The Sinn Fein Keep Left site has promoted internal discussion within that party for the promotion of the goal of a socialist republican vision.
The site has repeatedly posed the need for Republicans to become involved in campaigns and protests against the onslaught on working class communities in the Republic of Ireland. That is to be welcomed. However, its socialist-consciousness seems to dissolve when its attention crosses the border and it is faced with the realities of anti-working class measures largely promoted by Sinn F€in ministers in the Northern Executive.
The website would appear studiously ignorant of recent reports coming out demonstrating that there is a likely step-change in privatisation coming through the northern institutions. The scale of these amounting to a full £10 billion in expenditure over the next ten years will see the party’s northern leadership further bound to neo-liberalist policies in the future as the Westminster subsidy to run the north is largely consumed by repayments to private sector interests. So not only are these PFI/PPP contracts enforcing privatisation in public services today, with impacts on working conditions and ‘efficiency-savings’ on public services, but they will enforce any future Executive (with or without Martin McGuinness as First Minister) to a course of further privatisation and cutbacks.
Sinn Féin's Right-Wing Economics
While making much of the right-wing policies adopted by the Dublin Government, the website ignores the current austerity measures enforced by the party’s minister for Education who continued the work of her predecessor in relation to term-time workers and part-time teachers. She has failed to implement a programme dealing with the demands of childcare workers in playgroups who have campaigned for years for equality of treatment for their role and currently often receive wages just above minimum wage for work in every regard the same as primary school teachers. Then there is the ongoing cycle of rural schools being closed under a 'don't tell, don't see' policy which simply forces weaker schools to collapse under financial pressure. At the same time, the party negotiators agreed the terms of the current Review of Public Administration which will allow local authorities to privatise waste collection services no doubt with a view to future ‘efficiency gains’ associated with private sector cut-backs down the tracks.
The site has failed to discuss the implications of the cutbacks which are already being enforced each year as part of the 3% 'efficiency gain' programme across all Departments let alone consider how Sinn Féin ministers will implement future cuts of approximately 3 times this order (at least) in the face of working-class resistance. There is no discussion of the proposals to enforce a Water Rates bill which will impact working families already pushed to the wall by the loss of jobs. Where will Sinn Fein Keep Left stand when socialists and workers are jailed for their pledge to withhold payment of this unfair, neoliberal tax or simply their inability to meet payments?
A Revolutionary Socialist Approach
It is all very well for youthful radicals to go along with revolutionary politics in the abstract, to enjoy the frisson of excitement that comes from street-action and protest but another thing to see clearly where to take that activity to create real change. It is fine and dandy for political opportunists to capitalise on the immediate, short-term electoral benefits of being seen to support local communities when it comes to saving their hospital or school but to ignore when your own Minister is the one who decides to close down a Hospital or School north of the border. But it is not acceptable for mature socialist revolutionaries to do these things. It is particularly questionable for so-called Socialist Republicans to segment their minds to ignore the elements of their own party policy when it comes to reality north of the border but to play-act as if they are radical revolutionaries south of the border.
This website has exhaustively analysed the source of Sinn Féin's predicament. We have exposed the difficulty with any political strategy being predicated on the idea that 'Labour must wait'. As such, the party has retreated to a repetition of Fianna Fáil’s ‘strategy’ albeit with the added bonus of getting to implement right-wing politics north of the border. Where the latter took a generation to dump their commitment to socialism, it would appear that the former has already managed to jettison it everywhere except in a few redoubts in the minds of some Dublin-based activist's minds.
Revolutionaries cannot proceed from a lack of clarity. If you seek a socialist Ireland, then you must seek to advance that in today’s realities. With the acceptance of consent, the path to revolutionary unification through force of arms has been closed. So it must be achieved via consent. Does anyone believe that Protestants will buy into Irish unity when all that is offered is a vision of an extended 26 Counties? The leadership line appears to be that through working with parties like the DUP and UUP that they will somehow convince them that unity is necessary. The reality is the opposite, through the power-sharing institutions and the enactment of their preferred right-wing social and economic agenda, the domination of the DUP and UUP within their own communities has been reinforced. Indeed, the apparent ability of these parties to dictate the Government's agenda at will has further reinforced their own credibility in their heartlands.
If anything Sinn Féin working the institutions of Stormont has meant that the reality is that it is attitudes of nationalist communities which have suffered a collapse – a fact reflected by the haemorrhage of republican activists from Sinn Féin and the poor turnout in support of that party in the last elections. Nationalist heads are down and they will remain down irrespective of whether Policing and Justice powers are devolved (itself a goal of no great importance) to an Alliance Minister. The unilateral announcement by Sammy Wilson that he is concluding against the Bain Report proposals to decentralise civil service jobs west of the Bann is only further confirmation that the benefits from power-sharing are all one-sided. It is okay for Martin McGuinness to support the DUP in securing adequate money to ensure the payment of PSNI wages but when it comes to moving jobs out of Belfast the collaborative spirit suddenly disappears.
The Historic Defeat of Republicanism
Socialism or Barbarism considers that Sinn Féin finds itself trapped. It has been lured into working institutions which can not, and will not, deliver its goals. The opportunities to deliver any change are effectively stymied by the mutual veto the DUP negotiated. They remain bound to the demand for the repatriation of Policing and Justice powers even though it is entirely unclear how an NIO-managed Alliance party will change in any significant sense the current NIO management of the Police and Justice systems. Meanwhile, the Unionist parties would appear to be more deeply ensconced as hegemonic within their own communities and the possibility of Sinn Féin reaching out to working class Protestants is completely undermined by their adoption of right-wing economics.
The party’s goal of unity seemed to be predicated on the logic of the all-Ireland economy, yet now that dream lies in tatters. The economy south of the border lies broken and at risk of complete implosion and the concept that Irish unity is economically attractive looks like a continuing bad joke at least for the medium-term.
Republicans are looking to NAMA as an example of how the south is embedded in the northern economy but it is precisely this that demonstrates how weak and retrograde that connection is. The bailout of Irish property developers (which Sinn Féin supported) certainly enforced the greatest wave of neo-liberal cutbacks in the south but exposed the nature of their dealings north of the border. So much so that the First and Deputy First Ministers have gone cap-in-hand begging for the sell-off of this property to be geared towards the interests of northern property holders.
As pointed out on the website, North-South trade has indeed peaked with huge transfers of wealth going from Irish consumers north of the border before it is transferred to the multi-national share holders. The benefits have been to the British Exchequer which has derived a considerable fiscal bonus from its northern holdings. Presenting this as a gain exposes the narrow mindsets of republican ‘economists’ who don’t see that this has been instrumental in destroying the economic fabric of communities throughout the northern half of the Republic and benefited northern workers with a handful of minimum-wage shelf-stocking jobs.
The readers of Sinn Féin Keep Left should be no doubt that working class people will organise themselves to fight against the cut-backs enforced on the fiat of the Westminster government and administered by local ministers. The question for Sinn Fein Keep Left activists is which side of the barricades will they find themselves when social resistance crosses the sectarian lines and stands united against all the mainstream parties? If there are any in Sinn Féin who read Connolly and are capable of thinking about his politics then you must ask yourselves where do you stand and where would he stand. We at Socialism or Barbarism know where we will be - it will be the same side either side of the border. A great change is coming, we call on all socialist republicans to work for it to be a socialist change!
Monday, 12 October 2009
Sinn Féin Keep Left - An oxymoron?
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7 comments:
No, not an oxythingy. Nor are heads hung in defeat nor in mere deflation. Your article makes many good points and ideas worth considering. More power to your elbow in your attempts to further the cause of Republicanism and Socialism.
There's more than one road that leads to the same destination, although some people may take longer routes than others and detour as they deem wise. What path one chooses, based upon experience, expectations, ability to analyse a given situation, and take approapriate actions is up to the individual. All personal evaluation is tempered by our physical circumstances and hurdles put before us; possibly even those imposed by people travelling to the same destination.
The dark days of NLC are upon us and the days and imo are getting darker. Good luck in your travails as you navigate through these dark days.
Thanks for your comment. Perhaps we were unduly tough but we feel strongly that there is a need for those on the left to resolve the muddle that they are in.
Your comments on contingency are very good.
NLC?
NLC = neo-liberal consensus!
Anyhow, your comments on SFKL are interesting and have flashes of insight but they are confused to say the least.
Your argument boils down to accepting real-politick and advancing piecemeal concessions and somehow dressing this up as marxism.
Yet , modern globalisation undercuts the ability of any progressive government to advance even the most mild of social reforms. Check out South Africa and Brazil for classic examples. Chavez' crime in Venezuela causing the coup attempt in 2002 was not revolutionary socialism but imposing a tax on the middle class for the first time!
That is the whole point of the NLC. Because of that working the system, in effect, means that you become part of the problem. That is why Sinn Fein are now justifying the implementation of PFI/PPP in the north.
But even more fundamentally, real social change has always required political revolution. That is the essential corollary of marxism. Lenin stated clearly that tail-ending social movements is insufficient because the social consciousness they generate is always limited by their material circumstances.
The position in the north is doubly complicated by the complexity of the northern working class and the strategic imperatives it presents to those seeking revolutionary change.
Tbh, I'm not trying to dress anything up as Marxist, and I'm certainly not addressing or adopting a Leninist approach. If anything, I'm taking a piece-meal Progressive approach.
Hasn't the dilemma nearly always been that barring revolution, where time stops temporarily so to speak, one can't really forward a piece-meal Marxist approach? According to most ardent Marxists anyway. Therefore, one has to wait until conditions are right (and that's a big ask on timing) or one implements piece-meal policies which perpetuate the current NLC system longer than it should.
Tbqh, I've always thought Socialists, and Marxists in particular, have been poor at getting the message out into the public domain in a manner that an average human could reasonably understand and seek to apply to their conditions. There's too much reliance on what I like to call technicalities (infighting); narrow focus on liberal issues (which NLC has captured); and an overall tendency to forget the reason why someone is a Socialist -too help ourselves collectively against a system that perpetuates inequality, misery and alienation to name a few conditions.
The message, and the delivery of the message, has been piss poor for decades. Therefore, my energies are not put into revolutionary thinking but into hopefully radical thinking; always knowing full well that Capitalism will continue, imho, going from crisis to crisis and continually disenfranching more and more workers as every new crisis develops. Now is the time to educate, inform and not re-create the mistakes of the past. I've come across articles that claim Marx's books are selling very well in Germany and Japan. Are opportunities are arising? I think so.
Yee mightn't approve Editor, but I ain't the enemy.
slán agus ádh mór ort
The enemy is the capitalist system. The question is whether you stand in contradistinction to it demanding fundamental change in the form that previous socialists have demanded it e.g. Guevara, Connolly or Lenin or whether you objectively support it through a reformist strategy such as those adopted by people like Bernstein, Kautsky, Hardie, Castaneda, Carrillo, Hume or Blair.
There is nothing new about a reformist approach which seeks cover for its ideological collapse in the 'lack of consciousness' of the working class. It is a path that is well trod and very well known to anyone with a semblance of understanding of the history of socialism.
You must question whether it is appropriate for self-professed socialists to support a strategy based on the administration of a capitalist state while allegedly holding their noses implementing austerity measures (against their will as usual).
As Marx said, first as tragedy second as farce but we are not in the second re-run of this reformism but the nth where n is a very large number.
There is a huge volume of writings criticising this approach. In fact every marxist from Marx and Engels themselves, to Plekhanov, Lenin, to Connolly, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Castro, Guevara, Cabral, Hoxha, Cannon, Mandel, etc have written extensively against reformism as a betrayal of socialism.
In fact, virtually every marxist revolutionary who has successfully led a revolution or died fighting in that cause has argued against reformism. What makes us any different?
Besides you don't have to be a hardcore Leninist to be aware of the fundamental irreformability of the capitalist state - just read something like Ralph Miliband's 'State in Capitalist Society' for a rigorous delineation of the type of obstacles facing any reformist strategy. In fact his classic work, Parliamentary Socialism, is a case-study in the same game being played out repeatedly within the British Labour Party since its inception (and before Blair's New Labour project).
"What makes us any different?" Plenty. We have further historical perspective allied changing material circumstances to analyse Capitalism as it adapts or, rather, reacts to its own internal doctrine of capital accumulation within the scope of these changes. Those who fail to learn from history and current circumstances fail. Afterall, this is how Marx viewed the world and often held back commentary and analysis until events unfolded.
I'm of the opinion that Capitalists implicitly or explicitly know more about the practical aspects of Marxism than Marxists do. Capitalists, for all their faults, are doers, and they also have a firm grasp of the interplay between politics and the economy. They've become masters at the minipulation of societal norms through the workplace, base social relationships and politics; and they are able to achieve their ends through market, fiscal and monetary exercises presented through the MSM which they monopolise. At every turn, precisely because they know they're defrauding the workers on a daily basis through the production processes and increasingly through manipulation of international trade, the Capitalists uses any and all tools to achieve greater capital accumulation. This is no mean feat considering that Capitalists, who by necessity create crises, have also persuaded so-called democratic peoples to accept more hardship, greater fraudulent theft of their labour power, and even a deterioration in material so-called lifestyles arising from this latest crisis.
Imho, we are beginning to see with greater clarity the relationships between business, the state and propoganda. Even the 'hangers-on' of Capitalism, those who seek a quick profit on shares and property speculation, are beginning to question the foundation of the capital accumulation doctrine. However, they seek to create a more level playing field where the little man can eek out some capital accumulation or strike it rich. These people are fools but they indicate a fracture. Working people, imo, are either confused, still dazzled by petty bling or have become increasingly apathetic. (Surely, this situation and the relationship of the modern worker, especially in the non-industrial enterprise sector, needs urgent and deep analysis.)
Many Marxists/Socialists are in a funk. They're so afraid that any tranformative policy will be seen as reformist that they're close seizure. Some Unions have taken their agenda into the MSM, but in a pretty unsophisticated manner imo. It might be a start however.
Apologies cgmac that your post didn't go up quicker. Between illness and the work in building on the ground, nobody had worked on the site in the meantime.
As for your points, this is a marxist site. Marxism has many forms but the tradition which we uphold is consistent with the course of Lenin and Connolly. We do not accept your implied argument that capitalism has changed fundamentally and that as a result a course is open which allows for a more evolutionary path.
We have to point out the truth that there has always been a reformist tendency within the socialist movement and this, like all ideological trends, has its roots in social reality i.e. the theory of the labour aristocracy.
You make many points with varying degrees of validity but none of them with any degree of clarity that might justify a reformist approach on strategic grounds. We invite you to develop such an argument on your own website and we will respond in a fraternal manner.
As for the need to popularise marxism, we do not see this site as having such a role. Indeed, we hold that it is the tendency to reduce marxism to something amenable to bourgeois consciousness that is part of the reason why so many socialists have suffered an ideological collapse. We believe that what is needed is clarity among those who identify as socialists in Ireland. Clarity on what's happening from an economic perspective and clarity on the necessary revolutionary strategy consequent to that.
Once that is achieved building towards winning the struggle will become more realistic.
It is a truism that social consciousness is not amenable to ideological dispute alone - if it were socialists would have won the argument on moral grounds years ago. Instead it is decisively shaped by social experience and change. It is this latter experience which has begun to challenge the neo-liberal consensus that was built up over the past decade or so.
With such an understanding, the importance of socialists having a fundamentally revolutionary agenda is more important than ever.
This site believes that those who engage in administering the NLC as you put it become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. It is then much more difficult for consistent revolutionaries to challenge the legitimacy of the capitalist system if it is stood over by those who purport to be socialist.
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