Histor A.m

two significant political groupings, mainly struggle in the North.

organisation.

Marxist Group is to help launch a 32 County which the socialist cadre of all revolutionary movement, will come together. However, we basic on which this movement must unite”. (‘Where We Stand’, point 1).

It saw the need to develop a revolutionary International.

Vourth International. Consistent with the The world-wide youth radicalisation of the 1960s was not expressed in Ireland in terms of a mass national student movement, nor the type of prerevolutionary confrontation that occurred in France. Its expression came in the emergence of composed of students; two groupings faced with great opportunities in the period of the rise of the From the start, the People’s Democracy was closely related, in a spontaneous and empirical way, to the mass struggle for civil rights and the civil resistance. The majority of the League fora Workers Republic, on the other hand, viewed the national struggle as a hindrance to pure class struggle. However, as the LWR degenerated rapidly into economistic sectarianism, a Left opposition faction developed within its Young Socialist In contrast to the LWR and other far Left groups, the RMG from the start rejected sectarian concepts of the building of the revolutionary party: “Fhe general task of the Revolutionary revolutionary workers’ movement. We do not consider ourselves to be the basic nucleus out of which this mavement will develop. We see the Process as taking the form of numerous fusions in groups, including both wings of the Republican consider that as a group we can play a vital role in helping to formutate and clarify the programmatic Characterized by its line on the national and international questions and its opposition to the bureaucratic methods of the LWR leadership, the faction soon gained the overwhelming support of the Dublin YS and the sympathy of other branches.

programme which would recognise the national struggle as the central question for the working class; and it advocated support for the Fourth | Review.

The LWR responded by condemning the Fourth International as “revisionists” and calling for support for the Healy-Lambert International Committee, a small sectarian splinter from the International Committee’s refusal to support the La On Saturday 25th January the R.M.G.

commemorated the 3rd anniversary of the’

death of one of its leading founder members Mairin Keegan. A republican socialist, Mairin sought to link Marxism with the revolutionary traditions of Republicanism, by striving to develop a programme for the Irish Revolution.

This task continues to be the central objective of the R.M.G. who work towards this goal with the other left-revolutionary forces in Ireland. Mairin Keegan’s memory will best be served by achieving this aim.

Vietnamese, Cuban or Algerian revolutions, the LWR ‘condemned the Republican movement’s struggle for national unification and independence, and based its perspectives solely on the economic or day-to-day struggles of the working class.

The Left opposition suffered an enormous blow in October 1971, when its main organiser and the first representative of the Fourth International in Ireland, Peter Graham was assassinated in Dublin. Shortly afterwards Mairin Keegan, who also played a leading role in preparing an Irish Section of the Fourth International, died of cancer.

But the development they had worked for came. Ata YS conference in January 1972, the Left opposition (the majority of the Dublin branches and the Belfast branch) walked out, taking most of the organisation with them. It reorganised itself as the Revolutionary Marxist Group and sought recognition as the Irish Section of the Fourth International. Its founding conterence, which adopted a 16-point Thesis on the National Question, was held in February 1972;

and the Plough, first published as the paper of the Dublin YS, became the paper of the RMG.

In the three years of its existence, the most notable contribution of the RMG to the revolutionary movement has been its development of a Marxist programme. Even given its valuable work in mobilizing against internment and against repression, it cannot claim to have been significantly involved in the mass struggle.

What it has achieved is to offer in the Plough the most consistent and sophisticated analysis of the strategy of British imperialism and its allies in Ireland, and the tasks of revolutionaries. This incisive analysis has also been backed up in greater depth in its theoretical magazine, the Marxist While retaining its concept of the central importance of the national questicn, it has steadily developed its programme and intervention in other fields, in order to offer a revolutionary perspective on the whole range of questions facing the working class and the revolutionary movement.