{"id":12792,"date":"2019-01-22T21:29:44","date_gmt":"2019-01-22T21:29:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=12792"},"modified":"2021-02-21T14:18:52","modified_gmt":"2021-02-21T14:18:52","slug":"review-class-not-creed-1968-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/22\/review-class-not-creed-1968-2\/","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: CLASS NOT CREED, 1968"},"content":{"rendered":"

Connor Beaton reviews the pamphlet Class Not Creed, 1968<\/em> by Richie Venton both as a historic account of events in Northern Ireland and as an indication of the current politics of the Scottish Socialist Party.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Fifty years after the beginning of the civil rights movement in the north of Ireland, the whole island is coming alive with mass political activity. Campaigns against water charges, against sexual violence, for abortion law reform, for marriage equality, and for affordable housing have spilled onto the streets in virtually every major city in Ireland over the past five years. Protests in the south have consistently mobilised tens of thousands of people, particularly young people and women, and demonstrations have also taken place north of the border in a more limited way. Meanwhile, the Brexit vote in 2016 and the collapse of Stormont at the start of 2017 have precipitated a political crisis in the north, making partition a central political issue in perhaps the most serious way since the Good Friday Agreement was concluded in 1998.<\/p>\n

Against this political backdrop, a critical examination of the civil rights movement launched in 1968 could not be any more relevant. It is useful that Fermanagh-born Richie Venton, the Scottish Socialist Party’s national trade union organiser, has helped to open the space for this in Scotland with the publication of his latest pamphlet, Class Not Creed, 1968: Ireland’s lost opportunity for socialism, not sectarianism<\/em>. It has already shifted hundreds of copies, according to Richie, and has been used as the basis for discussions at SSP branch meetings.<\/p>\n

The 18 page pamphlet is not a new work, but rather the republication of the opening to Socialism\u2013 Not Sectarianism: Labour & Northern Ireland Politics 20 Years On<\/em>, which Richie co-wrote in 1989 with Peter Hadden, the late leading light of the Militant tendency in the north of Ireland. Richie, a teenager at the time of the civil rights movement, was by 1989 a key organiser for the Militant tendency in Liverpool. Therefore, the pamphlet repeatedly references the arguments advanced by the Militant newspaper while the civil rights movement was underway, even though it had only a \u201ctiny\u201d following in Ireland; this partly obscures the political reality in which the mass movement existed, and the political forces which drove it forward and influenced, to varying degrees, its collective decision-making. It presents events through one narrow, partisan lens. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with that \u2013 as long as readers know what to expect.<\/p>\n

Irish workers\u2019 struggle<\/h2>\n

Richie opens the pamphlet with a brief primer on the workers\u2019 movement in 20th century Ireland. \u201cUnder the shadow of the 1917 Russian revolution,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe capitalists faced a mobilised Irish working class in 1918-21.\u201d1<\/a> This peculiar framing implicitly plays down the significance of Easter Rising in Dublin just two years previously, which took place with the participation of armed trade unionists in the Irish Citizen Army. (The Russian revolutionaries themselves were among the harshest critics of those who distanced themselves from the rising and played down its significance; Lenin famously chided them in July 1916: \u201cWhoever expects a \u2018pure\u2019 social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.\u201d2<\/a>)<\/p>\n

It is particularly unfortunate that, by doing this, Richie erases one of the most immediate Scottish links to the Irish workers\u2019 struggle: James Connolly, the Edinburgh-born trade unionist and leader of the Irish Citizen Army. It is a failing on the part of the Scottish Socialist Party that it fails to mention him once in its first pamphlet on Ireland in at least several years, published in Connolly\u2019s 150th birthday year (just months after the Connolly150 conference, chaired in part by R\u00f3isin McLaren, who has since been elected the SSP\u2019s joint national spokesperson). If we are generous and assume the exclusion was not a political slight, this instead highlights one of the shortcomings of republishing, without introduction or context, a text written for a different time and purpose than best serves the SSP in 2018.<\/p>\n

Britain\u2019s interest in Ireland<\/h2>\n

Richie contends that, by the 1960s, the \u201coutlook of the British ruling class towards Ireland\u201d had changed due to the decline of the northern economy and the opening up of the southern economy to foreign (especially British) investment. The British ruling class \u201cbegan to look upon the border and the sectarian monster of their own creation as nightmarish obstacles\u201d to their new preference for \u201csome form of unified capitalist Ireland\u201d.3<\/a> Later in the pamphlet, he argues that the British ruling class \u201cfavoured piecemeal reform\u201d in the north, but \u201chad created state forces in the RUC and the B Specials (Ulster Special Constabulary) beyond their immediate control\u201d;4<\/a> in his conclusion, he argues that British capitalism in 1989 was \u201chappy with the prospect of a united Ireland\u201d.5<\/a><\/p>\n

This understanding of events essentially relegates the role of the British ruling class, and by extension the British state, in Ireland to a purely passive one. Rather than working in tandem with northern unionists and deliberately provoking loyalist reaction to secure its interests in Ireland, the British state in the late 20th century was instead beholden to unionism and loyalism, thwarted in its new ambition of Irish reunification on capitalist terms.<\/p>\n

To back up this argument, Richie points to the landmark 1965 trade talks between liberal unionist Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O\u2019Neill and his southern counterpart, Taoiseach Se\u00e1n Lemass. But here, Richie overstates their significance and their intent; Cabinet documents released in 1998 reveal that even O\u2019Neill\u2019s predecessor, the hardline anti-Catholic bigot Basil Brooke, supported the talks, writing: \u201cI do not think either the constitution or Protestantism is threatened in any way.\u201d6<\/a> The talks were \u2018symbolic\u2019, as Richie says, only in the sense that even hardline Ulster unionists did not feel threatened by them.<\/p>\n

In order to believe that the British ruling class had by 1968 become a passive actor in Ireland, we have to accept, firstly, that the British ruling class had no continuing economic, political or military stake in maintaining partition and, secondly, that it therefore maintained partition for some other reason.<\/p>\n

Richie observes of the economy in the southern Irish state: \u201cFrom 1958 the Southern capitalist government sought \u2026 closer integration with imperialism, throwing the doors open to foreign investment. By the \u201970s, two-thirds of the 100 largest companies in the South were wholly or partly British owned. Over half the South\u2019s imports and 70% of exports were with Britain.\u201d7<\/a> The British ruling class, then, were very capable of extracting profit from the southern state without need for further constitutional upheaval. Richie also acknowledges that this turn to foreign investment was driven by the southern state\u2019s inability to develop \u201ca healthy, independent economy\u201d, which he correctly identifies as a direct consequence of partition.<\/p>\n

Alongside this, the northern statelet provided the British state with a strategic military outpost on the island (particularly crucial in the context of both the Cold War and NATO\u2019s latter-day expansionism, considering the southern state\u2019s official military neutrality) and kept the boot of sectarianism on the neck of the Irish working class on both sides of the border. Richie accepts that the partitioning of Ireland \u201cthrew back the workers\u2019 movement for decades\u201d, but fails to explain why he felt partition did not continue to serve that purpose in the 1960s. Far from being an obstacle, the economic evidence cited by Richie suggests that partition was continuing to handsomely reward the British ruling class with the continued economic subjugation of the southern state, a strategic foothold in the north, and a marginalised and divided working class on both sides of the border.<\/p>\n

Besides these benefits of partition, the British ruling class have always been keenly aware of the consequences of withdrawing from Ireland. Richie touches on this briefly, but only \u201cthe prospect of sectarian civil war, with all the damage it could mean to industry and investment\u201d. The stakes may well have been higher. Having lost a great deal of authority in the Suez Crisis in 1956, as well as all of its colonial possessions in Africa by 1968, the British Empire was in a long period of decline. However, Britain was far from acquiscent to the process; its costly military ventures in Malaya, Kenya and the Falklands are testament to that. As in 1916, when the Easter Rising shook the Empire to its core, the prospect of losing its foothold in its first colony threatened to deal a devastating blow to an increasingly defensive British imperialism. By the 1970s, with modern Scottish nationalism also gathering momentum, the total unravelling of the British state, ending Britain\u2019s status as a world power, was not an unrealistic prospect.<\/p>\n

The extreme paranoia of part of the British ruling class towards the prospect of a united Ireland was articulated by Jim Prior, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, when he privately told Conservative MPs in 1983 that Ireland could become a \u201cCuba off Britain\u2019s west coast\u201d8<\/a> in terms of its threat to British interests. In terms of Ireland\u2019s political trajectory, Richie acknowledges that British capitalists \u201cwere not entirely confident of the outcome if sectarian civil strife were to go unchecked, with the growth of socialist movements within the civil rights movement and an insurrection by the workers of the Bogside\u201d.9<\/a> It is difficult to reconcile this assessment with the suggestion that the British ruling class were warming to Irish unity.<\/p>\n

Members of Socialist Democracy, a Trotskyist organisation that traces its own history to the civil rights movement, have concluded persuasively: \u201cPartition is fundamentally necessary to maintenance of a stable political framework for Ireland guaranteeing the safety of capitalism on the island. Defeat for Britain, or even voluntary withdrawal, would threaten this and also the stability of the capitalist state in Britain itself. At the very least it would fatally weaken the most reactionary and sectarian institutions and organisations in the north and remove the key mechanism for dividing the Irish working class, thus opening the prospect of real political worker\u2019s unity.\u201d10<\/a><\/p>\n

The civil rights movement itself<\/h2>\n

On the civil rights movement itself, Richie\u2019s principal criticism is that the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) did not advance a socialist programme, and instead had \u201crestricted their demands in effect to an equalisation of unemployment and slum housing, within a democratised, capitalist Northern Ireland\u201d.11<\/a> He argues that the civil rights movement should have made an appeal to Protestant workers on the basis of class. This is undoubtedly correct, but Richie likely overstates the success of such a move.<\/p>\n

Writing in 1972, Eamonn McCann, the future People Before Profit MLA and previously a key organiser of the Derry Housing Action Committee (which Richie commends for campaigning \u201calongside Protestant tenants in the Fountain district as well as with Catholic tenants\u201d12<\/a>), shares Richie\u2019s regret that not enough was done to build class solidarity between Protestant and Catholic workers. However, he suggests more realistically that the civil rights movement could have built \u201csome tenuous links with militant Protestant workers\u201d, rather than instigated a \u201cmass deflection from the \u2018loyalist\u2019 camp\u201d.13<\/a> Richie attempts to play down the extent to which Protestant workers were privileged over their Catholic counterparts by highlighting the poor conditions in Protestant working class communities like the Shankill. This ultimately minimises the degree to which the militancy of the Catholic population was drawn directly from material discrimination and the degree to which the base for loyalism was drawn from the relative privilege of the Protestant population, creating a gap which cross-community slogans alone would not be able to bridge.<\/p>\n

In terms of the content of a socialist programme, Richie proposes \u201ca minimum wage, a massive building programme and a socialist planned economy that could ensure decent conditions for all with no discrimination\u201d. He assigns little importance to the issue of partition, perhaps reflecting an impulse on certain sections of the left to focus narrowly on bread-and-butter issues at the expense of developing a wider institutional challenge to the state and the ruling class. This means that while Richie places himself in opposition to reformist currents within NICRA, he inadvertently leaves unchallenged the illusion peddled by those forces that the northern statelet can be reformed; centring a class analysis of partition in a socialist programme is equally necessary to challenge both reformism and left nationalism.<\/p>\n

Richie goes on to argue that the vehicles best placed to advance this socialist programme would have been the Labour Party in the south, the Northern Ireland Labour Party in the north, and the all-island trade union movement. In support of this, he points to the apparent leftward shift of the Labour Party in the south in the late 1960s, neglecting to mention that same party, under the same leadership, forming a coalition in 1973 with Fine Gael, who Richie himself describes as \u201cthe Tory party whose origins are in the fascist Blueshirt movement of the 1930s\u201d.14<\/a> He notes the electoral success of the NILP and its positive role in the civil rights movement, but shies away from making a serious analysis of how it failed to make itself relevant in the years that followed, especially as partition became a more significant political issue; likewise, the nature of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the reason why it became the southern Labour Party\u2019s sister organisation in the north is not subjected to serious scrutiny.<\/p>\n

It is particularly interesting to note that Richie was writing his defence of the Labour Parties, north and south, just as the Militant tendency was questioning its long-standing commitment to entryism. By the end of 1989, the Irish section of the Militant tendency had abandoned the Labour Party in the south in favour of setting up what is now known as the Socialist Party, effectively disowning the very tactic which Richie continues to defend in a pamphlet re-published three decades later.<\/p>\n

Debate and scrutiny<\/h2>\n

Besides the content of Richie\u2019s pamphlet, it is concerning that it came to be published in the name of the Scottish Socialist Party without reference to the party\u2019s official position on Ireland. This was similarly the case with Richie\u2019s previous pamphlet on the Russian Revolution, 1917: Walls Come Tumbling Down (also a republication of an earlier text, this time one from 2001 or thereabouts). The 1917 pamphlet was published without being presented to the SSP\u2019s executive committee for approval, never mind the SSP membership.<\/p>\n

It is possible (though tenuous) to argue that the decision to publish 1917 was at least in line with the motion passed at the SSP\u2019s 2016 conference instructing the party to \u201cexplain the truth about the Bolsheviks to the wider public\u201d while making clear \u201cthe Stalinist degradation\u201d, but the SSP conference has not discussed Ireland for more than a fleeting moment in years. The publication of 1917 was followed by a gently critical review in the Scottish Socialist Voice by the paper\u2019s editor, Ken Ferguson (who has a different approach to the Russian Revolution, drawn from his background in the Communist Party of Great Britain), but no similar critique of Class Not Creed, 1968 has appeared. For all intents and purposes, the content of the pamphlet appears to outsiders to represent the official position of the SSP.<\/p>\n

This does a disservice to SSP members who could reasonably expect the opportunity to pick apart a subject of considerable complexity and importance (not least to the Irish community in Scotland), rather to have one point of view imposed on them, particularly in a pamphlet which peppers its arguments with hostility towards other left traditions on Ireland; Richie variously accuses left republicans of \u201cignorant assertions\u201d and uses Tony Benn\u2019s diaries to lay at least partial blame at Bernadette Devlin\u2019s feet for the Labour government\u2019s deployment of troops to the north of Ireland.<\/p>\n

With the British ruling class now in a period of sustained crisis as the UK\u2019s exit from the European Union looms, there is an urgent need for the Scottish left to grapple seriously with major strategic questions, some of which also challenged the civil rights movement in 1968, and to identify the pressure points that can deliver advance for the working class. Building links with appropriate forces in the north of Ireland, based on a socialist analysis of the situation there, could be particularly useful. In other words, our understanding of the British state and its interests could prove crucial to intervening effectively in the months to come. Though it is smaller and less influential now than perhaps at any other point in its history, the SSP remains the most significant organised pro-independence grouping to the left of the Greens. With all due respect to the author, the SSP can and must make better contributions than this.<\/p>\n

Connor Beaton is a former member (2012-18) and national secretary (2017-18) of the Scottish Socialist Party. He works as a journalist focussing on Irish legal affairs.<\/h2>\n

Footnotes and References<\/h2>\n

<\/a>1. Venton, Richie. Class Not Creed, 1968: Ireland\u2019s Lost Opportunity For Socialism, Not Sectarianism. Scottish Socialist Party, 2018, p. 2.Back To 1. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>2. \u201cWhoever expects a \u2018pure\u2019 social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.\u201d<\/a> then Back To 2. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>3. Venton, Richie. Class Not Creed, 1968: Ireland\u2019s Lost Opportunity For Socialism, Not Sectarianism. Scottish Socialist Party, 2018, p. 4.Back To 3. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>4. Venton, Richie. Class Not Creed, 1968: Ireland\u2019s Lost Opportunity For Socialism, Not Sectarianism. Scottish Socialist Party, 2018, p. 7.Back To 4. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>5. Venton, Richie. Class Not Creed, 1968: Ireland\u2019s Lost Opportunity For Socialism, Not Sectarianism. Scottish Socialist Party, 2018, p. 18.Back To 5. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>6. \u201cI do not think either the constitution or Protestantism is threatened in any way.\u201d<\/a> then Back To 6. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>7. Venton, Richie. Class Not Creed, 1968: Ireland\u2019s Lost Opportunity For Socialism, Not Sectarianism. Scottish Socialist Party, 2018, p. 3.Back To 7. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>8. \u201cCuba off Britain\u2019s west coast\u201d<\/a> then Back To 8. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>9. Venton, Richie. Class Not Creed, 1968: Ireland\u2019s Lost Opportunity For Socialism, Not Sectarianism. Scottish Socialist Party, 2018, p. 16.Back To 9. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>10. Joe, Craig et al. The Real Irish Peace Process. Socialist Democracy, 1998, p. 40.Back To 10. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>11. Venton, Richie. Class Not Creed, 1968: Ireland\u2019s Lost Opportunity For Socialism, Not Sectarianism. Scottish Socialist Party, 2018, p. 13.Back To 11. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>12. Venton, Richie. Class Not Creed, 1968: Ireland\u2019s Lost Opportunity For Socialism, Not Sectarianism. Scottish Socialist Party, 2018, p. 6.Back To 12. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>13. \u201csome tenuous links with militant Protestant workers\u201d, rather than instigated a \u201cmass deflection from the \u2018loyalist\u2019 camp\u201d<\/a> then Back To 13. Link<\/a>
\n<\/a>14. Venton, Richie. Class Not Creed, 1968: Ireland\u2019s Lost Opportunity For Socialism, Not Sectarianism. Scottish Socialist Party, 2018, p. 13.Back To 14. Link<\/a><\/p>\n

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also see:-<\/p>\n

REVIEW: BALLYMURPHY PRECEDENT (Channel Four)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n