presumably, his coalition Irish nationalists, plan a fair and democratic society for Ireland: "No privileges, no perks, no special relationships . . . (no) economic favouritism for any individual or organization".

If we thought that Adams knew what he was talking about, we would have to say he was simply telling lies. Is he seriously suggesting that he and his fellow Irish Nationalists want to create a society where there will not be a minority owning class exploiting the working class — including those workers who were foolish enough to support Sinn Fein? No privileges, perks or profits for the capitalists, the minority class who are the real owners of Ireland and who can be of any nationality or religion? Come to that, no minority class owning Ireland? Even the Unionists, who are past masters in conning working-class Protestants, wouldn’t dare to serve up that sort of rubbish.

We hope that peace, or what passes for peace in capitalist society, will reign in Ireland and that the hatreds and division which the republican and loyalist nationalists have rekindled amongst the working class will soon dissipate, and workers, wiser from their grim experiences, will lend themselves to the political struggle to end capitalism and its propensity to violence.

Still there are the dead, the maimed . . .  and, surely, the heritage of crippled minds of men and women who carried out such awful atrocities for what they believed was a just cause and who are going to learn that their cause was just a squalid conflict about the distribution of capitalism's miseries. A small addition to the nearly one hundred million people who have died in capitalism's wars this century.

If nationalism was a recognised disease, its terrible toll of human life would excite the demand for a cure.

What's it all been about? (1994)

Editorial from the March 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we write, there has been no positive response from the IRA/Sinn Fein to the Downing Street Declaration. The Declaration itself is a contradictory and meaningless example of highly polished diplomatic draughtsmanship. It is designed to act as a political sedative while allowing the politicians to vacate the hooks to which they have become inextricably fixed by earlier actions and utterances. Indeed, we could damn the document with the same comment that Thatcher applied to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, of which she was co-sponsor: "We are dealing, not with facts, but with perceptions". In other words, not with reality hut with illusions.

The leadership of the Provos, a small number of political dinosaurs ushered on to the stage of history by bigots like Paisley and the more extreme wing of Ulster Unionism, are savouring their moment of media hype. Gerry Adams paid a publicity-seeking visit to the USA. Given that he had no intelligent contribution to make, it seemed a long way to go to repeat the old nationalist shibboleths. Though the opposition to his being allowed to go exposed how relentlessly vicious Ulster Unionism continues to be when its enemies are allowed a platform.

Thousands of people have been slaughtered. Tens of thousands have been injured. Scores, if not hundreds, have had their lives disastrously downgraded by loss of limbs. Some have died from punishment shootings and hundreds of young people are suffering the after-effects of kneecappings and other grotesque forms of punishment. Thousands more have been, or are, imprisoned. In any terms that is a terrible price to pay and it is not unreasonable for us to ask what it is all for.

The only visible dividend from this catalogue of horror is a bitter, mindlessly bitter, legacy of hatred affecting the most depressed section of the working class, divided into tribal quarrels that feed on the latest atrocity. Violence as a political weapon, used by loyalist and nationalist, has only created a situation where it is difficult to discern any logical formula for future peace and stability, not only in Northern Ireland but throughout the island of Ireland.

As far as the provisional IRA activists and their politicians are concerned, their current deliberations on the Downing Street Declaration can only be concerned with their probable political fortunes if violence is removed from the political scene. Without the police Holding Centres and the thuggery of the so-called security forces and with, especially, the speedy release of all political prisoners, Provo power and influence would quickly diminish. Their very localized political effectiveness today is dependent on the same sort of discriminatory sectarian politics as the more loathsome elements of ward-healing Unionism used in the past, carried out against the sinister silhouette of the gunman. In a climate of peace, the Provos have nothing to offer.

What’s it all about? Certainly not about ending the grim economic facts that oppress political life in Northern Ireland. The British Exchequer contributes some £3.5 billion annually to keep the Province in its present impoverished position. If the Provos could force Britain to disengage from Northern Ireland, the resulting gain to the Exchequer would have a dramatic effect on the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement and the fortunes of the Major government! But in a recent opinion poll in the Republic of Ireland 71 percent said they would not be prepared to meet the per capita tax of about £1,000 per annum to subsidize Irish unity.

More than 20 percent of the people in Northern Ireland are living below the poverty line. The jobs of many of the more prosperous are underwritten by the troubles. Despite emigration, an even larger percentage of people in the Republic are on or below the poverty line. Given all this, one can only wonder at the naivete of a political movement that thinks our first priority is killing one another in order to have the postboxes a uniform colour or the pattern of the flag over the dole office changed.

Northern Ireland must surely represent a classic case study that exposes the bankruptcy of political violence as a weapon for the promotion of any cause. Together with the brutality and utter stupidity of Paisleyite bigotry, the IRA must stand as an implacable enemy of the unity it professes. And even more so of that more important, working class unity without which we can not hope to establish socialism and get rid of the evils of capitalism.

Between the Lines: Sinn Fein, Game Shows and Live Aid (1985)

The Between the Lines Column from the August 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sinn Feigners

Beatrix Campbell, in Diverse Reports (C4, 3 July), sought to portray Sinn Fein as a progressive, caring, reforming party—an image it seeks to put across to electors. It should not be surprising that a programme showed Sinn Fein's policies without constant reference to the party's support for nationalist murderers; after all, the Tory and Labour parties support national armies committed to obscene acts of violence, but this is not mentioned every time there is a programme about their policies.

And having seen the uncensored picture, what are we to conclude? Quite simply, that Sinn Fein is just another party of reformist politicians who want to run capitalism. As the party's leader Gerry Adams, said, "All we can do is  . . . achieve those very small gains by working along with the people within the system". So much for Assembly member, Danny Morrison's throwaway comment that Sinn Fein is "a revolutionary party". From Adams we heard the usual vague claims of a reformist leader: first the nationalist movement must be built up to oppose British rule, and then after the British have withdrawn and Ireland is independent there will be "the beginnings of a socialist society". What does this mean? Uncensored Adams neglected to tell us. Campbell, who is a feminist, asked Adams what the position of women would be once Ireland had achieved Home/Rome Rule; she stated that "for women this happens to be one of the most repressive cultures you can think of." But Gerry told her that her question was based on "cultural imperialism" and she, being English, should learn that Irish people are different.

At the end of the programme one was left with the clear impression of a political party based on the twin confusions of nationalist illusion and reformist promise. If there ever is a united Ireland, presided over by Sinn Fein, it will be another capitalist state and the workers living under it will detest Adams and his fellow would-be rulers as much as they do their present representatives.

Even without the terrorist violence, which socialist unequivocally condemn, there was plenty shown about Sinn Fein to justify the unreserved hostility of socialists towards them.

Money sickness

It was D. H. Lawrence who referred to "the collective money-madness of mankind",  and where better to  observe that madness than in the gambling establishments of Las Vegas. Showdown at Glitter Gulch was a documentary about the world poker championship (BBC1, 3 July)  - an event where the winner gets a million dollars. It was an obscene spectacle, all these idlers throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars on to a table while millions of workers go without a decent supper and millions more die for lack of money for food. It was not "human nature" which led these men to indulge in an insane monetary ritual — it was a social system which elevates money into the god of life and trains those with more of it than sense to invest their energies in acquiring more. A mad system drives men mad and this programme was a peep through the window of one of the top-class asylums.

The price is indignity

The same "collective money-madness", but at a cheaper rate for the proles, is The Price is Right (don't know or care when it's on). The programme succeeds in being the ultimate in tasteless money fetishism. Crowds of impoverished workers scream and throw dignity to the wind as the prospect of guessing the price of an electric carving knife turns them into human cash registers. The aim of the game is to guess how much commodities are worth and if the guess is near enough to the price you win. Game shows generally portray capitalism as its most grotesque, and the trouble with watching them is that we are supposed to applaud contestants for doing well.

Live aid

Live Aid for Africa (BBC, 13 July) demonstrated several things that it did not intend, The purpose of the concert was to raise money to stop people starving to death in Africa. Yet its effect will be minimal, negligible, crumbs thrown into an ocean of despair. What then did the event show? First of all, that workers, even when motivated by immense goodwill and collective concern, cannot solve capitalism's problems. During the course of the sixteen-hour concert British workers donated a mere £4 million in telephone pledges, less than the British Government spends on the military machine every three hours every day; less than the richest woman in Britain (the Queen( receives as interest on her personal investments in one week. Workers were 'phoning up and saying that they would sell their cars and donate their precious savings to the worthy cause — but asking the impoverished in Britain to feed the starving of Africa solves precisely nothing.

Secondly, the show demonstrated just how superficial is the moralising self-righteousness of those who do not understand the capitalist system. Periodically we would be urged — by millionaires who became rich by dressing up in fancy costumes and singing about love through sore throats — to "feed the world". But why is food dumped while people starve? Why do some people have banquets while others do not? In short, the whole event was an invitation to weep at the symptoms, and to hell with any concern about the disease. Indeed, Bob Geldof (who may be sincere, but it certainly naive to a dangerous degree) was seen repeatedly throwing his arms in the air, like a man who feels something but does not know what, and declaring that governments should "do something". In fact, governments are doing something: running capitalism and feeding the capitalists' hunger for profits.

Thirdly, the show proved just how musicians have become incapable of performing without record producers to twiddle knobs and make them sound any good. Some of the sets from Wembley and Philadelphia, presented without the benefit of studio treatment, ranged from not very good to pathetic. Demonstrated above all, however, was the power of communication technology: fourteen international satellites beamed the show to 50 million TV sets, reaching an estimated audience of 1.5 billion people. But just as this technology can unite millions of workers for a lofty, if ultimately futile, moral cause, so too can it bind them together for more sinister propaganda messages, such as those demanded for example in the build-up to war. Left in the hands of the capitalist minority the means of mass communication are a potent weapon. But used for socialist purposes, think of how the worldwide unity forged by Live Aid could be turned into an instrument for making democracy work within the global village.

Watching the show until the final performance by Bob Dylan (not an occasion worthy of the wait, as it turned out), I was struck by an overwhelming sense of depression — not just at the thought that fellow human beings are starving to death, although that is good enough reason for a sleepless night, but because all the goodwill, energy, determination and technological know-how put into "doing something about it" will not feed the world. Despite Geldof's moral crusade the obscenity of mass human misery will go on and on and on until Elvis Costello stops singing "all you need is love" and the workers realise that the world os ours for the taking. And finally the national anthem came on, and by the time it got to "Long To Reign Over Us" I was fast asleep.

Steve Coleman 

What the People in Northern Ireland got for 30 Years of Death And Destruction (2007)

Latest post from the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back

It was a great day at Stormont. The great and the good from many countries were there including the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. Centre stage, of course, were Ian Paisley, yesterday’s ‘Never-Never’ man, now grinning like death in the apocalypse, and Martin McGuinness, yesterday’s IRA commander, expensively tailored and replete with effusive grin.

The event was generally acknowledged to be the formal end of Northern’s Ireland’s infamous thirty years of internecine warfare in which nearly 4,000 people were killed and some 60/70,000 injured.

Doubtless the fare was rich and the guests ate heartily. Paisley, Adams and their followers especially may have baulked somewhat at the political menu and the public exhibition of having to eat their words - admittedly. generously marinated in personal emoluments well beyond their past dreams of fulfilment. They could all be well satisfied with the price they got for their bloodthirsty ‘principles’.

Among the less great, the voting fodder who were afforded the democratic privilege of watching the circus on television, there was cynicism and utter disbelief but undoubtedly the overwhelming majority of the people of the province looked on the spectacle with differing measures of relief. If this collection of provocateurs and proxy killers was to be endured for peace - or what passes for peace in capitalist society - they would put up with it. The more thoughtful would have scratched comfort from the realisation that its not very different elsewhere.

Paisley’s DUP and the IRA’s Sinn Fein are together in government. Sane people can only hope that the electorate put them there because it was the despicable price that had to be paid for peace - for the game was always about power - even in Mother Erin’s British subsidised Fourth Green Field.

Ironically, Paisley’s antics over the last 40 years has done more to emaciate Unionism’s power base than the IRA; conversely, Sinn Fein is now an integral part of the political structures its murder campaign was supposed to destroy.

It is reasonable to ask what the working class got in return for its suffering for the victims - the killed and the killers, the mentally and physically maimed, the prisoners - were, as always, overwhelmingly of the working class. The media clarions our reward; we are going to get peace we are told. The agencies that were making war have gone into partnership - showing once again that peace and war emanate from the same source.

Meanwhile real power will not reside in Stormont, or London, or Dublin. It will reside in the cheque books of the billionaires and the multinational consortiums whose profit considerations will decide the priorities. Ultimately it is their writ that determines how we live in latter-day capitalism - even, indeed, if we live!

Richard Montague

Is Ian Paisley a socialist?

It is not often that the business pages of the capitalist press refer to socialism. Past experience suggests that when they do they make fools of themselves. A recent article in The Times (29 January) by Tim Haines confirmed this. "Northern Ireland", he wrote, "is in danger of replacing sectarianism with socialism".

If only this were true. Unfortunately socialism (common ownership, democratic control, production for use not profit, distribution according to needs) is not on the agenda there and in any event couldn't be since socialism cannot be established just in one country let alone one province. But this is not what Hames had in mind. After pointing out that state spending represents 60 percent of all spending in Northern Ireland, he went on:

"The Rev Paisley and Mr McGuiness will find little difficulty making common cause in asking for ever larger public spending to be showered, equitably, on their constituencies".

While it is true that politics in Northern Ireland is characterised by what on the continent of Europe is known as "clientelism" - where different politicians appeal to a different group of identified "clients" on the basis of getting material benefits for them in particular – Hames is wrong in thinking government spending and subsidies on and for the poorer sections of society is socialism. If it did then the Reverend Inane Paisley, with his client basis of poor Protestants, would indeed be a socialist. An absurd conclusion which is proof that the original proposition is wrong in accordance with the principle of logic the Ancient Romans used to call reductio ad absurdum.

Government spending on measures to help the poor has nothing to do with socialism. That's reformism not socialism. At most Paisley is a reformist, even a "leftwing" reformist compared with the UK Labour Party which used to take up this position (now it cuts back on benefits for the poor).

But if Paisley isn't a socialist, what about Martin McGuiness? He actually claims to be some sort of a socialist. At the special Sinn Fein conference to discuss policing in Northern Ireland on 28 January Gerry Adams proclaimed that his party's ultimate aim was "to bring about a 32 county democratic socialist republic." But this is just rhetoric. It means no more than the utopia of an all-Ireland Irish capitalist state reformed so as to work in the interest of workers in Ireland. But capitalism doesn't, and can't be made to, work that way. It's a profit-making system that can only work in the interests of the profit-takers not those who work for a wage or a salary.

In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein is the mirror image of Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party - it is the party of politicians who see the Catholic minority there as their "clients". McGuiness is no more a socialist than Paisley. He, too, only wants reforms to help his clients, the poor Catholics. Which is why Hames is right that the two of them should be able to get along quite well together in any devolved administration of capitalism in Northern Ireland that might emerge after the elections there next month. Not that either of them will be able to deliver on their promises, though both will be able to use the same alibi: that the British State didn't give them enough money.

Adam Buick