Crooked in every direction (1996)

Book Review from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Straight Left by Paddy Devlin (Blackstaff Press, £8.95)

The vanity that induces someone to think that the public wants to know about their life is well to the fore in this autobiography. The story of a ghetto kid who saw a future in ward healing politics — which, for some undisclosed reason he associates with socialism — is told in a tidal wave of personal pronouns.

There is usually a story in the life of every working class youngster who finds diversion in cheating the reality of poverty and privation. When that life is lived in a Belfast sectarian ghetto, an extra dimension of religious bigotry and strife is added to life’s miseries which, in turn, heightens the need for those forms of escapism which Devlin’s portrayal of his formative years illustrates so well.

But bigotry is no joke and, in Northern Ireland, it frequently carries a gun or a bomb. Here it is composed of the naked viciousness of a primitive Calvinism which, while most reflected in the crude politico-religious vapourings of Paisleyism, has to some extent infiltrated all the Protestant denominations, and that particularly virulent strain of Catholicism which is essentially Irish.

Both, after the fashion of mainstream religion elsewhere, are on the march to what is effectively their end. In Northern Ireland, however, legend, tradition and very deliberately inculcated ignorance artificially respirates these evils into an ugly tribalism that represents the politics of the province. The inadequacies of capitalism, especially in housing, employment and education, act as a convenient catalyst for these malignant forces in the hands of bigots like Paisley and Adams and their religious or political fundamentalist cohorts — who. if local politics demanded any degree of intellectual integrity, would have long since been marginalised.

It is the consequences, political and economic, of this politico-religious mishmash that has formed the background to the mayhem that has given Northern Ireland a central place among the world's trouble spots over the past twenty-five years. Devlin played a central part in the events that led to the present troubles and, while he relates faithfully the bigotry and intransigence that made the Unionists into destroyers of their own cause, he fails utterly to appreciate the part which the false analysis of the Civil Rights movement contributed to the Northern Ireland tragedy.

The leaders of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NiCRA). rightly accused the Unionist government and party of maintaining a regime that discriminated against catholics in the distribution of jobs, housing and local government votes. The inevitable assumption among working class protestants was that they were privileged in these areas — which they were not — and that the demand for a fairer distribution of these needs with catholics represented a threat to their alleged protestant privileges.

Socialists see the imposition of poverty in any of its aspects (jobs, housing, education etc.) on any grounds whatsoever — even when it is given apparent legitimacy by being called ’selection’ — as a feature of capitalism. Within the ambit of that system’s production for profit ethos, scarcity is an inevitable feature. Capitalism cannot exist without poverty, without unemployment and without penalising those who, for whatever reason, do not offer the profit system the maximum surplus value.

However Devlin may protest his ’socialism’, he was at one with those in the NICRA who identified the problems in religious terms; the problems were, they argued, caused by Unionism. Certainly, corruption and maladministration resulted in the uneven distribution of capitalism’s miseries but the miseries themselves were the political and economic consequences of capitalism. Unfortunately, the NICRA analysis led to conflict on religious lines within the working class when an essential part of the solution lay in the unity of the working class.

Like many pseudo-socialists, Devlin has a recidivistic contempt for the lessons of history. The failure of good intentions, Keynesian 'magic' and reforming zeal to remove the social ugliness of capitalism should drive him to consideration of an alternative form of social organisation, such as socialism — defined as it was before its wilful perversion by earlier groups of ward healers who thought they could make a system based on exploitation of the working class function in the interests of that class. Such consideration would, of course, be an admission of failure and acknowledged failures do not write autobiographies.

If you can stand the dreadful political ignorance of someone who suggests that the SDLP is/was associated with socialism, that the Northern Ireland power-sharing Executive of 1974 is a model for the (socialist?) future and that the Workers Party is a Marxist organisation, then the rest is interesting and factually instructive about events in Northern Ireland especially since 1968.

Richard Montague

Marx's vision of the future (1983)

From the September 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Below we print a letter published in the Belfast Sunday News in reply to an article by Belfast city councillor Paddy Devlin in his weekly column.

Over the last hundred years the ideas of Karl Marx have been distorted and confused, both by those who claim to have put his theories into practice in their police state dictatorships and by those who see visions of that old anti-Marxist, Stalin, every time they attempt to criticise the views of Marx.

It is quite understandable that most workers who live in countries which do not claim to be Marxist look at the state capitalism of the so- called “Marxist world" and conclude that if that’s liberation, then its achievement would not be worth the effort.

To dismiss Marxism on the grounds that it has been tried and failed is to misunderstand the revolutionary message of Marx which, as Paddy Devlin states correctly, is to be found in his conception of history. For Marx, history is a process in which humans actively create their own conditions, doing so, at all times, within the limitations which existing economic conditions make possible. History is not given to us, like a mystery gift from above, but is made by us. History is not simply a story of the past, but a vision of the future. All historians before Marx — and too many since — believed than humans were the subjects of history, often going under the alias of God or The Invisible Hand: Marx recognised that humanity would only be liberated when it used its ability to comprehend and design history.

The revolutionary point in Marxism is its proposition that mass human consciousness (our ability to think, plan and fashion our own behaviour) can transform society. Revolution, in the Marxist sense, as opposed to the anachronistic idea of barricade insurrection, can only be enacted by those who reject being the victims of history — the millions in the dole queues, the inhabitants of the slums, those who feel threatened by the bullet or the bomb, the wage slaves who are forced to spend most of their lives creating profits for the capitalist owners of industry: it is when such people, who constitute a majority of the world population, decide to take society and make it into their own that history becomes an active, revolutionary product.

It must be apparent that there is a fundamental difference between the revolutionary conception of history advanced by Marxists and the ideologies which dominated the so-called Marxist revolutions in Russia and China. There is a diametrical opposition between Marx’s view that working class emancipation must be the democratic act of the vast majority of workers and the view of Lenin, the architect of the Bolshevik seizure of power, whose elitist view was that it would take five hundred years for the workers to be educated to understand the need for socialism, and in the meantime it was up to leaders to create history “on the workers’ behalf’. The Leninist Left has about as much confidence in the ability of workers to determine our own futures and run our own lives as Mrs Thatcher does: they are in the leadership business, calling upon their human flock to follow' them on a mystery tour into a future which looks more and more like the present the closer you get to it.

It is its call to conscious action which makes Marxism more than an academic conception of history, to be debated by those who are lost in the study of the past. It is precisely this active, vital feature of Marx’s materialist conception of history which Paddy Devlin excludes from his explanation; to do so is like trying to analyse road transport without any reference to the existence of the drivers.

Paddy Devlin’s picture of Marxism is a mechanistic one of society automatically passing through stages — of change without changers and revolutions without revolutionaries. Is this because his enthusiasm for Marxism collapses when the need for majority working class consciousness and democratic political action becomes the inevitable practical consequence of the theoretical validity of Marxist history? Could it be that Paddy Devlin, like so many others on the Left, regards the prospect of the revolution, which he theoretically recognises the need for, as being beyond the grasp of other workers?

It is not worth taking up Paddy Devlin’s claim that "the introduction of comprehensive social services and full employment by Labour" have weakened the Marxist case; to my knowledge there has never been a Labour government which has created full employment and neither can their second-rate state charity be described as comprehensive social service.

The evidence that there is still a need for Marxism is that we are living in an age of mass social discontent.

STEVE COLEMAN 

Socialist Party of Gt. Britain

Published in the Belfast newspaper, The Sunday News on 19 June.