At Home and Abroad . . . (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Review December 1971

At Home

It is impossible to sympathise with the howls of frustrated rage over the cynical semantics of the Compton report on the interrogation methods of the British in Northern Ireland. The military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph pointed out that the methods employed were also used on some British shock troops, with the idea of training them to resist pressure if they were ever captured. This was of course a poor attempt at justifying the methods used by the British but it did underline the fact that brutal interrogation is widely used, on all sides, in war. And anyone who really expected the inquiry to come up with anything other than a whitewash themselves need some sort of interrogation but on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Cynical semantics have also been used by government spokesmen about two of their most pressing problems. When he addressed the well-fed Institute of Directors at their annual conference, Chancellor of the Exchequer Barber forgot all about the mounting unemployment and claimed that we are about to experience the biggest boom for years, that the economy is expanding and that price restraint is working. Perhaps he was drunk—the directors always enjoy a good lunch, with a small bottle of wine. Shortly afterwards Barber’s colleague Peter Walker, not to be outdone, was burbling out the same stale old promises about housing which we have been hearing for so long. His new Housing Bill, he said, is the most important reform in the field this century and then, like housing ministers before him, he made the ritual promise about slums. Walker, who lives in a posh house himself, reckons that he will have cleared the slums up in ten years. There is no mitigating evidence, that he was drunk.

Abroad

Never before have the protests about Bomb tests been taken as high as those about America’s latest one underneath the island of Amchitka. If this indicates a heightening of the energy of the protesters, it also hints that their unrealistic hysteria is becoming acute. Surely they didn’t expect the Supreme Court to rule that human interests should come before those of the American ruling class? To overturn every priority, every assumption, upon which capitalism everywhere works? Perhaps in future they will realise the order of things under capitalism and then begin working against the system instead of against one of its effects.

Meanwhile, another of the world’s nuclear powers—and one where there is no opportunity to protest against its Bomb tests—was finally allowed to join the club. China’s entry into the United Nations, although a big diplomatic defeat for Nixon, showed the contempt with which the UN (which, we may remember, was once going to be the means to a securely peaceful world) is treated by the world powers. In the old days America would never have allowed such a defeat. For after all the fine words and the lies about it, the United Nations is little more than an international gangsters’ club. It is fitting that the latest recruit to the top league of international capitalism should at last be welcomed into it—bombs and all.

Politics

Despite the recent upheaval in the Labour Party over the Common Market, it was a fairly safe bet that Jenkins would beat Foot for the Deputy Leadership. Most of the press applauded the vote, as a sign that Labour is still interested in men of principle and honesty. In its present depression, Labour could do with a new hope; even the problems which the Tories are finding in trying to run British capitalism have not yet erased the memories of those six gloomy years of Labour rule. So once again we have a rising star, who is going to lead us to yet another promised land. In this one incident we have all the history of capitalist politics; promise and disillusionment, confidence and panic, hope and despair. This wearying process goes on year in and year out, with each successive leader being hailed as the answer to our problems then quickly exposed for a futile trickster. And none of them, yet, has been honest enough to admit it.

Honesty is a word very foreign to the Communist Party, whose recent national congress came well up to the expectations of those who always look to the Communists to provide some hilarious political double acts. This year, of course, they had to talk about Northern Ireland, and to hammer out a typical reformist line. They showed a touching concern for the catholic minority, then took the line that the best thing to happen was for the British troops, whose methods have been under such fire, to stay there. This was typical of the confusion and the trickery of the Communist Party, who as usual are dabbling their hands in the blood of the workers in the hope of fishing up a few miserable scraps of ignorant support.

Blogger's Note:

See the article, 'Northern Ireland: The Gentle Art of Interrogation ', from the same issue of the Socialist Standard.

Northern Ireland: The Gentle Art of Interrogation (1971)

From the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anybody living in Northern Ireland today who doubts the assertion that the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary are waging a vicious war against that section of the working class who are Catholics or who question the allegation that part of the weaponry of that war are brutality and torture can carry out his own inquiry.

There are a number of approaches.

For example, one could go into a Catholic district almost any night and linger in the vicinity of a street corner until the inevitable military patrol comes along. When one has been called a “fucking Irish pig”, or a “fenian bastard” or when one has been put against a wall and had one’s ankles or knees kicked or, even, a baton deflected off one’s testicles, one can quote “the Law”—which, along with “Order", the military are defending for one’s protection—and the consequences will complete a definite stage of one’s inquiry! It is a simple test which we would urge on marble-mouthed gentry who speak down to us from Westminster or Stormont—though, if they were to get the full benefits of such a test, it would have to be carried out incognito!

If one has escaped the needs for hospitalisation at this stage of the test, it can be carried further by indulging in some simple and minimal act of self-defence. Irrespective of one’s age or sex this is guaranteed to provoke the “security forces” into a flurry of security excitement which will ensure that in future one will have no difficulty in appreciating why so many people who, a short time ago, laughed at the military posturings of the I.R.A. are now, tragically, finding their way into its ranks.

There are, of course, no gas chambers in Ulster. Unlike the ghetto Jews in Nazi Germany, Ulster’s ghetto Catholics are not herded into gas chambers and murdered. They may be gassed in their bedrooms or living rooms but then they have the satisfaction of knowing that a group of humane medical people, acting for the British government, have said that the gas used has no long-term effects—unless, that is, the concentration is heavy, in which case permanent brain damage may result. Again, maybe, they could be disturbed by other medical opinion that asserts that inhalation of the gas does produce permanent and damaging side-effects or they could be apprehensive about the fact that the power determining the concentration of the gas is the same power that shot an unarmed man outside his own door, further up the street, last night.

One can understand the brutal reaction to taunt and provocation. One can appreciate the anger of a member of a military machine, embracing the most awesome devices for killing, to the death of comrades at the hands of amateurs who must compensate for lack of numbers and weaponry with stealth. What continues to surprise is the fact that politically ignorant members of the working class, with normal emotional appetites, can be induced into the trade of killing at all; but worse, that there can be a process whereby such men can be brutalised into a condition that allows them to engage in acts of savagery against homes that look like their own homes, women who look like their own wives and mothers, and children who look like their own kids.

When we go up the scale to the professional torturers, the mind simply boggles. Here’s one person’s reaction:

. . .  I knew I was in a torture chamber. Yet my mind could not conceive that I was living in the twentieth century . . . Surely these men could never bring themselves to torture me in cold blood. Looking around at their faces I saw neither passion nor compassion in any one of them.

The writer in question details the ensuing physical and psychological torture to which he and his fellow-prisoners were subjected:

. . . Corporal Walters had been compelled to stand to attention for over forty hours before he collapsed. Fusilier Kinne had been kicked so savagely during a beating-up in jail that he sustained a double-rupture . . . Denis’s hands were secured so far up behind his back that he had to stand on tip-toe.

The quotations are from The Edge of the Sword a book written by Lieut-General Farrar-Hockley, who recently commanded British Land Forces in Northern Ireland. The writer is describing the experiences of himself and his comrades at the hands of the Chinese and Koreans when, as Captain Farrar-Hockley, he was taken prisoner in Korea in 1951 and he digresses at length on the mere beatings and kickings meted out by his captors as well as the foul system of psychological tortures devised to break them.

It was after Korea that the British Army began to develop its own techniques for the interrogation of prisoners and the specialisation in brutality and torture devolved on men whose personality and behaviour showed aptitude for the trade. Such men were seconded from their regiments and “elevated” to the Special Air Services (SAS) where the entire curricula of known brutality was imparted to them in “schools” such as that at Bradbury Line, near Hereford. The activities of these heroes is the subject of a permanent “D” notice imposed on the British press. Apart from their employment as torturers, killers, and specialists in counter-espionage activities these worthies are sometimes employed in the business of toughening-up and brutalising ordinary troops.

Despite denials by Lord Balniel, the British Minister of State for Defence, and the protests of Lord Carrington—sometimes known in Ireland as Himmler Carrington—of SAS presence in Ulster, some Irish newspapers have given quite detailed information about the activities of SAS Unit 22 in the province. It is possible, however, that Balniel’s honesty may be vindicated in the suggestion that the SAS unit concerned got around the dilemma of plying their foulness in the UK by seconding their Ulster contingent back to their old regiments. Certainly, if they are not in Northern Ireland, there is a lot of evidence to indicate that the brutality of the army and police dealing with political detainees makes the work of the SAS superfluous!

After being given the overall I was taken outside the room and along the corridor into another room and made to stand against the wall as one is made for frisking only I was made to stretch my legs and arms as far apart as I could get them. My feet also had to be as far from the wall as possible. I was to remain in this position for at least two, and at most four, days with the hood on. I lost all track of time, but there is no doubt that 1 remained in this position for days. If I did not keep my head straight I was hit with a fist in the small of the back, the genitals, the arms. As the duration of my stance against this wall grew longer, the collapsing and falling became more frequent, until I began falling every twenty or thirty minutes.

No, we are not back to Lieut-General Farrar-Hockley and his Edge of the Sword; this time we are with a Mr. Michael Donnelly who was arrested in Ulster by Crown Forces on 9 August 1971, “on suspicion”. The extract above is from his sworn statement made eleven days later.

There are many other statements that speak of beatings and kickings, the “disorientation treatment” which involves putting a hood over a prisoner’s head and putting him in a confined space where he is subjected to a constant high-pitched or throbbing noise for days on end, the discharging of firearms, using blank cartridges, at the prisoner’s head, sexual assault, electric shocks, and the use of injections. Many of these statements are attested to by medical evidence of the victim’s condition after “treatment”, by the corroboration of other prisoners (and it is noteworthy that prisoners who did not know one another and had no chance to devise corroboration after their experiences, relate the same details), by the “disappearance” of prisoners for periods up to eleven days after arrest (during which the police, the military, and the local Home Affairs Ministry pass the buck about the prisoner’s whereabouts until he subsequently turns up in a prison hospital).

Following on the adverse publicity which the Authorities have been subjected to as a result of the well-documented revelations of torture and brutality, the Westminster government yielded to pressure and set up the inevitable inquiry. That such serious allegations should be answered by an inquiry confining examination, by its terms of reference, to a mere fraction of the total complaints, that it should be presided over by a paid British government official, that it should have no powers to compel witnesses to attend or to order the production of any records relating to the complaints, gives rise to the suggestion that it is a mere whitewashing exercise.

By the time these lines are in print the official inquiry will be complete (the complainants, predictably, boycotted it) and will have published its report. It is safe to say that while it may make scapegoats out of some minor thugs for some slight overstepping of the mark—doubtless “as a result of the regrettable circumstances of the occasion”—it will not, and could not, find the political flunkeys of capitalism guilty of the charges levelled against them. If you reflect on the effects of such a decision on the British government and its Stormont rubber-stamp you will understand what we mean!

The “Security” Chiefs themselves are revealing. As part of the general propaganda drive against the IRA which includes finding “large caches” of arms conveniently deposited on vacant lots and empty houses and killing gunmen who are carted off by their comrades and, presumably, buried secretly—despite the fact that anyone conversant with IRA tradition knows that the denial of a patriot funeral to an IRA man killed in action would be an affront that his family and comrades would regard as blasphemous — the “Security” people are now justifying the internment of men without trial by claiming that it is bringing them the necessary intelligence to take the initiative against the IRA. The proposition is worth pondering; surely if a suspect’s arrest is justified in the first place the authorities must be well satisfied that he is an IRA activist and, indeed, the claim that they are getting information from those arrested would appear to bear this out. But if there is no brutality, no torture, why do these vicious enemies of the State who must be arbitrarily incarcerated in the public interest, suddenly decide to give helpful information to the Authorities?

There are those, of course, who will claim that whatever methods are being used are justified. It is a convenient stance when one is not included among the innocent—and the Authorities have released considerable numbers of people who claim they were victims of torture and brutality after relatively short periods, showing that even in their own recognition they had “made a mistake” and have even admitted that some of those detained were victims of mistaken identity.

One can be sickened by it all; can say impotently “I must do something”. But what to do? That is the question . . . the question that chokes on emotion. On pity, on sadness, on hatred, on a blind desire to strike wildly at the perpetrators of the foulness. By all means, we must strike back at the evil but not wildly, not emotionally, not stupidly. There is no solution in wanting to strike back at the leering face of the soldier or widow the wife of the cop. Certainly violence, riots, killings, bombings etc., could decide the issue against those who use the weapons of torture and brutality. Enough deaths and destruction of property and the British government may decide that the job is not worth the candle and, if one is a Republican, one may have the joys of victory and the pleasure of imposing one’s notions of freedom on those in Northern Ireland who don’t want a Republic.

It could happen then that those who presently support the British connection in Northern Ireland could become the rebels and one could become a member of the new Irish Republican “Security” Forces—it’s even possible, and it has happened before, that one could be seconded to a British SAS “school” to learn the techniques of brutality and torture in order to put one’s talents “in the service of Ireland”.

It could happen because the material conditions that now allow it to happen here would continue to exist in the Irish Republic of one’s ambition despite the vapourings of the IRA and similarly-confused pundits regarding the establishment of “a Workers’ Socialist Republic”. It did happen when the British withdrew from the south of Ireland in 1922 and left the Irish Free State Army to deal with the unfortunate idealists who thought that among other things, freedom meant more than changing flags. It continues to happen now in the various state-capitalist “Socialist Republics” throughout the world where freedom is mortgaged for the State organisation of poverty—“Socialist Republics” established by the efforts of IRA-like idealists who were strong on the poetry of freedom and weak on the economic and political conditions required to establish it. How often does theirs become the face that leers behind the riot vizor? Theirs the finger on the executioner’s gun? Theirs the macabre brain of the torturer: Cuba . . . Russia . . . China . . . Israel . . . Egypt . . Kenya . . .

Just think of a country, any country, where a minority—a group who identify their economic privation with some common ethnic or religious distinguishing feature —resist their condition by real or alleged extra-constitutional means and there you have the Northern Ireland situation. What is happening in Northern Ireland today is happening, somewhere in the world of capitalism, every day. It is yesterday’s news from Czechoslovakia, or Aden, or Vietnam; it is today’s news from East Pakistan and Ulster; it will be tomorrow’s news from somewhere else in the crazy world where trade and profit take precedence over human beings. The news deals only with the death, the shootings, the bombings and organised barbarities. The poverty, frustration, bad housing and utter social despair that causes the eruptions rarely breaks through the veneer of religious bigotry, racial prejudice or political hatreds they have created. For poverty and human privation is not news . . . they are too general ... too mundane ... too constant a feature of capitalism.

It is only in capitalism, with its market economy and its need to deceive the overwhelming majority of those who produce wealth that the wages and money systems are essentials of production and distribution, that the material conditions for friction and violence can continue to exist. It does not matter what political party presides over the system of wages exploitation, whether it calls itself “Socialist”, “Communist”, “Republican”, “Democratic” or any other name; the capitalist system, identified by its broad masses of wage workers, its production of wealth for sale and profit and the continuing existence of poverty and want on the one hand and privilege and power on the other hand is an anachronistic foulness that cannot exist without war, violence and brutality. It is a foulness that not only deprives the great majority of the material means of a full and happy life, but degrades and brutalises people to play the role of soldiers, “freedom fighters”, gaolers, torturers and murderers.

How can we then strike back at such a system? Not surely of degrading ourselves with the same foul weapons of murder and torture simply to drive out the present administrators of the system and the flag that identifies them in order to submit to the same system under a different gang of political administrators?

It is essential that we should understand that capitalism is a world system, a world problem to which a world solution is required. Wealth today is produced by social labour from the resources of the world and the abundant evidence of those countries that have attempted to counter the effects of world capitalism by tampering with the economy at national level has demonstrated the truth of the Socialist contention that only the total abolition of capitalism as a world system can end the problems of society in general and the working class in particular. Even more, perhaps, experiments in State-capitalism, as proposed by the IRA and other political groups in Ireland, and as practiced in many countries of the world today, have shown that not only do the old miseries of poverty, etc., remain but that, faced with the disillusion and frustration of a working class that believed State ownership could solve its problems, the new regime resorts to the worst excesses of capitalism and denies its subject class access to the very political avenues essential to its emancipation.

Richard Montague

Northern Ireland after internment (1971)

From the October 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

It started on Saturday morning the 7 August, though the scene was being set with progressively accelerating vigour over the weeks and even months before then and, unknown even to his cabinet, the Northern Ireland Prime Minister had returned from London the previous week, after discussions with his political principals, with a package of political dynamite that was to be precipitously cast on the flames of Saturday’s events and create the terror of what has already become known as "Bloody Monday" — or even, according to some, the date of commencement of the Irish Civil War.

Saturday morning commenced with the British Army’s killing of a young man whose car had back-fired as he passed a military post. The killing was carried out while the young man sat in a stationary motor van at traffic lights. The moronic heroes of this latest chapter of growing military homicide issued a series of conflicting reports that did nothing to placate the growing riotous reaction and when, in the afternoon of the same day, the dead man’s workmate, who had been with him in the van, was released from a police station showing on his face and body the grim marks of brutality inflicted by the miiltary and police — attended, of course, by another casual and callous army statement to "look into the matter" another chapter of violence was opened.

Within forty-eight hours the British Military Governor, General Tuzo, unleashed his "security forces" into the Catholic slums to apprehend and intern, without evidence or trial, people whom, for one reason or another, had earned the hatred of the political gangsters running the Northern Ireland statelet. It would be easy to believe that some of those arrested were IRA activists; some were simply members of the Civil Rights Movement and spokesmen for the ghetto Catholics while others were members of the Peoples’ Democracy — a "left-wing" political group whose spokesmen, including some of those arrested, have repeatedly pledged themselves to non-violent action and, indeed, have many times taken issue with the militant Republicans on the question of violence.

The move to intern without trial, involving all the old devices of beating and terror plus a few of the more recent sophisticated ploys developed by the Americans in Vietnam, was obviously aimed not simply at the IRA but at all opposition groups in Northern Ireland. The openly brutal methods of arrest and torture were calculated not only to "punish" those arrested but to terrify those who were not and no one who has subsequently visited the areas where the terror was carried out, and watched and listened to the officer-encouraged arrogance of the soldiers can be left in much doubt that the military have been instructed to see that "law and order" is enforced, if necessary with the boot, the club, the torture chamber and the bullet.

"Bloody Monday" commenced a week that will become a historical milestone in Northern Irish affairs. To those doubting the character of the man, it revealed Brian Faulkner as a power-maniac prepared to unleash the most terrible violence and murder in order to placate the Brutus’s of his own party so that he would not follow the inglorious Ceasars of the last two years. It gave evidence sufficient to indict the British Army’s "supremo", General Tuzo, and his command of many of the vilenesses that occupied and still does, the War Crimes Commission. It exposed the military baloney of the IRA. It showed the hierarchy of the Protestant churches defending the most vicious assaults on their Catholic neighbours — while the Catholic cardinal blethered innocuously! Politically it broke any last hope that Northern Ireland might, some time in the future, be capable of civil government by the Unionists. Finally, and most importantly, it wrote a lesson for the working class; it said "Stop! Look! Think!”

The situation lends itself to the heady patriotic prose that is the stock-in-trade of revolutionary romantics; it creates the background for vitriolic bitterness and dreams of revenge; in its intricacies, it is food for the analytical journalists and “experts”; in its totality it is sadness, tragedy and despair for the working class who are again called upon to offer their dead, their slums, their days of wretched living, for the cause of a Unionist Ulster or a United Ireland.

The question “Why” must not be asked — even of our fellow members of the working class. It is a treason easily adduced from the ravage and conflict by either ’‘side” of the politico-religious divide. Only the struggle, the bitterness, the prayers for revenge are relevant! ‘‘A Fenian burnt out . . .!” ‘‘A fucking soldier got it! ” . . . “We knocked the shit out of them!” But Why? Why? Why? . . . Always the same group answers: “We were burnt out!” . . . “The bastards shot one of our chaps!” . . . "They knocked the shit out of us!”

If we were preaching religion we should perhaps say, and maybe with less inhibition than those preaching religion, “Look, we all have this in common . . .” and use the rhetoric of Shylock to prove that misery, grief and tears, like happiness, love and joy are common to all men — but that has been said from a million pulpits to a thousand wars and there is no record of it ever having retarded the armament industry.

If we were mere politicians we should promise a wholly subdued Unionist Ulster or, perhaps, an “Ulster” where the unionist is written with a small “u” and administration undertaken by a political concoction of orange and green, or, again, we might offer you an “Ulster that is a Province in a ‘Workers’ Republic’, “where the State became the principal employer — but these schemes, like the prayers, have all been tried, here or elsewhere, by myriad politicians in a hundred states and there is no evidence of any of them ending poverty, slumdom, insecurity and violence.

So let’s look again at the Northern Ireland problem. Let’s see if we could wave a magic political wand and bring about conditions in which our particular problem of violence would not exist. Better still, let’s examine the social topography, so to speak, of violence; see where we find it and, equally important, where we don’t find it.

Where are the richest recruiting areas of the battalions of IRA, UVF, Paisleyite militants, etc? Not Belfast’s Malone Road, to be sure! Not even the comfortable semi-“D’s” of better-off workers with above-average wages and a modicum of job security. To be sure, they may be affected with the current hatreds but their bigotries, like their family scandals, are rarely publicly displayed. Like the master class, who they ape, they don’t put out flags or bunting to commemorate some garbled version of history. Theirs might be some indefinite pandering to some shade of orange or green but it comes low in their order of priorities; below “getting on”, having the kids “educated” or the garden tidy. It might reach the level of the Protestant Telegraph or the United Irishman but only in the concealment of the Newsletter or The Irish Times. Never does it achieve a vigour that necessitates the rumble of armoured cars and raucousness of ill-kempt soldiery.

The “extremists” come from the slums; from the back-to-back houses of the Falls, the Shankill, Ballymacarrett and all the other areas of miserable existence whose names have become “Hill 60’s” in the present struggle. They come, too, from the estates of “working class dwellings” where food, clothing and peace of mind are mortgaged for the frugal comforts of electric heaters, Great Universal shoddiness and Woolworth culture. And they come from the small farms where the age-old problems of bare existence are accentuated by the progress of agricultural capitalism.

These are the addresses of the political “extremists”, the felons, the internees and the rioters. This is the geography of misery where live and die, the victims of a rottenness that now condemns them.

While Unionism can be blamed for facilitating the easy identification of capitalism’s problems with religious bigotry, it certainly can not be blamed for the fact that, like all the other political parties throughout the world, it has failed to eliminate, or even make tolerable, the basic poverty features of the system and, in the Northern Ireland context, provide the social and economic conditions conducive to peace and community harmony. Given the fact that the system of social organisation operating in Northern Ireland is capitalism, and allowing for the competitive disadvantages of local geography and lack of indigenous raw materials, the record of the Unionist Party was as good, or as bad, as most other parties operating capitalism elsewhere and certainly no worse than the “Republican” capitalism of the south of Ireland.

The big question now is, what is to be done? Obviously British capitalism, already subsidising Unionism to the tune of some £200 million annually, will not be prepared to increase that subsidy with the presence of thousands of troops indefinitely and, with the mounting casualties among British servicement, an already-unpopular British government must fear the back-lash of British public opinion. Again, local capitalism, an immediate casualty of the conflict, is becoming increasingly anxious for peace.

Sooner or later the politicians will get around the table to work out a “political solution”; yesterday’s angry words will be forgotten, today’s “unacceptable” will become “reasonable compromises”, undertakings will be given and received, smiling photographs will be taken, peace will be restored and the workers will go back to work or to the dole.

If it stops murder, arson and intimidation it will, of course be good and the politicians will not be slow to take credit for ending what they, and the system they serve, began. But beyond that, as far as the working class are concerned, what will it all mean?

Only the establishment of a society in which the productive resources are owned in common by all and harnessed to the function of producing an abundance of the material requirements of a full and happy life for all, will eliminate finally and for ever the material basis of conflict and social discontent among people. Essentially, such a condition must be world-wide but the promotion of its need among the working class in Northern Ireland now reveals the hollowness of those conflicts to which workers presently lend themselves and speeds the day of its universal application.

The “practical” men of politics will, of course, say “It doesn’t do anything about the situation we now find ourselves in”. Such “practical” men have always been looking for a quick patch-up answer to rescue us from the repetitive problems of capitalism and capitalism keeps them constantly supplied with problems requiring “immediate" solutions! In Northern Ireland it is painfully obvious — and this is sometimes alleged by enemies of Unionism and sometimes offered as an excuse by Unionism — that it is the shortcomings of the system, and the system is capitalism, — the poverty, slums, joblessness, etc. — that forms the basis of friction and fratracidal strife. The actuality of violence, on the other hand, is provided by the programmes and schemes of the “practical” men with ideas for planning capitalism — and capitalism is production for the market and the wages and money systems whether ownership is vested in individuals or the national state — in such a way as will make that system run contrary to its nature.

To such “practical” men we have nothing to say; we would not attempt to tempt them away from the reality or the promise of privilege and political office with a vision of a world where the “Northern Ireland Problem” could not exist. To the working class we say: the schemes of the politicians and the generals, real and imagined, are irrelevant; they contain nothing new; they are but the old failed notion that capitalism administered by the “right” people can function in the interests of all — each, of course in "his station” — or the newer, but equally failed, notion that capitalism, despite its production for profit motive, its wages exploitation and money trick, can be tolerable under the direct aegis of the national State.

Richard Montague