Marxism, the state and Northern Ireland

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Marxism, the state and Northern Ireland The State in Northern Ireland 1921-72 by Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson (Manchester University Press 1979) To say that this new book by these three authors is an important one is perhaps to state the obvious. Analyses of the state in Northern Ireland and of the last decade of conflict, as opposed to empirical accounts and journalistic impressions, are not exactly plentiful. And Marxist analyses are even rarer. One indication of the extent to which the major political issue of Northern Ireland has been neglected — by British Marxists in particular — is that the journal New Left Review has not contained a single article on Ireland since one of the three authors of this book contributed one over a decade ago. It is therefore with this background of neglect in mind that we should greet this new contribution and welcome its arrival.

It is a readable book with a relative absence of academic jargon — excepting a brief passage of dialogue with Hindess and Hirst which is perhaps inevitably more difficult given the subject matter and the work to which it is a response — and could be read with ease by most political activists. On the other hand, the function of the book is certainly not to guide political action, The authors concentrate on attempting to undermine the analyses of Northern Ireland which are the foundation of most of the political activity being undertaken at the present time by Marxists, without attempting to suggest an alternative political practice.

“This is not the place to develop an alternative perspective” they say. Until the right place is found for such a project, we must therefore be content with their present work, which is extremely thought provoking and might best be regarded asa sort of intellectual agent provocateur.

Aim The authors appear a little uncertain about the status of this present work: ‘The great unfulfilled need of Irish Marxist politics is a scientific analysis of Irish society. This objective however is a long term one. It is not possible to wish such an analysis into being, as its construction requires a substantial period being devoted not Richard Chessum only to the assembly of raw materials but to the clarification of concepts ... The authors of this work have set themselves a more modest goal — a partial survey of the economy and politics of Northern Ireland — in the hope that it may provide a kind of signpost for this larger objective.’

On the other hand: ‘The research described here will be employed to propose definitive answers to the principal questions raised over and over again by Northern Ireland’s historians and commentators’, The first of these statements seems to imply an Althusserian notion of ‘scientific’ work as being somehow divorced from ‘political’ work and has as its consequence a certain separation of theory from political practice. It is fortunate indeed that academics have the space and time to develop their scientific analyses, but the actual participants in the Irish conflict are unlikely to enjoy a ‘substantial period’ in which they are not called upon to make political judgements based upon their own very inadequate experience and understandings. The second statement, however, with its use of the word ‘definitive’ makes rather a large claim on behalf of the present book. Can such a claim ever be justified? Of any book that has been written or is likely to be written on Northern Ireland? State and Nation If they have doubts about the book’s status however, the authors have none about its main focus. As the title unambiguously states it is about the ‘state in Northern Ireland’. Too much time has been spent, they tell us, on discussions of ‘nations’, ‘nationalities’, and their ‘right’ to self determination, Marx and Engels were opposed to making a moral principle of self determination, and Lenin was against constructing abstract definitions of nations and nationalism.

Most ‘Marxist’ writing on Ireland has ignored or misunderstood Marx, Engels and Lenin, and consequently fallen into the trap of mistaking moral exhortation for political analysis. This in turn has resulted in tail-ending either the nationalist or unionist bourgeoisie instead of producing a distinctively Marxist political practice. There is a great deal of substance in this argument, especially as it is applied to the advocates of the ‘Two Nations’ theory (the British and Irish Communist Organisation) and some of their adversaries who have replied to them within their own theoretical framework. However, to exclude discussion of nations and nationalities from an attempt to analyse Northern Ireland is to ignore a very important dimension of the task before us: it is to neglect the self identifications made with these entities by the actual participants in the conflict, to exclude from our range of vision whole areas of their consciousness, Nations may not lend themselves to ‘objective definitions’ or to ‘the clarification of concepts’, but they nonetheless have a crucial importance in any adequate analysis if only by virtue of the fact that they are subjectively defined as ‘real’ by those most likely to influence events. It should not be necessary to add that the work of Marxists must also include a study of why individuals and groups make the self identifications that they do, i.e. the material basis of their consciousness. But to restrict ourselves to analyses of states and ignore the reality of nations in the minds of those in conflict is to forget that many express an allegiance not to the former but to the latter. Class Divisions Bew, Gibbon and Patterson attack the crude formulation of the ‘Northern Ireland problem’ as a conflict between Catholics and Protestants as generic subjects: ‘It requires a considerable effort to make the point against this prevailing orthodoxy that the problem cannot be understood at the level of the ‘Protestant community’ on the one hand and ‘the Catholic community’ on the other. It must be insisted that the problem of ‘the two communities’ is

the problem of the reproduction of two class alliances.’ As a criticism of the simple and naive ‘community relations’ approach, this is unexceptionable. As a reaffirmation of the basic Marxist view that class divisions are at the root of all capitalist societies and, in the long run, determine their direction, it is very necessary. Once again, however, there is a danger: that not only the reality of Catholic-Protestant polarisation will be overshadowed, but that its resilience will be underestimated in this approach. The authors call for ‘the applications of concepts designed to understand class struggles structured by the unfolding of internal elements ... such concepts must analyse how in Northern Ireland the local Protestant bourgeoisie gained and held power, how it maintained a block of alliance of classes identifying with its tule, and how it divided and oppressed the classes and groups that opposed it...

the emphasis in the analysis that follows will, in other words, be on the internal relations within the Protestant block’.

Exclusive concentration on these internal relations can produce an analysis as one dimensional as that of the ‘community relations’ approach so severely criticised. In particular, the very real material relations of inequality which exist between Catholic and Protestant produced by differential access to privilege and power, have to be given a central place in any account of the Northern Ireland society. The capitallabour relationship within the mode of production is not the only significant material relationship which acts as a major determinant of political consciousness. To concede this point and incorporate it in our theoretical work is not to reject Marxism. To be a Catholic in Northern Ireland is to experience relative powerlessness in just as real a way as to be working class. The criticism of Bew, Gibbon and Patterson must be that whilst their empirical work (reproduced in this book) makes this fact abundantly clear, their theoretical work shows less sign of it having been adequately accommodated.

The Northern Ireland State Referring to the main task of their book, they proclaim: ‘The state is the central Marxist Leninist concept which makes it possible to elucidate class relations such as these, The state represents the ‘condensation’ of politics in bourgeois societies. Its content is both the necessary product of the general and specific antagonisms of such sacieties and the means by which these are moderated to the advantage of the dominant class. The state provides a ‘shell’ for class rule, lending it a stable and more or less permanent institutional character. Above all the state is the means by which the dominant class subordinates and divides other classes’, These rather high level generalisations about the manner in which we should conceptualise the state tell us very little about which sets of relationships they see as being the basic institutions of the state. And it would be useful to know this, especially since the Preface to the book (written by themselves) refers not just to the Northern Ireland state, but to ‘its destruction in 1972’, Indeed, they specifically state that the overthrow of the power of the Unionist Party ‘coincided with the destruction of the state itself’, and pose this as one of the major ‘facts’ to be explained.

But what exactly was destroyed by Direct Rule and William Whitelaw? The ‘ideological state apparatuses’? If so, which ones? The ‘armed bodies of men’?

Only the B Specials disappeared and then to reappear in a different guise, more heavily armed than before. The Northern Ireland state shows every sign of having survived more or less intact.

Again, it would be useful to know whether they believe that ‘the state in Northern Ireland’ briefly rose from the dead in 1974 during the lifetime of the power sharing executive? Presumably it then ascended into heaven after the shock of the UWC strike? Ian Paisley does indeed claim to be filled with its Holy Ghost, In one very important aspect this book does however contribute a great deal that is of value. In its emphasis on ‘the relative autonomy of the political’, it casts doubt on the ‘economistic’ interpretations both of partition itself and of more recent developments within the Northern Ireland state. Political decisions are quite correctly seen to be only occasionally direct reflections of the immediate economic interests of the ruling class or fractions of it, and much more frequently a consequence of the mediations of a complex combination of considerations related to the most basic function of any capitalist state — the need to ensure the continued dominance of the ruling class over the subordinate class.

This approach rules out both the simple view of the British and Irish Communist Organisation which sees in the ‘uneven development’ of Irish capitalism an adequate explanation of the Orangemen in Newtownards, Co. Down.

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setting up of two separate states, and the naive conspiracy theory of some nationalists which views partition as the consequence merely of the economic interests (in an immediate sense) of the British and Northern Irish bourgeoisie.

Partition was neither the culmination of a natural process in which the political arrangements of Ireland were brought neatly into line with its economic development, nor the outcome of sinister manoeuvring on the part of an imperialist power determined to hold on to as much of a colonised country as it could.

It is in the presentation of their alternative explanation however (which it must be said is not exactly new) that the authors reveal the weakness of their own political stance. For in emphasising the autonomous political activity and ideology of the Protestant masses as the major factor determining the nature of the newly created Northern Ireland state, they undermine the credibility of their own basic position. In the absence of the presentation of an alternative political perspective, their actual standpoint can be inferred from statements like the following: ‘... contrary to common assumption, there is nothing inherently reactionary about the Protestant working class or, for that matter, a national frontier which puts Protestants in a numerical majority’. Logically, who can fault such a statement? But what can be their purpose in making it? Their book is an historical analysis and we are not dealing with ‘essences’. Just subtract the word ‘inherently’ from the statement and it is plainly false — in every historical period in the history of the state.

Again they quote with approval an article written in 1940 in which the author favoured asserts: ‘I do not regard the present intolerable position of Catholics in the partitioned area as being a necessary consequence of partition as such, but rather the result of a particular form of administration’. Once more, there can be no argument.

But the assertion is meaningless. The Bill Kirk

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crucial question is whether the ‘particular form of administration’ is a ‘necessary consequence of partition’ in the context of the social and political balance of forces in which it occurred. And Bew, Gibbon and Patterson scem to suggest by the evidence that they themselves produce that it is. For their main argument concerning the nature of the state and its basic cause is summed up as follows: ‘The strategy of class alliance pursued by the Unionist bourgeoisie, together with the diplomatic strategies of the British ruling class, were responsible for the establishment of a Northern state with a sectarian-populist flavour’.

The reference to the diplomatic strategies of the British ruling class refers in part to the British Government’s flexibility as to political arrangements concerning the Six Counties at the time of the war of independence, and its willingness to put pressure on the Unionists later to bolster the Free Staters against the De Valera Republicans in the South. With the British ruling class divided and unreliable, the Unionist bourgeoisie were thus obliged to turn to ‘their own people’ for support.

Populism The all important question of the strategy of class alliance is dealt with at some length. Independent Orangeism based on ‘the Protestant labour aristocracy, urban petty bourgeoisie and small employers’ had ‘a clear and distinct ideology combining militant anti-Catholicism with democratic, anti-landlord and anticapitalist sentiment’. Let us leave on one side the problematical nature of an ‘anticapitalism’ espoused by small employers and accept the view of Bew, Gibbon and Patterson that it was such an autonomous force in Protestant politics which persuaded the Protestant bourgeoisie to make itself independent of the Conservative Party (the party of the British establishment) at Westminster, and to create the Unionist Party. The huge paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force then integrated the Protestant masses with the Protestant landlords and capitalists, and the forces that represented the hitherto autonomous movement ‘were stripped of their progressive elements’. Throughout the early period of the state there was to be a conflict within the state between ‘populist’ and ‘anti-populist’ elements, with the former invariably emerging as the dominant force, due to the overriding strategic need of the Protestant ruling class: the maintenance of its hegemony over the subordinate Protestant masses by acquiescing in and basing itself upon the sectarian consciousness of those masses.

All of this, one might have thought, would have convinced even the authors that ‘a national frontier which puts Protestants in a numerical majority’ is likely to be, for the foreseeable future, a massive boost for the forces of reaction and a near insuperable obstacle for the forces of progress. Connolly was seldom more perceptive than when he made his ee ‘myth predictions about this. Yet our present authors would seem to have it otherwise.

Again we have the exceptional moments which prove the rule dragged up to produce a conclusion which flies in the face of both evidence and analysis: ‘The sectarian and supremacist ideologies of the Protestant masses have been condoned and encouraged by the ruling class throughout the history of the state. But at various times the predominant populist strategy has been incapable of producing hegemony. Important sections of the Protestant proletariat have come under the influence of relatively secular labourism’. Finally, they declare ‘only with the present struggle’ have ‘progressive tendencies’ in the Protestant bloc been ‘completely submerged’. So it is those mad bombers who are to blame after all.

Reform It is in their analysis of ‘O’Neillism’ that Bew, Gibbon and Patterson depart substantially from much previous Marxist analysis of recent developments in the Six Counties. Writers as far apart in their political viewpoints as Michael Farrell and Anders Boserup have seen the rise of the ‘modernising’ ‘reforming’ Capt.

Terence O’Neill as the product of changes in the Irish economy — and the Northern Irish economy in particular — which have resulted in a different type of capitalism becoming dominant in the Six Counties.

With the decline of the old staple industries of linen, engineering and shipbuilding, as well as of agriculture, and the influx of new foreign investment, the older family firms so characteristic of Northern Ireland’s economy in the past have been rapidly replaced by new multinational concerns attracted by generous tax concessions and grants and subsidies.

The increasing replacement of local capital by foreign monopoly capital created a situation in which many employers no longer had a vested interest in discrimination. Loyalists during the 1974 apprentice boys’ march. (F rom Camerawork) In addition, a similar process of foreign multinational investment in the South made good relations between North and South a necessity in order to ‘rationalise’ investment decisions and economic activity, especially in view of the impending entry of both parts of Ireland into the EEC. In response to both of these factors Capt. O’Neill therefore began the process of desectarianising the Northern Ireland state, whose populist sectarian nature now became a hindrance to the development of capital.

The political implications of this analysis were very different for Farrell and Boserup respectively. According to Boserup monopoly capital had a progressive role to play in the Six Counties in the break up of Orangeism. Only the foolishness of Republicanism with its armed aggression against the state prevented the monopolies backed by the British state from playing this role. For Farrell, it was not so simple. The forces of monopoly capital backed by O’Neill raised expectations among Catholics which O’Neill could not fulfil because of the resistance of large sections of the Unionist Party. This resulted in the Civil Rights Movement which, in turn, led to the backlash of the Protestant working class and petty bourgeoisie who saw their ascendancy threatened, and eventually under the impact of the Catholic upsurge the old Unionist monolith broke up.

Bew, Gibbon and Patterson reject this entire analysis. They analyse O’Neill not by looking at conflicts between different sections of capital, but by again asking how the agents of the Northern Ireland state were constrained to act to maintain their hegemony over the Protestant masses in a situation of increasing unemployment. The decline of the old industries had thrown many Protestant workers out of their jobs, heightened their feelings of discontent with the economic policies (or lack of them) of the state to deal with the situation and thrown many of them into the arms of the Northern Ireland Labour Party which won 4 seats in Stormont in 1958 and Bo Bojesen

again in 1962. Thus it was in response to the need to re-assert the hegemony of the Protestant ruling class and win back these Protestant workers that O’Neill adopted a more interventionist stance in his economic policies and associated his government with the concept of indicative planning. Say the authors: “O’Neill’s economic policies bore no relation to intercommunal relations.

Their raison d’etre lay only in political conflicts within the Protestant bloc... .

The new departure required the centralisation of initiative at Stormont within a relatively small group of Ministers and civil servants”’.

This was to create divisions between the Unionists since the Unionist Party had always emphasised local autonomy and local initiative. It succeeded however in undercutting the support given to the NILP by effectively stealing many of the latter’s policies and rhetoric, and this was the paramount consideration.

In an important paragraph, Bew Gibbon and Patterson sum up their view on previous Marxist treatments of O’Neill: “By effectively ignoring the State, or treating it as an epiphenomenal expression of the economic interests of different sections of capital, writers like Farrell and Boserup fundamentally misinterpret the history of the 50’s and early 60’s. The ironic consequence is that both end up crediting O’Neill with the intention of reforming sectarian structures (although his attempts are then dismissed as feeble). In fact, he had no such reforming zeal. The belief that he had is the other side of the coin to the view that the bourgeoisie ‘created’ sectarianism, that is, it sees sectarianism as a tactic to be now adopted, now dropped.” Again, it must be said that by concentrating exclusively on relations within the Protestant bloc, they may be producing a one sided picture. Nonetheless it could well be that the new synthesis which emerges in the course of time on the Marxist left on this particular question will be closer to that of these authors than to that of other Marxists who have written on it. Loyalist Responses Two points need raising however in connection with this analysis. Firstly, the authors will doubtless stress that the defection of sections of Protestant workers to the NILP which led to O’Neillism (a feeble version of the New Deal) is a clear indication of their ability and willingness to break from Orange ideology and politics in the presence of a viable and attractive alternative. But if their analysis is correct, those same workers quickly returned to the Unionist fold when their demands appeared to be in the process of being met by the Party to which they had traditionally owed allegiance. For it was the bombing campaign which led them to return to their traditional ways, nor even the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, but the new economic policies of the Unionist Government. This would suggest that the original defection was less a positive and enthusiastic choice, than an act of desperation — or at the very least a way of voicing protest. Once the Unionist Party seemed to take more notice of their plight, they went back home with a sigh of relief. Moreover, their later defection from O’Neillism itself following the new assertiveness of the Catholics, suggests the very phenomenon that Bew, Gibbon and Patterson wish to underplay: the resilience and strength of populist sectarianism whenever the Protestant ascendancy seems in danger. The second point that requires consideration is this: if O’Neill did not represent the political aspirations of a newly dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie, then what was the pressure leading to reforms (or, at least, reforming gestures) relation to the sectarian nature of the 6 County State? According to the authors, it was almost entirely to be explained by pressure from Westminster.

They even lay an extraordinary amount of stress on the personal views of Harold Wilson. And this is related to a more general point which they make about the alleged impotence and inactivity of the Loyalist right in the early 1970’s.

After referring to the collapse of, not only O’Neill, but every kind of ‘centre politics, they say: “Much more remarkable was the failure of the right to take advantage of the centre’s unpopularity. It was suprisingly timid throughout the period, for reasons which at the time were not altogether clear. It was even more timid when Direct Rule was actually introduced — the threatened holocaust dissolved into a series of peaceful rallies. In fact, the right (and even this did not include much of the parliamentary right) was not to launch a real offensive until the UWC strike of 1974”.

An interview with William Craig in 1976 is then used as evidence of why this was so. Allegedly, it was due to ‘‘a calculation that the British ruling class had the will to take the Loyalists on’’. They continue: “Broader implications: if this view held by the right, which was presumably shared by the centre too, is related to the motives behind O’Neill’s movement towards general placation in 1964, a compelling continuity appears.

There was a common conviction throughout Unionist politics and throughout the 8 years preceding Direct Rule that a substantial British intervention in Northern Ireland was a significant probability’.

The authors state their view that this was a wrong calculation, “‘contrary both to historical indications and the reality of British strategy”. But the important point was that the Unionists made it.

But is this a plausible story? William Craig himself was scarcely quiescent during this period. The ‘peaceful rallies’ referred to included inspections by him of serried ranks of para-military men in UDA uniform, motor cycle escorts and Nazi style salutes, Craig made speeches which amounted almost to incitement to murder (the famous ‘we will assassinate

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our enemies’ speech, for example), and which were certainly designed to call the bluff of the British government. He pointed to his para-military friends and claimed to have tens of thousands behind him who were prepared ‘to come out and shoot to kill’. “We in Vanguard feel the time for talk is over. We want the Ulster Loyalists to commit themselves to the course of action.” “We will be preparmg contingency plans which will make any political initiatives which are unacceptable to the majority unworkable’.

“Let there be no doubt that Ulster Loyalists will fight if they have to fight”’. Statements such as these just before and just after Direct Rule provide us with a different picture of the Loyalist right from that painted in the book under discussion. For they were accompanied by assassination campaigns and the building up of extra parliamentary and para-military organisation. One of the UDA leaders was later to comment upon Mr. Craig’s interest in his own political skin ‘The UDA was being asked to march on Rome while Mussolini took the train’.

Nonetheless a strategy of calling the bluff of the British Government was of little use if it was calculated that that bluff could not be called. It is safe to assume that William Craig — and other right wing Loyalists — were doing a little more than merely articulating the desperation felt by the Protestant masses in order to maintain their support. Perhaps this last discussion relates to the authors’ remarks in the Preface to their book, discussed earlier. If it is really true that the state was destroyed in 1972 with the introduction of Direct Rule, then indeed one would have expected the ultimate sacrifice from the Protestant Loyalists, a famous last stand’. If, on the other hand, we take a more realistic view of what happened under William Whitelaw, as well as looking at what has been happening since, the postponement of such a ‘last stand’ by the Loyalists becomes easy to understand. Over the last 6 years in particular we have seen the strengthening of the Loyalist state and the political forces of extreme Loyalism under Rev. Ian Paisley. Despite setbacks necessitated by extraordinary crises of British policy, the Loyalists have not yet lost their state. They have battled, they have sometimes fought militarily, but they have consistently bluffed — and bluffed successfully. The British state has not yet taken them on, and shows less sign of doing so now than at any time in the last 10 years.

How many more books will Bew, Gibbon and Patterson write before it happens? Richard Chessum Bibliography M.Farrell, ‘NI: The Orange State’, Pluto (1980). A.Boserup, ‘Who is the Principal Enemy’, Square One Pubs (1972).