Notes by the Way: Indian Offer to Occupy Belfast (1935)

The Notes by the Way Column from the August 1935 issue of the Socialist Standard

Indian Offer to Occupy Belfast

It is often urged in defence of the British occupation of India that the Indians are unable to keep the peace among themselves. Hindoos, Sikhs, and Mohammedans are sometimes on such bad terms with each other about religious and other differences that riots occur and lives are lost. The British authorities then step in and try to keep the peace. This is all very well, but what are the Indians supposed to think about the recurrent riots in Belfast, where Protestants are now refusing to work alongside Catholics, demand the dismissal of the latter, and mob those who do not at once clear out. Several lives have been lost, and many persons have been injured. Troops had to be called out to patrol the streets.

We are waiting to hear that the Indian National Congress has offered to occupy and pacify Belfast.

Irish Gentility

Southern Ireland also is determined not to be out of the picture, and with fierce conflicts between the police, farmers' mothers, wives, and daughters at Cork, is establishing its right to be regarded as a civilised nation. The following is taken from a report by the Cork correspondent of The Times (July 13th) of riots between farmers’ wives, mothers and daughters and the police, when an attempt was being made to sell up farmers' stock for payment of land annuities to De Valera’s Government: —

Some of the women were black and blue with the handling they got. They were driven back time after time, but re-formed in massed formation and charged the police. They captured helmets and caps, and brought them back as trophies. Then they threw them back to the police, charged again, and recaptured . them. The women had a banner, which was taken by the police; but the women recaptured it. Women were sent staggering with punches. Eight women were taken inside the gates under arrest, and the battle subsided for ten minutes or so. Women reinforcements arrived with baskets of eggs and the police were bespattered from head to foot. There was a baton charge and the women cleared away, but not before some were injured.

Mr. De Valera, who is unable to prevent these riots in Southern Ireland, nevertheless, accuses the English Government of being responsible for the riots in Belfast!

The Boll-Weevil Problem

The Boll-Weevil is a pest which attacks and destroys cotton crops. The United States Government, in accordance with the vicious nonsense which masquerades as economics in capitalist circles, is also engaged in destroying or, rather, restricting the cultivation of cotton in order to keep the price up. The same Government employs a large body of men to help kill the boll-weevil, and large sums of money are spent killing it with calcium arsenate. A correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (July 17th) says that people in the cotton areas are asking : “Why kill bugs and at the same time resort to artificial means for crop reduction?” The Manchester Guardian answers the question by pointing out that the individual grower may want the total output of cotton restricted, but wants his own crop preserved. That is so, but whichever way the situation is regarded, it is a splendid example of the shocking lunacy of capitalism.

Who said That?

Students of politics and politicians can guess who said:—

We are leaving no stone unturned gradually to raise the workers’ standard of living. (Times, July 1st.)

You will rightly answer that it is a record played on all die capitalist gramophones, from Tokyo to Montreal, and from Pole to Pole. Actually, these words were used by one of the latecomers, Hitler's right-hand man, Dr. Goebbels. Anyone who still had any lingering suspicion that the Nazis might try to do something for the German workers must, in face of these words, now know that they will do nothing whatever.

The Excuse for Fascism and Nazism

The Nazis in Germany came to power partly through the clever exploitation of a supposed Bolshevik danger. The man who taught them this trick, Benito Mussolini, has admitted (according to Mr. Wickham Steed Observer, June 30th), that his similar story about Italy was utterly false. 

On July 2nd, 1921, Mussolini wrote an article in the Popolo d'Italia containing the passage: —

To say that a Bolshevik danger still exists in Italy means taking base fears for reality. Bolshevism is overthrown.

Mussolini then proceeded to work up a panic about this non-existent danger, as a means of gaining power. When, later on, his attention was called to his double-faced attitude, he replied: —

What I wrote then was true, but it is also true that I climbed into power on the shoulders of those who thought there was a Bolshevik danger.

It is always a sound policy to be suspicious of a known bandit who implores you to let him protect you from some danger supposed to be threatening you.

The Industrial Research Racket

Employers have always been interested in the discovery of ways of reducing the amount of labour required to produce each unit of the product in which they are interested. They have also always considered it useful to obscure their motive —the search for additional profits—with talk of workers’ welfare. Nowadays in the most highly industrialised nations, the whole process has been organised in Governmental and private bodies, which profess to be interested in the scientific study of labour processes, the relationship between hours and conditions of work, and the functions of the human body, and the suitability of the individual worker for particular kinds of work.

Whatever may be the intentions of the individuals responsible for these organisations, and whatever incidental increase of knowledge may result from their efforts, such bodies, in the lump, are absolutely fraudulent. Because industry is controlled by the capitalists and their agents, and operated for profit, these industrial research organisations are only called in by the employer to serve some need of his. The claim of independence and neutrality as between employer and employed is a hollow one. There is a simple test. Let any of these organisations give a single instance of the workers in a factory being allowed to call in research experts to examine the competence, suitability, intelligence, etc., of the directors and shareholders of the company, and their claim to the fees and dividends they receive. This never happens because the object of such investigations is not and cannot be, under capitalism, a disinterested search for truth, it must always be directed to promoting the interests of the profit-seeking class, who own and control.

Evidence of Returning Prosperity

Under the above heading the Daily Telegraph (July 25th) describes how “The prosperity tide is flowing strongly again.” Elsewhere in the same issue are the latest figures of the number of persons receiving poor relief. In England and Wales on January 1st of this year the number was 1,472,891, an increase of 70,166 over January, 1934. The prewar figure (January 1st, 1914) was 761,578. (See Statistical Abstract, 1935, p. 83.)

Looking at profits instead of pauperism there is more justification for the Daily Telegraph's view. The Economist's index of profits shows a continuous and substantial increase each quarter since the end of 1933. 694 companies, which published their reports during the quarter ended June 30th, showed total net profits (after payment of debenture interest, etc.) of £80 millions, and paid an average of 6.7 per cent. on their ordinary shares (Economist, July 13th).

Progress or Only Promises?

Lord Trent, head of Boots, the Chemists, addressing the Royal Sanitary Institute Health Congress, at Bournemouth, on July 18th (see report in Times, July 19th), said some sound things about the conditions of working-class life, marred, however by a quite unfounded optimism. He said that “the practice prevailing last century” was that “of treating labour as a commodity by hiring in the cheapest market and casting aside when done with.” No one will dispute that. His second claim was that ”there existed in this country a growing body of employers . . . who held very definitely the view that there was an obligation upon them to give their employees the widest possible opportunities for making the best of their lives.” He then went on to say that the above obligation “involved a very considerable departure from the practice prevailing last century.” This brings us to the important question whether in truth the present practice is any different from that of a century ago. Granting for the sake of argument that employers hold the view attributed to them, can it be said that it makes any difference to their conduct? If Lord Trent thinks it does will he explain how it is that we have seen during the past crisis three millions of workers cast aside by employers who no longer wanted them?

Either the employers have not changed their hearts or, if they have, capitalism has prevented them from giving expression to the change by treating the workers differently. In either case Lord Trent’s assumption that capitalism will remedy the workers’ problems is shown to be unjustified.

Major Douglas’s Little Joke

When Major Douglas and other Social Credit illusionists are asked why it is that banks pay such small dividends compared with the more profitable of the industrial and commercial concerns, seeing that, according to Douglas, they have the power to ”create credit” without limit, and thus make profits of hundreds per cent., their reply is that the banks pay moderate dividends for "reasons of policy, ” for fear of attracting too much attention.” (See Social Credit, 1933 Edition, p. 157.)

In 1935 (see Times, July 25th), five overseas banks paid no dividend at all, and numbers paid 2 per cent., 3 per cent., and other small amounts up to 10 per cent. It is highly diverting to be told by Major Douglas that bank shareholders, "for fear of attracting too much attention,” rest content with no dividends at all, while Great Universal Stores pays 45 per cent., Beecham’s Pills 27½ per cent., Prices, Tailors, 65 per cent, (they own "The 50/- Tailors ”), Eastwood Flettons 166⅔ cent., Woolworth’s 70 per cent., and the Insurance Companies from 25 per cent. to 100 per cent.

Major Douglas had better think up some more plausible argument—or, better still—scrap the great superstition about “credit creation” and start studying the subject.

Edgar Hardcastle

Capitalism's code of killing (1993)

From the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism has always maintained the mythology of the ’just war’, and the church has always been the leading standard bearer for state-sanctioned murder.

It’s not all that long ago since boys’ adventure stories were about swashbuckling heroes meeting in battle on more-or-less equal terms. Raphael Sabbatini's Captain Blood or Maurice Walsh’s David Gordon were fairly typical of the type: brave men opposing one another with courage and resolution and a determination not to take unfair advantage in battle.

Such romantic nonsense is out of place against the background of modern weaponry that denies the killer the agony of watching his victim die. War was never romantic nor "fair"; individual hand-to-hand combat with pikes, lances or swords must have been hell and the science of gaining an unfair advantage over an opponent, then as now. was known as strategy.

Because war and preparation for war is a permanent feature of capitalism that accounts for massive investments of personnel and finance and because it is an utterly foul business, governments are obliged to "respectabilize” it. Thus, something of the old romanticism prevails in what is offered as history. In every' walk of life, parents, schools, churches, participation in war is elevated in the public consciousness and emotive key words, like bravery, heroism, sacrifice, dedicated, proud and patriotic are part of the lexicon of glorification used to transmute the most utterly debased acts of human savagery into something necessary and noble.

Even the "enemy" is not completely damned lest condemnation provoke interest and enquiry. His leaders can be mad or bad and his courage, dignity and honour can rarely be accepted as on a level with "our boys". Nevertheless, there is a decorum that embellishes the obscenity of war. almost a mystique to lighten the haunting futility of death and this can be extended to the enemy.

Thus, it is expected that "we" and our "enemy" will reciprocate in showing a respect to corpses that must be denied to the living. The Luftwaffe pilot shot down while slaughtering women and children in London, the RAF man show down over Dresden while carrying out Churchill’s plan to kill as many German civilians as possible, the hyped-up John Wayne dropping a 2.000kg bomb on a Baghdad street, the heroes who made history at Hiroshima; if, in death, any of these falls into the hands of "the enemy", then they will be accorded the ritual firing of rifles and blowing of bugles over their graves. The exercise gives dignity to those who work at killing and promotes the notion that they died bravely in pursuit of a noble calling.

Appalling reality

But, in the reality of war. battles are won by the gaining of unfair advantage. Obviously, a completely fair fight could have no winner and it is, thus, imperative to the opposing sides to deceive their opponent and. where possible, to introduce weapons of greater destructive capacity and to amass greater concentrations of men and materials.

Spying, with its underscore of lies, deceit, blackmail and, not infrequently, murder, is a legitimate adjunct of war; striking at the enemy’s homeland and slaughtering innocent civilians demoralizes the enemy, impedes his movement and his production of munitions and is, therefore, condoned on the grounds of saving lives. The watchword in war must be "Victory!", untrammelled and uncompromised by considerations of everyday moral rectitude. The Roman Catholic church articulates the provisions for waging a "just war" and one of these stipulates a favourable chance of winning. In common with other bodies, the churches deplore war but lend their services to succour the participants and, often, to plead with their god for the vanquishing of "the enemy".

It is remarkable that decent people who deplore violence and who might be in the forefront of those demanding stiffer sentences and the return of the death penalty for people engaged in violence are often the most vociferous supporters of armed forces and patriotic aggression. How can any rational human being defend the idea of training great masses of people to kill and arming them with guns, bombs, nuclear weapons and the rest of the obscene array destructive equipment that governments provide for the killing business?

The answer we get from apologists for state violence is that it is made necessary by the nature of our society and the fact that our potential enemies have armed forces. The latter simply acknowledges that the effect lies in the cause — because there are armed forces, we must get armed conflict. Pressed, then, to consider an alternative form of society that will not contain the seeds of conflict, these apologists are usually revealed as the most trenchant defenders of the present system.

But there are other aspects of the killing business that create a real dilemma for the upholders of the political and economic status quo with its competition and built-in propensity for conflict and war. Among these is the problem of political terrorism.

In Northern Ireland, for example, people like Archbishop Eames of the Church of Ireland frequently grab headlines with condemnations of terrorists. There are many other churchmen, politicians and others who echo Eames’s sentiments and we name him only because he is the most forceful and frequent person to condemn violence. Like the others. Eames does not condemn all violence or dissociate his church from bodies established and maintained to excel in the use of the most calculatingly efficient means of inflicting death and injury.

Forthrightly and correctly — he condemns the terrorist who leaves a bomb in a hold-all in a public place; he condemns the gunman and his organization and he argues that such behaviour is anti-Christian and that, despite the claims of loyalist killers, they are not acting for the Protestant community.

But Archbishop Eames has yet to go on record condemning governments for having armed forces, he does not condemn gunmen acting for the state and he is silent when a massive bomb is dropped on a city by a sophisticated flying machine using the most advanced technology to conceal its presence and its purpose, and, of course. Eames does not tell members of the state armed forces that their behaviour is anti-Christian.

Psychological scars

In fact the Archbishop, like his competitor colleagues in the other churches and, indeed, most of those in the forefront of the various well-intentioned peace groups, is not opposed to violence and killing. He may be moved to sadness by the lunacy of human beings killing human beings but he only condemns and disowns such behaviour when it is illegal.

Effectively, this reduces the Christian — and, it must be said, the general — concept of so-called moral reasoning to the politics of the head count and this, in turn, must raise very serious questions about the nature of capitalist democracy and the manipulation of "public opinion" by a minority-controlled public power of persuasion.

The question is particularly crucial for those of us who live in Northern Ireland, where the violence which spawned the ruthless Provisional IRA was initialed by a repressive elected government some twenty-five years ago. Now. with violence an everyday occurrence and selective condemnations ritualized by, among others, the very people whose behaviour and political ambition made it inevitable, the hypocritical utterances of people with a ready recourse to a microphone or TV camera can itself fuel violence.

Random killing

Recently, with an upsurge in the random killing of catholics by groups of loyalists operating under various fine sounding titles, a new strain of hypocrisy has emerged — from Sinn Fein, who articulate the political thinking of the IRA. According to this source, killing people because of their job or their overt political altitudes is a legitimate pursuit. On the other hand, if protestant terrorists, in order to exert political pressure, identify their targets on the basis of perceived religion, that is breaking the rules and must, therefore, be evil.

But is it? If you can departmentalize your thinking of the question you might conclude that killing someone is deplorable but sometimes necessary and proper providing the killing is within the confines of a particular code. But who determines the nature of the code and on what basis is it justified? Who is it says that it is permissible to kill perhaps millions of people in another country with a nuclear bomb because that country, or the authority within it that controls armed force, is threatening "our" markets, trade routes or sources of raw materials but it is wrong to kill people who represent an authority that abuses you or unfairly frustrates your political aspirations?

In the ease of the Provisional IRA, apart from the spurious claim to the democratic succession of Sinn Fein’s 1918 all-Ireland electoral victory, the historical morality of violence is often advanced, it is true, of course, that most states owe their existence and their power to the violence, often illegal violence, by which they were established. The "morality" of that argument is that violence is the justification of violence.

Special condemnation

As for preserving a social condemnation for the random killings carried out by loyalist gunmen, it might be asked by what logic it is permissible to shoot a bricklayer because the only way he can make a living is by selling his skills to "the enemy" but wrong to kill at random in order to frustrate a perceived harmful political design.

This is a part of the maze of contradictions you get into when you accept violence at any level. Nor can the question be resolved legalistically for, in every case, the lawful executive is itself not only an agent, real or potential. of the most ruthless violence but. in its role as what Marx referred to as "the executive committee of the ruling class". "Lawful government" is the constant agent of the many other forms of, frequently obscene, violence perpetrated on the working class.

Condemn all violence

Socialists condemn all wars and all political violence. That might seem a simplistic way of avoiding comparisons and condemnations of one form of violence as opposed to another. But it is not a simplistic formula; it is the inescapable logic of the fact that while members of the working class are pitched against one another in wars and so-called national liberation struggles, working class interests are never at stake.

All wars and violent political struggles arise directly or indirectly out of the competition and conflicts of capitalism though such conflicts are usually filtered through an ideological disguise in order to conceal their nature and as a means of enlisting working-class support.

The only struggle that concerns socialists and should concern the working class is the class struggle — the struggle between those who produce all wealth and own virtually none and those who produce nothing and own virtually everything. That struggle, we hold, can be resolved democratically when we have divested ourselves of the fictions that allow us to be enlisted as killers.

Richard Montague

Northern Ireland: Back to power-sharing (2007)

From the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

What thirty years of death and destruction in Northern Ireland brought?

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 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.

Who better to end conflict than those who had created it? It was the First Minister in this new legislature, Ian Paisley, then a clergyman in a church of his own invention and busily engaged translating biblical inanities into mantras of political hatred, who was the principal architect of conflict for the last forty-five years.

If he had reason to hate the traditional IRA it might have been because they had publicly renounced armed struggle in 1962, thus threatening the political fabric of an Orange hegemony which was based on the threat of the IRA. Paisley’s religion and its associated politics were nourished by hatred of catholic nationalism and official Unionism’s updated response to the new political climate harboured the promise of a peace that would leave Paisleyism – the brand of bigotry that bore his name – redundant.

Ironically, Paisley’s anger at the threat of peace was shared by those republicans who abandoned the new pragmatic IRA; effectively, those on the catholic republican side who mirrored the hate politics of Paisley and his cohorts.

First killings

When the first shots and explosions in the Northern Ireland conflict occurred the Provisional IRA did not exist. On the 27 May 1966 a three-man gang of protestant paramilitaries went into the catholic Falls Road area with the intention of assassinating a well-known republican. They missed their target but they availed of the opportunity to shoot and kill a drunken catholic called John Scullion.

The circumstances of the second killing demonstrates that, despite Paisley’s bigoted ranting, inter-denomination movement in the Belfast ghetto districts had not yet reached crisis point. At 2 a.m. on Sunday 26 June 1966 four young catholics felt safe enough to go for an after-hours drink in a hard-line protestant area when they were attacked by loyalist killers; three were shot, one fatally. Later the police arrested and charged three members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).

Thereafter politico-religious zealots, some directly associated with Paisley, carried out explosions at four reservoirs serving Belfast and a member of Paisley’s religious sect was killed by his own bomb while attempting to blow up an electricity generating station in Ballyshannon, in the Republic of Ireland. Paisley’s close associate and fellow director of the Puritan Printing Company – who, incidentally, stood as a Protestant Action candidate against the World Socialist Party in the late 50s – was convicted on explosives charges.

By now the touch-paper of violence had been well and truly lit. The Unionist Prime Minister at the time, the condescending Captain Terence O’Neill, and several subsequent Unionist Prime Ministers tried to take the heat out of the situation with puny reforms limited by the spectre of a bellowing Paisley demanding their political heads for ‘selling out the protestant people’ but the mass torching of homes had become a grim nightly diversion of the lumpen proletariat on both ‘sides’ . The sectarian police force was overwhelmed and the British Labour government, that had allowed the pot to boil over the years, sent in the army.

Another terror element

This was the period of the so-called Cold War and in the higher echelons of the British army there were those who adhered to the ‘Eastern School’ of military strategists. Their thesis was based on the notion that the balance of terror represented by nuclear warfare made conflict between the two major power blocs improbable. Instead, ‘the enemy’ would make war by proxy, exploiting areas of local conflict and potential conflict.

The main protagonist of this doctrine was Brigadier Frank Kitson, then a senior officer serving with the British forces in Northern Ireland and responsible for key elements of army strategy. Kitson had served in Aden where the practice of army sponsored gang-and-counter-gang operations had been operated unsuccessfully against the two opposing nationalist forces fighting the British there. The evidence of collusion in sectarian killings levelled against the army over the years in Northern Ireland are consistent with the working of such a policy.

The entry of the British army brought another element of terror into the Northern Ireland conflict. Not only was the army bereft of any ultimate political objective, it was heavily influenced by some officers who perceived a local conflict in absurdly wider terms, and, despite the evidence of then current happenings, its intelligence base was that of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), a notoriously anti-nationalist paramilitary police force.

The IRA (later called the Official IRA), wanted no part in a sectarian war and to its credit initially refused to release weapons to its Belfast and Derry members to use against protestant workers who were loyalists. In the wings a small group of republicans were endeavouring to create a movement that would offer armed resistance to loyalists. Their efforts were sustained by the bigoted posturing and naked aggression of Paisley, the partiality of the RUC, and the crass stupidity of the military strategists.

In July 1970 the army put a ring of steel around part of a nationalist area in west Belfast, declared a curfew, brutally confined people to their homes and killed four civilians. The curfew lasted over the week-end during which houses were systematically searched . On the Monday the media showed the destruction the troops had wrought. That destruction could be said to be the birth pangs of the Provisional IRA; the republican sectarians now had an army and a surfeit of recruits.

It would be naive to believe that the reckless move on the part of the army – a move which could only give emotional muscle to those promoting a return to militant republicanism – was an act of military stupidity, but in the background there were events which explain why the London government, which, as always, were the puppet masters of the generals, permitted the move.

The previous month had seen the return of the Tories – the Conservative and Unionist Party – to power in Britain. This gave the Ulster Unionists – the Tories’ political cousins – a more sympathetic ear at Westminster and in Northern Ireland the Ulster Unionist Prime Minister, James Chichester Clarke, was in serious trouble and inevitably Ian Paisley was prominent among those creating that trouble.

Go, so I can take your place

Paisley had led a strident crusade against Clarke’s predecessor, Terence O’Neill, because O’Neill had shown a willingness to remove some of the notoriously undemocratic practices used to consolidate Unionist political hegemony; practices which affected the working class in general but which catholic nationalist leaders nourished as purely anti-catholic grievances.

Paisley had raised the slogan ‘O’Neill Must Go!’ and it found sufficient response among the backwoodsmen of the Unionist Party to force O’Neill’s resignation. Now his slogan was ‘Clarke Must Go!’ The legend for Clarke’s proposed exit was because the writ of the sectarian Unionist Party did not run in some nationalist areas of Belfast and Derry. Again, Paisley’s activities were causing tremors within the Unionist Party whose Standing Committee was summoned to debate Clarke’s fate. Five days before that debate was scheduled to take place the army carried out its ruthless attack temporarily removing the sting from the Paisley threat.

Others who took on the Prime Ministerial role and later the role of First Minister had to ‘Go! before the present incumbent – Paisley – got the job.

By now, of course, the Provisional IRA’s murder campaign was in full swing endorsed by the notion that they were fighting a war to drive out the Brits but inexorably they were drawn into tit-for-tat sectarian killing. Additionally, they murdered catholics and protestants in any way tenuously associated with the British administration – numerous in an economy where public money underwrote some 60 percent of all jobs. Especially ruthless and cowardly, the Provisionals forced non-combatants to fight their dirty war by forcing them by threat to themselves or their families to deliver bombs to determined targets.

The IRA and the protestant paramilitary gangs as well as the duplicitous ‘security’ forces were killing people with military ordinance. Paisley brought death and disorder by threats and phantom battalions of red-bereted ‘defenders’ and midnight squadrons of men waving their government-issued firearms certificates.

Now 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 have 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

Northern Ireland: Unite for Socialism! (1973)

From the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Northern Ireland — with its street riots, its shootings, its bombings, its political prisoners — is but one of world capitalism’s trouble spots. What has been happening there is only exceptional compared with life in capitalist Britain. On a world scale it is normal. Somewhere, sometime innocent people are always being killed by the forces of Law and Order or by the terrorist activities of their self-appointed “liberators”. If it’s not Northern Ireland, it’s Cyprus. If it’s not Cyprus, it’s Algeria. If it’s not Algeria, it’s Palestine … or India or Vietnam or South Africa. The only difference is that Northern Ireland is a lot nearer home.

Violence is never far below the surface of capitalism, even in comparatively peaceful areas like Britain. The instutionalised violence of the State exists to protect the class monopoly of a minority over the means of wealth production and its agents have continually to contain the frustrations caused by the insecure and deprived existence of the working class under capitalism. But the scarcity the working class the world over have to endure is artificial. The world means of production are quite capable of producing an abundance of wealth from which everybody could freely take according to their needs. Capitalism holds back production because it operates, and has to operate, according to the rule “No profit, no production” and it restricts the consumption of the vast majority to what is needed to keep them efficient wealth — and profit — producers.

Reform Futile

Those who accept capitalism, and choose to work within it, inevitably find themselves dividing the working class by arguing the merits of which worker, or group of workers, should get which scarce job or house or hospital bed or university place. In Northern Ireland the Catholic workers naturally say it is unfair that they don’t seem to get a proportionate share of these things as compared with their Protestant fellow workers. The Protestant workers, on the other hand, equally naturally, don’t feel inclined to give up whatever small advantage they believe they have just to conform to some abstract principle of equality. The reformist in practice accepts the restricted choice capitalism offers and tries to make the best of it, which isn’t much. Sometimes, it is true, he does see that the solution is not a fair distribution of jobs (and so of unemployment) or of new council houses (and so of old slums) and so does propose an increase in what there is to share amongst the workers. But here he fails to see the very real restrictions which capitalism places on doing this. Under capitalism production is for profit, not for the benefit of the working class. The fact, confirmed by years of sad experience, is that capitalism just cannot be reformed so as to work in the interests of the working class, the majority of society. It is futile to try to do so — and, in the context of Northern Ireland, worse than futile.

Sectarianism Kills

For given the tradition of sectarianism, any move to redistribute poverty in favour of the Catholic workers was bound to antagonise Protestant workers. This is why the Civil Rights movement must take joint responsibility with the Unionists for the current violence in Northern Ireland. For their reformist campaign helped to unleash passions that have put the clock back fifty years. The very nature of their campaign — a fairer deal for Catholics under capitalism — meant that they were seen to be, and in fact largely were, a Catholic sectarian movement. The fact that this, and the resulting violence, was clearly unintended is beside the point (though it does do them credit as compared with most Unionist politicians who used all their party’s years of experience of stirring up sectarianism to manoeuvre the Civil Rights movement into this position). They should have foreseen that this was likely to happen and that the killings, the maimings and the burnings of the past few years would have been too high a price to pay for the comparatively minor reforms they were demanding.

We are not saying workers should not protest against their sufferings under capitalism. Of course they should. But they should fight back on sound lines — for Socialism, not reforms of capitalism. A redistribution of poverty from Protestants to Catholics is no answer. What is called for is an end to the situation where workers, Protestant, Catholic or whatever, are in the degrading position of having to struggle amongst themselves for the basic necessities of life, especially when the amount of these necessities is artificially restricted by the same system that degrades and exploits them.

No Workers’ Republic

Socialism alone can end this, by making the means of production the common property of all mankind so that they can be used to provide abundance for all. The struggle for Socialism will unite rather than divide the working class because it does not set worker against worker over the few crumbs capitalism has to offer but is so clearly in the interests of them all.

We would be the first to admit that, unfortunately, “Socialism” in Northern Ireland has come to be associated with pro-Catholic politics, another pernicious side-effect of the reformism of those who call themselves socialists but who in practice seek only to reform capitalism. These people — the Bernadette Devlins, the Gerry Fitts — are not, and never were, Socialists. They stand, at most, for State-organised capitalism in Ireland. The “Workers’ Republic” many of them proclaim as their aim is an empty, and misleading, phrase. In Irish politics, whether intended or not (and in this case it generally is intended), the word republic labels its advocates as in favour of a united Irish State, in effect as supporters of that section of the Southern Irish capitalist class which wants to rule all Ireland not just the 26 counties they now do. The word workers does nothing to dispel this, but merely shows that those who use it don’t want to be identified as uncritical supporters of all-Ireland capitalism and wish it to be known that they favour reforms they believe will benefit the working class. Some go further and advocate full State ownership of land, industry and trade, but such a programme of state capitalism would not benefit workers in Ireland. If anything it would probably lead to even more restrictions on the limited political democracy and trade-union rights they now have. The state capitalist government in Ireland would still have to sell exports on the world market and would still have to drive the workers to produce as big a surplus as possible for re-investment. The workers would still have to resist and struggle to return for their own consumption as much as it could of the wealth it produced (and they would probably find the likes of the IRA, in view of their record of callous disregard of working-class life, harsh taskmasters).

National or Worldwide

The plain fact is that there is no national solution to the problems which face workers in Ireland, North and South. These problems are not essentially different from those of workers in all the other countries of the world. Workers everywhere live under the same system, world capitalism, which artificially divides the world into States and cultivates loyalty towards these States in the form of nationalism in order to further the interests of the various sections of the world capitalist class who rule them. The working class, too, is a worldwide class with a common world-wide interest: the overthrow of capitalist rule everywhere and the freeing of modern technology from the fetters of the profit motive by the establishment of Socialism.

Abundance for All

Socialism is necessarily a world system because the system it will replace, capitalism, already is. As far as the production of wealth is concerned there is already one world. The production of the world’s wealth, artificially limited as it is under capitalism, is one huge co-operative enterprise involving factories, farms shipyards, railways, warehouses, offices and workers of every kind in all parts of the world. What is not worldwide under capitalism is the ownership and control of this productive system, which is scattered amongst hundreds of competing States and big international companies. What Socialism will do is to bring this vast worldwide productive network under the control of mankind so that they can use it for their own benefit: first of all, to abolish poverty destitution, hunger, slums, ignorance and ill-health and second, to provide an abundance of wealth from which every single human being can freely take according to their needs without money or rationing of any kind. On this basis, boring work can be eliminated and free men and women come to enjoy the fruits of the centuries of forced labour of their fathers. The degrading struggle for the means of life, and the senseless hatreds it engendered, will become a thing of the past.

Struggles can be Ended

We insist that this is relevant in Northern Ireland today as it is everywhere else. Understandably, at the moment, ordinary people in Northern Ireland want peace, an end to the pointless shootings and bombings and the added insecurity they bring. We too want an immediate end to this senseless sacrifice of working-class life to no useful purpose (not even now the interests of their masters, as was once the case). But, over and above this, we want Socialism, a far more worthwhile objective than a mere return to “normal” capitalism with its boring jobs, its dole queues, its slums and its general poverty and exploitation minus only the extra violence.

We urge workers in Ireland to join with us, and their fellow workers in all other countries, in working to establish as quickly as possible Socialism, a world of peace and plenty.

Adam Buick

Northern Ireland’s World of Violence (1971)

From the August 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently Prime Minister Faulkner, whose outstanding ability is the art of double-talk, told us that the “terrorists” — by which he means those thugs, gunmen and murderers who do not support him — were as good as defeated and he was confident that Northern Ireland would soon return to that condition which for decades Faulkner and his political ilk were pleased to regard as normal. Like all skilful liars, Faulkner, as always, made qualifications sufficient to permit retreat, or even a complete volte-face, if the situation required it.

While we wish no victories to Faulkner or the economic interests he represents, such have been the events of the last few weeks in Belfast, and such the futility of its purpose, that we wish he had been right. We have seen the most senseless acts of violence and depravity on all sides in an orgy of blood-letting, fatal and otherwise, and we have lived with the foulest hypocrisy of selective condemnation on all sides — hypocrisy that is as aggressive, vicious and futile as the activities it condemns.

The Official IRA 

Let’s look at the apologetics of violence. If we take the militant Republican hypocrisy first it is simply because it generally receives less prominence than that of its opponents. The IRA claims to have a mandate from the Irish people, given at the last all-Ireland elections held in 1918, to act on behalf of those people and to secure that British rule is banished from the entire island; such a mandate, they claim, gives them the executive authority to carry on the functions of government, including the waging of war, if so required. The democratically-expressed will of the Irish people was, they say, frustrated in 1918 by the violence of Britain and the intransigence of the northern Unionists and the resultant partition of the country denied the people as a whole the opportunity of further democratic decision.

They claim, and rightly so, that the people who introduced the gun into Irish politics in the present century were the Northern Ireland Unionists who organised a private political army to frustrate, if necessary by violence, not only the democratically-expressed wishes of the Irish people, but, also, the will of the British parliament and that, having by threats of violence denied to the majority on both islands their democratic options, the Unionist Party opted for dismemberment of the country in such a way as would ensure for them, in the area under their control, a permanent built-in political majority which they continued to maintain by policies of the grossest religious bigotry and economic sanctions against their minority.

Such a summation is factual enough: it is true that those respectable elements who hold their hands to their pious mouths in holy horror at the present wave of terrorism are largely associated with, or sympathetic to, a party and a government that exists only through the arrogation of a claim to exercise violence to frustrate the majority in Britain and Ireland and it is also true that a half-century of Unionist rule has done nothing to win opponents to its cause. But the IRA (and we refer specially to the “official” IRA and not the nihilistic “Provisionals”) are being conveniently pedantic when they make the claim that since there has been no electoral decision of the people of all-Ireland — that is, in an election involving the whole country — since 1918 they are the inheritors of that year’s political decisions or that the dead of 1918 have a right to speak for the living of 1971.

Especially is it nonsense for the IRA to suggest that, while the will of the country in 1918 should be accepted as constant, they have the right to abandon the conservative nationalist economic philosophy of Sinn Fein, which earned the electoral victory of 1918, in favour of the up dated chauvinism of their present national state capitalist philosophy.

It is a fact of political life in Ireland, as tragic for us who are Socialists as for the IRA, that the overwhelming majority of the working class support Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Unionist Party. Such support as the IRA do receive is from a small minority and this has been demonstrated time and again at election contests North and South of the Border. The IRA claim to executive authority died with the establishment of the Irish Free State and such actions as it has taken thereafter can claim no justification in the democratic principles the movement pays lip-service to.

As Socialists we recognise what passes for democracy in capitalism simply as a weapon useful to a Socialist-conscious working class in the establishment of Socialism; as a political condition which, from a working class standpoint, is superior to its alternatives insofar as it permits of the organisation of our class for the democratic conquest of political power and the abolition of government of people and establishment of a democratic system of such administrative controls as are required to secure the material basis of a full and happy life for all. We have no “moral” standpoint on the question — we don’t consider, for example that a British soldier, invested with the support of millions has any more “right” to use arms in the service of capitalism than has an IRA man supported by a few thousand people. Our political “morality” is based, like all political “morality”, on the needs of our class and if we reject the idea of minority violence, or violence at all, it is simply because our Socialist objective can only be achieved by the conscious act of a majority of Socialists.

In claiming, falsely, an inherited democratic right for their activities the IRA show a peculiar and convenient nodding acceptance of a political principle which, if they accepted its implications, would ring the curtain on their foolhardy military adventurism.

What is more to the point than the source from which the IRA claims to derive its authority for its activities is the effect of those activities on the working class. Put simply, and we put it thus to the IRA and its supporters, the questions is: have any of your activities, at any time, proved, in any way, beneficial to working class interests or brought them nearer an appreciation of the fact that their miseries are the result of capitalism, a world system based on the exploitation of the working class or an understanding of the Socialist alternative to capitalism’s world system of exploitation?

Of course they haven’t! The killings and counter-killings, the executions, the jailings, the trials and the rest of the chronicle of violence and death, past, present and future, has been based on the fiction that national sovereignty solves working class problems; based on the ignorance that the nation state — historically a device of capitalism — is a “holy” and a “wholesome” thing and that a subject class should invest its blood in the struggle to change its masters.

Latterly, of course, the IRA has gone back to, and, indeed, beyond, the old Constitution and Governmental Programme of the Irish Republic with its requirement for national agricultural, industrial and fishery cooperatives, and have claimed that their objective is a “Socialist Workers’ Republic”. We have dealt at length in previous issues of the Socialist Standard with this impractical contradiction in-terms which is simply a working-class-deceiving euphemism for capitalism organised directly under the State. Not only have we shown the fallacious reasoning behind the notion that a single country can, through State ownership, organise the capitalist mode of production, with its market economy and wages system, in such a way as to eliminate the inherent contradictions of capitalism, contradictions which inevitably mean poverty and insecurity, expressed in their many forms, for those who remain in wage bondage, but we have also drawn attention to the despotic nature of government in such conditions.

Is this the end which the IRA feel justifies their means? Is this why working men should die or spend years of their lives in prison? Is this why working men who fall foul of the anger of the IRA for such things as “civil crime” should be beaten, kicked, tarred-and-feathered or shot — indeed, in this latter connection, is it not peculiar that an organisation claiming to be Socialist should wreak such brutality on the oppressed of capitalism who yield to the stimulation of the system in transgressing its rules?

The Provisionals

The “Provisional” IRA are simply a Catholic counterpart of the political Protestant UVF. Their bombings and murders are no more despicable than the brutalities of their enemies but their role in such areas of Belfast as where they are, to quote their white-washed wall claims, “in control”, is particularly vicious.

Not renowned for their skill in political argument they brook no interference from any quarter weaker than their own and to oppose them, even with the weaponry of political argument is to invite intimidation or worse. Unlike the “official” IRA, which, to its credit, refuses to become involved in religious rioting, the words Catholic and Protestant figures prominently in the vocabulary of the “Provisional” as synonyms for “them” and “us”.

The appalling ignorance, or, if we are less charitable, the barbarous strategy, of this section of militant Republicanism has been responsible for many of the horrific street confrontations between Catholics and Protestants and Catholics and British military, confrontations which reflects no credit on any of the combatants.

The Provisional IRA can see — and it is easily seen — the viciousness of the young workers who have been gulled into the service of capitalism in the British Army but they are totally blind to the viciousness and degradation of their own violence because they too have been gulled into the service of the same worthless cause, even if they do prefer their capitalism with green, white and orange wrapping.

Politically we are wholly opposed to the “official” IRA. As workers and Socialists we dispute both their end, State Capitalism, and their means, Violence; we would say that historically and presently their end and means have driven them on a course which leaves little room to condemn viciousness in their enemies. We would be less than honest, however, if we did not acknowledge the restraint they have exercised in many of the brutal street confrontations that have been promoted by the vicious reciprocity of their erstwhile comrades of the Provisional movement and of the so-called Security Forces.

We can analyse and explain the circumstances leading to the emergence of the Provisional but the fact that we understand what they are, and why they are, a malevolent political cocktail of ignorance and bigotry precipitously decanted by the burnings and murders inflicted by political Protestants and the police forces on the Catholics in August 1969 does not alter the fact, like the UVF, they are one of the staunchest pillars of vicious reaction that opposes working class reconciliation and Socialist understanding in Northern Ireland today.

The Ulster Volunteer Force . . . and others 

We have always pointed out that the Unionist Party’s strategy in maintaining political control was to officially disclaim policies of religious discrimination and yet give sufficient evidence of discrimination to lull Protestant workers into the belief that they were the favoured children of Unionism. It is a despicable strategy but one that has paid rich dividends to a party whose purpose was the preserving of political conditions favourable to the economic interests of the capitalists they served. Of course evidence can be adduced to show that some working class lackeys of Unionism were rewarded with a house or a job — but the reward itself demonstrates the poverty of its recipients.

The fact is that Unionism made war on the working class without discrimination and it is no accident that the areas of most constant sectarian conflict differ only in the type of slogans they have white-washed on their gable walls.

It was only in the early sixties, when economic changes, and impending economic changes, caused the Unionist Party to adopt new methods for the same old purpose — the class interests of our masters — that some “liberalising” of official attitudes emerged. These changes not only brought political Catholicism forward with a determination never again to retreat but also enabled ambitious would-be politicians to pick up from the gutters of traditional Unionism the trusty devices for forging a career — foul bigotry, lies and bully-boy tactics.

The success of some of these would-be politicians is now a fact (and the failure of some others may explain some of our mysterious bombings!) and their course to political stardom is the story of our present violence. The chapters of that story are: the nurturing of the nonsense amongst the most down-trodden section of the Protestant working class that their “way-of-life” — their poverty and slums! — was somehow threatened by the government’s new under-emphasis on religious bigotry; the organising of Catholic workers in the Civil Rights Movement to achieve “rights” which their leaders alleged Protestants had (presumably including that majority of Protestants who, like their Catholic class brethren, knew only poverty and slum-dom); the Government’s cowardly re-adjustment of attitudes to counter the loss of support to Paisleyism and the inevitable conflagration of 1969.

Among the hate weapons developed by those elements eager to supplant the government was the UVF an armed and secret force taking its name from the force developed by Unionism to over-ride the democratic decisions of the people of Britain and Ireland in 1912. The fact that little is known about the present-day version of this tool of political thuggery is not so much a tribute to its ability to maintain secrecy as it is a pointer to its lack of organised existence. Proscribed by the government after a number of Catholics had been foully murdered in such a way as not to allow the murderers even a pretext beyond the fact of the victims’ religious identity, the UVF developed a “front” organisation which remains legal and more careful than the earlier force. The acts of violence generally attributed to the UVF are usually carried out by people associated with one or more loose groupings of extreme political Protestants and such groupings are, tragically, not rare in the Protestant ghettos.

It is from people associated with such groups, which are the real sinews and support of the UVF, that the most vociferous protests at the violence of the IRA groups comes. They are shocked; they despair of words fitting their condemnation and they are hypocritically forgetful of the violence and murder which the organisations they support have carried out against Catholics and even, on a number of occasions, against the police and British Army.

Typical of such hypocritical protest is the Orange Order and perhaps the most nauseously hypocritical of its spokesmen is the political Protestant Rev. Martin Smyth. Like the Prime Minister and the police chiefs, like Paisley and the thousands of eminently respectable, and pre-eminently ignorant, people whose convenient political memories and selective condemnations is often a bigoted bludgeon, Smyth appears to forget that, in taking to arms, the IRA are only imitating the earlier and more successful example of Unionism and in bombing and killing they are only emulating the activities which Smyth and his hypocritical ilk forgot to condemn when the victims were Catholic and the perpetrators Orangemen. We have no record of Smyth, the indignant and the righteous Rev. Smyth, publicly protesting when one. of his Orange Lodges delayed the serious business of remembering 1690 in 1969 by paying a silent tribute outside Belfast jail to one of its members who was convicted of murdering one man and wounding two others simply because they were Catholics.

Then there are the Orange politicians who have witnessed and testified to the brutality of the British Army when they have been fighting with Protestants; most often they are the first to decry the validity of evidence of similar brutality when the Army has been in action against Catholics.

The British Army  . . .

There is the third force in our violence and hypocrisy, the British Army. One would think that men who have voluntarily become full-time members of an organisation that trains them not only to kill but requires that they surrender all right to question the identity of their victims, are not likely to become involved with protest against those of like mind who oppose them. Still we regularly get old Major Neverthink on our TV screens now protesting the military cricket of the “cowardly bounders” who use dirty methods, like amateur imitations of Army Claymore anti-personnel bombs, against his troops.

We were of the opinion that in military parlance the surprise attack and hasty retreat was simply good strategy; the development of new weapons was inventiveness and, when such weapons were produced from easy-to-hand materials, this was good improvisation but possibly our misapprehension arises from the time the French partisans were fighting the Germans or, more recently, when the brave Hungarians or Czechs were fighting the machine gun-toting Russians. Our British Army’s Major Neverthink in Northern Ireland thinks the “terrorists” are short on guts if they don’t advise the military of their intentions before bringing out their Webleys to face the Army’s tanks and machine guns!

Aside from the babbling selective condemnations of British Army officers there is the much more serious political and practical blindness of the military command. From abusive threats of kicking teeth in to arrest for motorists who refuse to sign statements saying they have no complaints about Army behaviour (!) to the quite clear cut instances of hate-incensed troops provoking riots by indiscriminate and largely futile house raidings confined almost entirely to Catholic districts; from their constant provocation by blanket presence in the narrow streets of Belfast’s slum-dom along with heavy and noisy equipment to the imposition of indignities on the civilian populace in those areas and the greater viciousness that their equipment gives them as one of the sides in street rioting, the Army demonstrates that they are either a foul machine at the easy disposal of brutal politicians or that its leadership is wholly irresponsible.

Failure elsewhere — and it must be remembered that the tactics being used by the British Army in N. Ireland today are those that brought them discredit and even military failure in all the areas where they have served the cause of capitalist “law and order” — and they can serve no other cause — seems to have taught the Army no lessons nor do they appear to grasp the elementary fact that every raid, and its attendant situation, carried out in the pathetic slums of Northern Ireland, even if it yields a firearm, creates new desires for firearms and many new hands to use them. But then the soldier is on orders despite Nuremberg and its lofty legal precedents, “their’s not to reason why”.

There is nothing new in the world of violence. After Belsen, Churchill’s policy of mass bombing of civilians, Hiroshima, Hungary, Vietnam and all the other foulness that the profit system and its political priorities have given rise to, capitalism’s chamber of horrors can hold no new surprises. Only the hypocrisy of selective condemnation, of blaming the “other side” can continue to surprise and when such selective condemnation is as general and arrogant as it is in Northern Ireland today, where it is patently the seed of fresh conflict, surprise is a prelude to nausea.

We too condemn: not just either of the two IRA’s or the UVF, not just the government or “security” forces, not just the rioters, Catholic and Protestant. We condemn the system of social organisation that creates conditions in which it can all happen — a system where it must always be “You or I” and rarely “You and I”.

There is an answer, a simple answer — complicated for the working class by the same mad social conditioning that allows them to babble idiocies about violence, that answer is Socialism; the establishment of a society of production for use, a society where the resources of nature and the mental and physical skills of people will combine, not to produce things for sale and profit, but to produce an abundance of the things we require sufficient to permit of free and equal access to our needs. Only in such a society will the material basis of division and dissension, that in Northern Ireland as in so many other areas of capitalism has erupted into open violence, be finally banished.

Richard Montague

From Orange Law to Whitelaw (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

March 22nd. Mr. Brian Faulkner in London being talked to by his Tory overlord, Heath. Press says talks “crucial”. Ten hours talking . . . Brian walks out peeved. Brian comes back . . . talk . . . talk. 

March 23rd. Faulkner is back in Belfast giving the bad news to the rest of the gang at Stormont. Northern Ireland tense . . . waiting. Dark clouds over Stormont. Faulkner goes back to London. 

March 24th. The news is out! Stormont is “prorogued”, the semantics of anti-“backlash” strategy. Everybody knows that Westminster is not only the assassin but the undertaker! Orange law is dead; Wullie Whitelaw, Heath’s Ulster hatchetman, takes its place with near-absolute powers. Real change is alleged. 

Trauma . . . anger . . . suspicion . . . fear . . . bitterness . . . hope — all are elements in the emotional shock-wave that hits Northern Ireland. What does it all mean? Whitelaw or Orange law? We say there has been no change: capitalism still rules.

So often over the past few years in Northern Ireland have we seen the unexpected occur in a continual succession of nine-day wonders that have knocked many of the sacred cows from their sacrosanct pedestals . . . so many of the things which the cynics said “will not happen in our time” have happened.

The lessons are many but, primarily, they show two things: they show the speed with which political change can occur and the ability of the great majority of people to reconcile themselves to that change and they also show that whatever amount of apparent change occurs in the administrative organs of the system, they leave, wholly and totally, the real problems that affect the working class intact and undisturbed.

If, like the “Left” the Communists, Labourites, P.D., official I.R.A., etc — we were sufficiently ignorant of the real nature of capitalism, and the alternative to that system, Socialism, to take sides in the major dispute in Ireland concerning how capitalism should be organised or by whom, then we could take either side — almost with equal “justice” — and have an excellent case for rapping our opponents: But we are not “Leftists”, concerned with administering social aspirin to a society suffering the horrible economic cancer of capitalism. We are Socialists, holding to the demonstrable fact that only the surgery of social revolution, carried through with the weapons of democracy and Socialist knowledge, can bring about real change. As such we are not concerned with taking any “side” in the political struggle in Ireland (or elsewhere), a political struggle that has emerged from, and was caused by, the earlier internecine struggle within the country’s propertied class, and are, thus, absolved from the hypocrisy, the lies, the contradictions, the prejudices as well as the deliberate exploitation of working class blood and tears for the accomplishment of purposes that bear no relevance to working class interests.

We have seen anglophobic Irish nationalists demanding “British standards of justice”, sometimes even when the military stalwarts of that “justice” were engaged in the crassest brutality against them. We have seen “Loyalists” of the Unionist Party, and its fringe lunacies, denounce those same British standards while boasting their loyalty to Britain. We have seen the “Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people” take in a tame Catholic to its ranks in a lame attempt to convince the world that it was not a Protestant Parliament. And we have seen the British Tory Government sack the local Tory bigots, with all the implications of disgrace, and establish a dictatorial overlord to implement the aforementioned “British standards”!

And we could go on . . . and on . . . but, why? Nothing really has changed. Nothing, that is, that really affects the life of Paddy Murphy, Catholic, workingman or Jimmy Brown, Protestant, workingman. The regime of the alarm clock, the job, the dole, the poverty, the slums, even, the violence — real and intended — goes on and all the happy slogans of reform are turned on their head as their diametrical opposite draws the cheers of the leaders who first taught you the slogans of reform. “One man — One vote”? No! Now we have Whitelaw — and no votes! Abolition of the Special Powers Act? Now we have the infamous Act administered by the British Army with a repressive ruthlessness that sometimes makes even the RUC appear playful! Jobs? Homes? These are now the governmental preserve of the Heath administration and its wanton failure in both fields in Britain can hardly inspire confidence!

Because, so often, we saw the viciously-contorting face of Brian Faulkner vomit its blood-curdling hatred at those whom he opposed; because we lived with his lies and hypocrisy and his leadership of a group of self-seeking political gangsters prepared to stop at nothing to maintain their power and privilege, we may see in the ignominous dismissal of the foul Unionist coterie some victory. But there is no real victory for the working class, even in the satisfaction that some of them may see in the political demise of Faulkner and his cohorts. For these people, like Heath, Wilson and Lynch, or, if they achieved political power, the leaders of the IRA, the Ulster Vanguard or the professional “moderates” of the Alliance Party, are the mere political servants of capitalism.

It was to maintain capitalism in such a manner as would make most effective its exploitation of the working class that Unionism and Nationalism became political forces in Ireland. It was the immediate needs of capitalism in the nearly part of this century that exploited the divisive influences historically bound-up with class society in the country and brought forth the slogans of bigotry and patriotism, hatred and prejudice — the inane Orange battle-cries and the futile Nationalist shibboleths. The poison of sectarianism and nationalism was used by the contending factions within capitalism to rally the working class in the North behind the continuance of union with Britain, in order that the Northern capitalists could maintain their free access to the British markets, and the working class in the South behind the demand for “freedom” from British rule, so that the political servants of the developing capitalist class in the South could take legislative steps to protect a weak native capitalism from the competition of foreign, mainly British, capitalism.

With the changing of conditions affecting capitalism in both parts of the country the old friction of interest between the Northern and Southern capitalists largely declined. It was this decline and the closer economic integration of the UK-Irish economy, endorsed in the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement, that led to the closer co-operation of Northern and Southern politicians in the latter part of the Sixties and paved the way for the O’Neill-Lemass bun-worry at Stormont in 1965. Capitalism in Ireland no longer needed the unpleasant levels of bigotry and hatred that had been necessary to promote both parts of its divided interests nearly fifty years before. With as little scruple as had been employed when the weapons of hate and division had been first used, the political servants of capitalism attempted to throw them aside, and, in the process, to take credit for their integrity and political perspicacity! But, in Northern Ireland, the poison had been injected deep into the vein of working class life and the sheep baulked at following their leaders through the pens of hypocrisy to a tolerance based on the new needs of capitalism.

The rest is the history of the last four years: the story of murder, arson, brutality, torture and increased hatred and division when the working class paid with its lives, its freedom and endured privation and repression beyond the norm and the capitalist class saw its profits endangered and its lives discomfited. This was the background to Heath and his gang bestowing on Faulkner and his mob the old order of the boot!

Faulkner and his Tory hate-mongers were kicked out by their erstwhile friends of the British Tory party not because they were the Party that generated hatred and bitterness nor because they had set up an authoritarian statelet in which lies and deceit imposed the same miseries on propertyless Protestants as did hate policies and political coercion on propertyless Catholics. If these crimes had represented the indictment against Unionism, Unionist politicians would never have been allowed to relax their privileged backsides in the plushed splendor of Stormont. No, Teddy and his friends did not abandon Brian and his boys simply because the latter had been found out nor did the Leader of that other great act in capitalism’s political circus, the Labour Party, recommend dismissal on such grounds. Faulkner and his party had to go because they could no longer deliver the goods to the capitalist class in the form of a reasonably peaceful, docile, hard-grafting working class churning out goods for sale and profit without the expenditure of too much in the way of overheads for maintaining “law and order”.

A few points are worthy of note; the Party of acknowledged political gangsters whom Westminster have seen fit to dismiss are the same Party who were given power by Liberal Lloyd George’s Government of Ireland Act of 1920; the same Party that enjoyed the confidence and support of successive Tory governments up to the present Heath administration; the same Party whose political foulness was strengthened by the Labour government’s Amendments to the Governments of Ireland Act, in 1948 and whose corruption was beneath the cognizance of Harold Wilson until it became an expensive embarrassment in 1969.

And the alternatives for the future? Again it is worthy of note that Harold Wilson—who can doubt with the foreknowledge and connivance of Heath? — sat in counsel with “the gunmen and murderers” of the IRA in Dublin. It is worthy of note because capitalism will employ, and has employed, any trick, any hypocrisy, any instrument that guarantees its untroubled exploitation of the working class. And none of the contenders for power are any worse than those presiding over capitalism’s system of theft at present.

And the future for the working class? This we can predict with easy confidence. The continuation of poverty, insecurity, of going without . . . living in slums or letting the larder pay the rent or the mortgage . . . division . . . violence. In a word, no change! But, then, the working class knows its miseries and, ironically, while it seeks assuagement of political or religious problems it does not expect relief from its class miseries. Nor will it get it before it jettisons its inculcated nationalistic and religious prejudices and its notions that a society in which a minority class owns society’s means of living can provide the material basis of a peaceful, a full and a happy life for everybody.

Richard Montague

Northern Ireland 1970 - What price civil rights (1971)

From the February 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Predictably, as 1970 ended, the communications media in N. Ireland, took us over the ground we had travelled in 1970. It was a sad year for the working class and as the T.V. cameras made us relive the events so recently passed we were reminded of the graveyard, the prison cell and, generally, the hate-scene that was Ulster 1970.

Certain names cropped up repeatedly — the political dramatis personae of the grim year just passed. These were the people who were asked by the newspapers, the T.V. networks and the radio commentators to comment on events of yesterday and predict those of tomorrow. These were the new “stars” of the political scene whose fame—or notoriety, dependant on the point-of-view of the appraiser—had emerged from or been consolidated by, the events of 1970. They looked out at us from our T.V.screens or laughed at us from our newspapers, men and women who looked hale and hearty in the flush of their success, giving, with their wisdom, the requisite degree of honour demanded by the occasion.

Paisley, Fitt, Devlin, Hume, Bradford, Cooper, the whole galaxy were there—the sort of super New Year political circus that might be a T.V. producer’s hang-over from the big get-togethers of the other side of show business, during the Christmas period.

As we watched these happy and successful men in gay banter over the events of 1970 and playing the role of witty prognosticators, we, for some reason, thought of Shelley's quatrain allowing the scene to let us take poetic licence with the final line:

And many more Destructions played,
In the ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like politicians telling lies!

The other actors who played the crowd scenes in the action of the previous year, the working class, were not in attendance. Hundreds of them were unavoidably detained in the prisons, a number of them had achieved the greater anonymity of the cemetery, and many more, blinded or maimed, had withdrawn from the scene. But, from the point-of-view of the stars, the production had been a huge success.

Thus, with the opportunity provided by the now traditional practice of public stocktaking at the end of the year, did we see the situation. Perhaps ours was a jaundiced view; perhaps there are important things we were leaving out. So . . . let’s put it to you!

Are we wrong in asserting that those people whose names became household words as a result of the Civil Rights struggle have now become (as we predicted they would) comfortably ensconced in the Establishment—on the less-competitive "Opposition” side, to be sure, and accommodating themselves with the same trappings of respectability as the gang they largely replaced, the old Catholic Nationalist Party? Now we can hear their voices “like a bad prayer, not overloud” lauding the virtues of law and order and, sickeningly overloud, roundly condemning the violence of which they, to put it at its most charitable, were co-instigators.

But maybe you think we are being tedious in looking only at the fact that some people have used the struggle for “civil rights” as a means of forging for themselves a political position that holds a fair degree of power and privilege. You might even assert that it was their just reward for their part in the struggle.

Well, let’s not be tedious; as Socialists we are only too well aware that capitalism will always provide the temptation to trade principles for material reward. Quite rightly we should consider the struggle for "civil rights” not in the light of the people it threw up to play the role of leaders and politicians but in terms of what it did for our fellows of the working class and what promise it gave us for tomorrow.

We know it set whole communities at each others throats; that more than a score of people died; that many more will carry the physical evidence of their participation in the struggle to their graves; that hundreds of people were burned out of their homes; that thousands of people were intimidated into leaving their homes or jobs, or both; that many thousands of pounds sterling went, in the form of fines, into the coffers of the Crown and that some five or six hundred people found themselves behind bars.

And the promise for tomorrow? Tomorrow, whenever that is, the walls of steel, barbed wire and corrugated iron will come down to reveal the scars of yesterday. The vacant lots where once stood the less-awful back-to-back slums; the pock-marks on the wall that starkly reminds us that so-and-so died here; the whitewashed, wrong-spelt hate chant . . . Thus, the promise of the tomorrow that follows the day when men of good intent, knowing not the cause of our agonies, began their nonviolent protests!

After this tomorrow, unless the working class can be won to aspirations beyond the tribal catch-cries that Unionism, in the service of capitalism, gave them — catch-cries that the leaders of the C.R. stupidly construed as the source of the N. Ireland problem — will come the long agonising days of social convalescance before there is achieved again even the degree of amicable distrust which existed in Che pre-civil rights days.

And yet the Civil Rights Movement has won a complete victory over the Government that opposed them in 1968! They have achieved a virtual unconditional surrender to their demands. On all sides the Official Machine is industriously churning out the paper reforms, the Commissions and Committees that are not reporting are still sitting, the lawyers and the politicians are working overtime and even a politician who promised to surrender his very life if one of the C.R. demands was granted is now a Minister in the Government with the job of advertising the liberality of the Government. Oh yes! the Civil Rights Movement was a success beyond measure in terms of achieving the reforms it pursued. But, as always, the reformists victory is a shallow one. None of the basic problems that afflicted the working class, Catholic and Protestant have been affected by the “reforms” and since it was the political expression of these problems that created the windmills against which the C.R. struggle was directed, these windmills, too, must remain. Even if cloaked in new forms they will remain, if anything, heightened by the tensions and bitterness of the C.R. struggle itself.

"One man—One vote” was one of the great clarions of the Civil Rights Movement. Many people outside the Province, and quite a few within, were led to the belief that some Catholics were being denied votes in local government elections simply because they were Catholics. The actual truth of the matter was that many thousands of members of the working class—and incidentally, more Protestants than Catholics—did not meet the property qualifications required by the local government franchise laws while members of the capitalist class—by virtue of their property and business directorships—were permitted multiple votes.

Now we have “One man—One vote”—well . . . no. Not exactly . . . yet! The Government are engaged in considering and planning a further local government reform measure consequent on the C.R. agitation, and agreed to by the C.R. movement, under which a number of more economically viable local councils will be brought into being in place of the previous abundance of smaller councils. In keeping with the recommendations of a commission led by a Professor Matthews, the central Government at Stormont will take over most of the more important functions previously undertaken by local authorities and the new super councils will have the status of local lavatory committees. So with our new reformed local government franchise system we will all now have an equal opportunity to vote for aspirants—if they can be found—to the freshly-reformed and impotent local councils. But even this “reform” must be waited for and, until the government have designed and have agreed the actual formula for stripping the local councils of their powers, we have the democratic equalitarianism of “One man—No vote”!

Another “reform” was the abolition of the “B” Specials—a Unionist Party “Dad’s Army” under the guise of a reserve police force. Opponents of the Specials used to deride the physical and intellectual qualities of the Specials and, indeed, they compared most unfavourably with the rank-and-file members of the regular police, among many of whom the Specials were a bit of a joke. In the mid-Fifties the “B’s” (whose title accommodated a choice of designation!) were out in force to meet the threat of I.R.A. border raids and came mostly into prominence through their numerous mishaps and accidents—which, while mainly confined to shootings of themselves, did, unfortunately, on a number of occasions, result in the loss of innocent lives.

In place of the Specials we now have the Ulster Defence Regiment which the British and Stormont governments assure us can do the job for which the Specials existed more efficiently than the latter force. Better armed, better officered and trained, and more mobile than the old “B’s”, the force contains most of the physically and intellectually salvagable remnants of the Specials and these are supplemented by the most confused and reactionary elements of the working class, Catholic and Protestant.

This is another of the “reforms” won for us by the Civil Rights movement!

A Commissioner of Complaints has been established to meet another C.R. demand. The report of his first year's enquiries and the number of complaints made would appear to indicate that either much of the criticism directed against local authorities was exaggerated or that, and this is more likely, when faced with the task of formally lodging a complaint, many people were obliged to think the matter of their complaint through to its conclusion and, accepting the inevitability of their problem as general to their working class condition and station in life, decided not to bother.

Of course the basic cause of the problems which occupy the Commissioner is not within his terms of reference. The problems must remain even if the Commissioner does manage to remove religion from the filing index of capitalism's misery.

And yet another “reform” . . . ! A Central Housing Authority, perhaps even filled with competent, maybe even, dedicated, people but still faced with the problem of providing “working-class” dwellings in a society where homes, like all other commodities in capitalism, must ensure a profitable return to the usurers and financial spivs, that equals or surpasses other fields of financial enticement.

And again! Pledges and legislation to ensure that religious discrimination will be removed from the public sector of the labour market. This “reform” might ensure that when two unemployed workers seek one job, one of them will be discriminated against on grounds other than religion.

And the most ludicrous of all the “Civil Rights” demands: abolition of second-class citizenship! O pious ghosts of yesterday! What did they mean? Did they mean that the working class would have the same freedom from poverty, the same standard of living, homes, education and holidays as are enjoyed by he owning class in our society? Of course they didn’t! It was typical of the empty and ill-considered ideas of the civil rights leadership and indicative of the abounding political ignorance of those who followed them that they should have paid lip-service to such absurdity. To suggest that all could have equal freedom, equal opportunity, equal citizenship in a society in which a small minority class own and control the means whereby the rest of us live, and to bring workers into the streets and into conflict on the basis of such a “demand” is not simple stupidity, it is political madness!

To Unionism in its entirety, the whole rotten set-up, its politicians, its “respectable” businessmen, its church leaders, its judges, magistrates, spies—every bit of its foul apparatus, forged with calculated cunning to protect the economic interests of the exploiting class in Northern Ireland—to this crew, severally and severely, must go the discredit and blame for the foulness that is bigotry in Ulster. They built the bomb!

To the “Civil Rights” leaders, including the Trotskyites and “Lefties” who were merely playing the “entryist” tactic, whose ignorance of the nature and purpose of Unionism’s bomb, whose failure to understand either that bigotry was simply a device for confusing and exploiting all workers and that Unionism was simply capitalism dressed in the costume of local requirement or that only Socialism and the complete abolition of capitalism could ensure “civil rights” for the working class, must go the discredit and blame for igniting the bomb.

Meanwhile the working class have died . . . the arsonist has done his work . . . the Catholic and Protestant magistrates impose their mandatory cruelties without concern for the fact that the same system that made them and which they exist to protect created the material of their labours. Outside, in the arena, the slaves clamour for each other’s blood. Thus, freshly reformed! capitalism in Ulster, 1970.

Richard Montague