Socialist Theory or Science Fiction?

D.R. O’Connor Lysaght reviews The Dynamics of Irish Politics by Paul Bew, Ellen Hazelkorn, Henry Patterson; Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1989, £8.50 Sterling.

It should be stated that this book is not a complete fiasco. Its third and fourth chapters contain a lot of useful material: their footnotes include even more useful references. Its second chapter includes valuable demolition work on Senator Manning’s whitewash of the Blueshirts.

For all that the work under review does not describe the Dynamics of Irish Politics, the title being as untrue as the claim on its back cover that it “is the first overview of politics in the Irish Republic from the 1916 Easter Rising to the present based on an examination of the state’s social foundations”

This failure is rooted in its authors’ politics. Hazelkorn and Patterson are members of the Workers Party: Bew is known to sympathise. The organisation they support has developed in a trajectory from revolutionary nationalism toreformistneo-Stalinism and is likely to continue further to more honest reformism. A major ideological aid in this process was a pamphlet combining inaccurate history, capitalist economics and much bandying of the word ‘dialectic’, The Irish Industrial Revolution. This attacked the traditional Republican analysis of Irish economic under-development simply by inverting it. Responsibility for it is placed not with British imperialism but with the Irish national bourgeoisie. At the same time, the Stalin strategy, of capitalist stages leading to a socialist society ina singlecountry, is maintained. Redemption is seen as coming not from the expropriation of the Irish bourgeoisie but from investment, mainly from the U.S.A. Such are the loopholes in this work that it may be suspected that the Workers Party members are all lobotomised in order to believe it. Not only are its statistics ngged quite crudely, but it has no idea of causation; it gives no explanation for the alleged lack of enterprise of Irish capitalists outside the north-east; Protestant Ulster was left for another study that never appeared). This opens the way to explain this to traditional British racist slurs. Even from its publication in 1977, the time was overdue for real intelligence to supplement it.

In the twelve years that passed before this book tried to supply the need, two countervailing pressures appeared to complicate the analysis. In 1982, the Telesis Report, whose findings gain extra credibility by being themselves the fruit of private enterprise, destroyed the illusion that foreign capital could build the Irish economy qualitatively beyond its present level. Seven years later, months before this book’s publication, the Workers Party leader responded to his organisation's slow growth and to the pace of change in Eastern Europe by abandoning its commitment to the maximum programme of Socialism. It is not yet clear how far this affects a traditional minimum Republican-Socialist demand such as the nationalisation of Irish finance capital. It does leave a massive hole in Workers Party policy, that the leaders are unable to fill with the demand for workers’ control (too Socialist). Theironly alternative is to abandon their party’s umbilical link with the cause of separation from Britain.

The authors of this-book are about as academically qualified as anyone to provide the analysis to fill the hole without using the calls for Socialism rejected by them and their party. All have doctorates and writings to justify them. More importantly, each has stooped to a level of intellectual shysterism far more sophisticated than could be imagined by the authors of The Insh Industrial Revolution. Patterson’s 1980 book on the Belfast Labour movement, Class Conflict and Sectarianism, insists that in Belfast ‘no form of class politics could have been developed which would have threatened the integration of the Protestant bloc, which did not attempt to come to terms with Protestant working-class resistance to nationalist demands’, implying an unsubstantiated faith in the possibility of a genuinely democratic form of partition, Hazelkorn is an authority on the 26 county political client system, but also on Marx and Engels’ writings on Ireland. On these latter, she claims (Saothar 9) that, in the end, Marx “believed that a solution (to Ireland’s problems) could be found within the Union’. This alleged near deathRed conversionta Umiceasits is not given any reference AN REABHLOID - Page, I?.

in an otherwise well documented article. Bew is an authority on the land question. He emphasises the objective (as distinct from the subjective, political) inevitability of the larger farmers’ control of the countryside before 1914 and the resulting inevitability of the workers’ failure to ally effectively with subsequent land agitations.

These positions provide justification for Socialist Unionism. None of them contains more than half a truth, so that any synthetic theory drawn from them is nonsense. Nonetheless, aconsistent theory would be coherent nonsense: not scientific Socialism, but, at least science fiction.

Even such literary distinction is denied this book. Whether they sense that opinion is not yet ready for suchradicalism or whether they have had torecognise that Telesis has destroyed a major part of its objective base, the authors drew back from taking this step, though they hint at it in their earlier chapters, particularly the first, in which the Irish farmers move from ‘Home Rule’ tothe Republic is ascribed to their fear of a possible (but never implemented) United Kingdom Land Tax. They insist too that ‘the break with economic autarchy’ has restructured the 26 county economy. Then, in the face of the current economic crisis, «ith unemployment above the figures of 30 years ago, and emigration at similar levels, their confidence collapses.

They limit their optimism to a purely political perspective: the fact that at the last general election, the allegedly Socialist left in the 26 counties gained two more seats than its previous best. They mention only briefly that this represents less electoral support than that won by Labour alone in 1969; nor do they emphasise the fact that their triumphs still left the left with less than one seventh of all T.D.’s.

Even this perspective is achieved by dubious paths. The theoreticians of The Irish Industrial Revolution are dismissed as ‘ngidly determinist’, but the new work is little better. Indeed, since determinism implies a first cause, it is more inclined to that weakness in that it blames 26-county underdevelopment on a ‘rural bourgeoisie’ who benefited from the land wars. (the role of Finance capital is ignored). The issue of national unity is ignored on the specific ground that it has little active support among the people, but is suppressed even when that support is demonstrated in a series of mass mobilisations over the past 20 years This suppression effects the books title, giving its inaccuracy an extra dimension. A book that limits itself to 26 counties cannot hope to explain Irish politics.

This is but one of the book’s evasions of matters not Page 20 - AN REABHLOID. directly economic. Hazelkom’s study of clientism has had little part in her contribution to this. The conditions created for it by the centralised state bureaucracy inherited from the colonial regime is not considered at all, partly, no doubt because it might seem ‘anti-British’, partly because the Workers Party has many supporters in that bureaucracy. Even mor interesting is the way the political dynamic produced by the Catholic Church is pigeonholed and dumped among the ‘Conclusions’, barely in time to be stitched on to a complete analysis.

To these excisions are added the fact that the work’s economic analysis is limited to the 26 counties. The end of autarchy is praised and then, with one eye on the Telesis report, is criticised. Mention is made of oil crises. These are seen almost as different acts of God, about which nothing can be done. The dominance of the cattle trade with Britain is considered in the same way. Failure to examune the role of Irish banking and its part in the export of Irish capital reinforces the result: the illusion of the inevitability of Irish economic policy and discussion of it within terms set by the bourgeoisie The lack of working class power is explained by their numerical weakness and by defining small farmers not as a natural ally but as part of the capitalist class. This can be held for the period before the ’60s, but cannot explain the period since the "60s, when the working class has formed a majority of the population. One obvious reason, the betrayals of the Labour party in Coalition, are blurred by the present perspectives of the Workers party. So Labour is criticised for class collaboration in the early days of the 26 county state, when the working class was weak, The criticism is much less hostile when they seck coalitions at a time when the working class is in the majority!

This then is at heart a book that dismisses the possibility of Workers power or even an agenda for the working class, They sketch a worst case scenario - Fianna Fail in power, relying on religion and nationalism to compensate for the deficiency in its economic policy. But the best case that they hint at fails to inspire - coalition, with more compromises thanks to Workers party participation.

Ata time when the working classes of the USSR and Eastern Europe are reemerging on the world stage and where yet again after 20 years yet another imperialist plan for Ireland seems doomed to failure this sort of new realism seems even more tawdry and intellectually threadbare than usual.

An ‘An REABHLOID Pamphiet’

Socialism against this international background.

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