Book reviews

Review Review Review Revie An Camcheachta/The Starry Plough; War by other means? Tn his introduction to the new Republican theoretical magazine” An Camcheachta/The Starry Plough” Gerry Adams says; “every struggle needs its forum for discussion and debate”. Unfortunately his imtroduction ends with a poem which, while unobjectionable in itself, indicates the limits placed on theory and open discussion by the republican movement. The main thrust is that the movement is “doing the business” and those who are not part of it have no nght to criticise.

It’s this position of republicanism that has led 10 their isolation and ghettoisation and the new journal, like the introduction shows little sign of breaking from it. Socialism is restricted to a few Connolly quotes on the cover. The articles - on the Brooke talks, counterinsurgency and community politics all demonstrate that the republican movement have turned Clauzewitz’s fammous dictum that war is the continuation of polincs by

AN CAMCHEACHTA

niet Is now available from : Republican Publications, 44 Parnell Square, Dublin 1. other means on its head - for the contributors politics is war by other means. Thus the republican struggle is analysed using the same terms as those employed by British counter-insurgency “experts” while at the same time claiming to have resisted British definitions.

The real strugele is the military struggle and the real revolutionanes the IRA in arms. The mass of the population is important only asa “sea” in which the revolutionaries move and the political battle essentially one of “hearts and minds” for sympathy and suppon. There is no conception of working people themselves organising and playing an active role in their own liberation, no mention or sign of understanding of class struggle. One result of this is shown in Una Gillespie's article all major political questions are pushed into the future when the British go. The left/right division will occur after a United Ireland. Today the struggle against the border subsumes everything else. As Marxists we disagree fundamentally with this position. The British presence does not stand above class struggle but is a majorelementin thatstrugegle. The conscious action of a majority of the Irish working class.1s necessary both to defeat imperialism and native capitalism, For Una the question of developing from today’s struggles a socialist program that will make this possible is simply not posed. The articles have been well researched and there are many interesting points, but over the journal asa whole hangs a dreary timelessness. The general points could have been made ten or ¢ven twenty years ago.

In conversation republican militants often show an openess and a willingess to debate. Many see themselves as socialists or marxists and it is often difficult to see why this doesn’t lead to greater changes in the movement. This journal, the fruit of twenty years of closed debate in a framework which prevents many questions being posed, let alone answered, helps to resolve this question.

JOE CARTER.

An Reabhloid page 20

eview Review Review Review Disappointing but not surprising Maurice Goldring is a leading Irish expert among French, indeed West European, Stalinites. He has a rather different position to that inherited by the CPI from Desmond Greaves; it is closer to that of the Workers Party, which published his Faith of our Fathers. Yet he does more than put French dressing on the findings of such “red professors" as Bew, Hazelkorn and Patterson. He can recognise and record accurately the Stickies helplessness in Belfast. His new book represents a distinct analysis within the battered tradition of Stalinism.

In Ireland this tradition has its common denominator in the belief that unity and workers power [in itself, for Stalinites, “Socialism"] can be achieved by peaceful political manoeuvres to produce, as a first stage, a democratised six county state [the old “Bill of Rights” gimmick} open to merge freely with the twenty-six county republic. There Greaves and hisillegitimate Sticky child part company, with the latter believing that Irish “Socialism” might be won within the two still separate states. Goldring tries to strike a medium between the two. He avoids the more extreme Sticky positions, such as Henry Patterson’s desire for British Labour to run parliamentary can- Gidates in the North of Ireland. He does not ignore the awkward fact that six county Catholics have only two fifths of the Protestants job opportunities, criticising Gregory Campbell's apologia. Yet he hints that the Protestants are a distinct nation and presents Irish unity as being just a simplification, comparing it to “Croppies Lie Down”.

At the last, he can only offer hopes. He has done a lot of work on his subject, but itis on top of him rather than vice versa.

So it is not really surprising that Goldring's most definite stand is to ask [p. 11] “Who is to decide that [sectarian] militancy is not an expression of class consciousness?” and [p. 134] “Why should class consciousness not sometimes take a reactionary form?”

It does not occur to him that such forms can belong naturally only to sectors of the working class, dividing it against itself and weakening its potential to achieve power. Socialists are forced to choose between such sectoralism and the consciousness of the oppressed - a consciousness more likely to advance unity. Sectoral anti-Catholicism in Belfast does not advance struggle any more than sectoral Catholicism in the twenty-six counties. In this way, despite many shrewd insights and new bits of information, Maurice Goldring does not give an accurate overview of Belfast or even ofits Protestant majority. For an overview of the latter, itis best to look towards what Goldring patronisingly describes as one of the relatively few books written from the left. Geoff Bell's “The Protestants of Ulster’, despite flaws,gets to the heart of the subject in a way to which Goldring can only aspire.

D. R. O;CONNOR LYSAGHT

BELFAST: FROM LOYALTY TO RE-

BELLION - MAURICE GOLDRING,

LAWRENCE AND WISHART, LON-

DON £7.99 sterling An Reabhloid page 21

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