Ireland as a whole. In-built was a system of discrimination against the republican nationalist community. The Catholic population was denied jobs and forced to live in ghettoes; factories were built in predominantly Loyalist areas.
WORST CONDITIONS The worst housing and social conditions, the worst unemployment and poverty is to be found in the Catholic areas. Thus many have traditionally been forced to emigrate, ensuring continued Loyalist domination.
The Loyalists and British rulers also used electoral gerrymandering, rigging electoral boundaries, giving factory owners - overwhelming ly Loyalist - multiple votes, and denying non-householders voting rights.
Simple democratic demands like one person-one vote, one familyone house, one person-one job therefore challenged the whole system when they were raised by the civil rights movement in the late 1960s. The Loyalists and their British backers used any means -including violence - to smash the movement.
Such violence has been a constant feature of British-Loyalist rule. Pograms have been used to terrorise the Catholic Republican community and, today, 90 per cent of the British troops are concentrated in the Catholic areas, harassing and shooting people.
While it is illegal to be a member of the IRA, ar laation of the most oppressed, it is perfectly legal to belong to the Ulster Defence Association, a pro-British terrorist outfit.
AFFECTS BRITISH WORKERS The division of Ireland and the direct rule by Britain over the North serves to hold back the class consciousness of workers throughout Britain. They are encouraged to identify with the British rulers and their army of occupation.
The most chauvinistic and bigoted attitudes are encouraged among British workers towards the Irish.
The effectiveness of the ruling class in this can be seen in the small size of demonstrations in this country. The major left groups have been unwilling to throw their resources into tackling what their own imperialist ruling class is doing in Ireland and have therefore failed to build a mass solidarity campaign with the hunger strikers or - more generally - to mobilise mass support for the immediate withdrawal of the British army of occupation.
While British workers are misled by the ruling class on this issue, while they do not identify with the oppressed of other nations, they will be unable to develop the class consciousness which is necessary for them to free themselves.
MARX AND ENGELS As Karl Marx put it, labour with a white skin will never be free while labour with a Black skin is branded. He and Lenin both compared the Irish with Blacks in the United States in terms of their oppression.
Marx and Engels wrote about and studied Ireland at length. As a result of their studies and their practical experience in Britain, they argued that until British workers could identify with the republican struggle in Ireland, they couldn't make a revolution in Britain.
Marx and Engels placed great emphasis on doing work in the British labour movement to gain support for the Irish struggle. In November 1872, for example, they helped organise a march of over 30,000 people in London in support of the great republican fighters in jail then, the Fenian prisoners.
Compare this with what the major British left groups of today have done on the issue!
Lenin and Trotsky, following the same path, also pointed to the need for British revolutionaries and the labour movement to fight the ruling class's policy in Ireland.
SECTARIAN?
What of the view of Stalinists, such as the Communist Party, and social democrats, like the Labour Party leaders, that the republican struggle is "sectarian" and only alienates the Protestant workers?
This is merely an excuse for their own cowardnice in tackling the British ruling class and its poisonous ideology which has infected many workers.
As Irish Trotskyist leader and Belfast City Council member John McAnulty explained in the July London demonstration in support of the Hunger Strikers. 27 issue of Intercontinental Press:
on sectarian bigotry and discrimination. The resistance to that discrimination, which is the resistance of the majority of the Irish people to an undemocratic and armed division of their country, is not sectarian."
and workers throughout Britain.
PROTESTANT WORKERS In the North of Ireland, the British ruling class has for decades been using Protestant workers against the Irish freedom struggle. These workers, who have been given advantages and privileges identify with Loyalism, the ideology of the most reactionary capitalists.
As long as they do this, they and will continue to be a major impediment to the struggle for national freedom and socialism in Ireland.
ged and these Protestant workers won over by socialists ignoring the national question in Ireland.
inist view - such as the "Official" IRA and other Stalinists - have ended up in the imperialist camp.
struggle - such as the Provisional IRA/Sein Fein - have inevitably been drawn towards more radical positions.
NATIONAL STRUGGLE explained how the national liberunique and particularly dynamic form of the class struggle.
be forged.
30b swart/socialist Acton UNITY the most oppressed).
"The state in the North is based In fact, it is profoundly revolutionary - both for the Irish people above the republican working class, PREJUDICES will be unable to defend their own class interests against the capitalists, This situation will not be chan- to them whatever."
The national struggle there is absolutely central to the fight for socialism in Ireland, and those tendencies which have rejected this basic LenOn the other hand, forces that have pushed ahead with the national Lenin and Trotsky, who led a revolution in a country which was a prisonhouse of oppressed nations, ation struggle of such peoples is a In his famous pamphlet, What is to be Done?, Lenin explained that political questions are always more social life - if any meaningtu and true working class unity is to Real and lasting unity can never be built by the most oppressed giving up their own demands and just concentrating on issues that won't "alienate" better-off workers imbued with reactionary ideology (not to mention actually carrying out reactionary violence against Reactionary views are never overcome by pandering to them or refusing to meet them head-on. This is why Stalinists, social-democrats and Liberals have not got rid of racism. Pandering only emboldens the peddlers of such views, helps maintain them, and holds the most oppressed (and militant) workers hostage to the prejudices of the better-off. It means that any unity built up on economic issues will melt away when the ruling class play their trump card of racism or chauvinism.
Trotsky helped educate AmericTASKS an Trotskyists on this in relation to the Black struggle in the United States (which he, along with Marx, Engels and Lenin frequently compared with the Irish struggle).
Revolutionaries, Trotsky argued, must carry on an "uncompromising, merciless struggle not against the supposed national prepossessions" (i.e. Black nationalism - J.A./G.E.) "of the Negroes but against the colossal prejudices of the white workers and make no concessions This is also an answer to those who claim that republicanism in Ireland - a movement of the oppressed - is as bad as Loyalism. Trotsky argued that the upper strata of workers held "aristocratic prejudices" and that "it would be tragic" if revolutionists "were infected even in the slightest degree with these qualities. We must not only reject and condemn these prejudices; we must burn them out of our consciousness to the last trace. We must find the road to the most under-privileged and down-trodden strata of the proletariat, beginning with the Negroes, whom capitalist society has turned into pariahs..."
In Britain, the Irish and Black people occupy such a pariah status. It is absolutely crucial for revolutionary socialists, and the labour movement in general, to fight against this. We cannot, as Trotsky warned, act like "The trade union bureaucrats (who) live in an atmosphere of aristocratic privileges of the upper strata of workers?. States to New Zealand, anti-imperialist movements across the globe, and many other people are backing the Irish struggle. Sinn Fein has also received messages of support from the Nicaraguan government and the Sandinista National Liberation Front's director of foreign affairs.
The main weakness is the lack of a strong solidarity movement in Britain. The failure of the major left groups to seriously set out to build such a movement not only allows our class enemy to continue their blood-drenched policy in Ireland. It also means they can escape the acute political crisis such a movement here, in conjunction with the Irish struggle itself, could cause the British ruling class.
Caught between the Irish strug. gle and a mass solidarity movement. the Tories and their system would be literally up against the wall. All of our struggles, around every right we are fighting for, would be in a much better situation for success.
From all this, the tasks of revolutionary socialists in relation to Ireland are clear:
We have to struggle, as Marx and Engels did, to mobilise British workers by the tens of thousands in support of the national struggle of the Irish people, which points clearly in a socialist direction, in support of the hunger strikers who - whatever our disagreements with the tactics and views of some republican currents — are the political prisoners of British imperialism, and for the immediate withdrawal of the army of occupation.
So far, the major groups of the British left have proved incapable of mobilising even their own members, let alone anyone else, for the very small demonstrations in support of the hunger strikers. Meanwhile, ten Irish freedom fighters have been killed by the Tories.
It is imperative, therefore, that leaders of these groups, of the Labour Committee on Ireland, the Troops Out Movement and others concerned with this issue, get together and put out a call for a broad national conference on the issue. Such a gathering could put out a truly authorative call for national actions, including a major demonstration in London, in support of the Irish struggle being waged so heroically by the Irish people.
1. Leon Trotsky on Black Nation alism and Self-Determination, Pathfinder Press 1978.
2. Ibid 3. Ibid