Monthly Archives: July 2022

The significance of David Trimble

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Trimble and Paisly at Drumcree (Belfastlive.co.uk)

The death of David Trimble will not be marked by the same fawning saturated media coverage of his fellow Nobel peace prize winner John Hume.  When the two winners were announced many nationalists thought he didn’t deserve the prize but was awarded it because it could not be given only to a nationalist.  It was part of the whole ’equality of the two traditions’ motif that characterised the whole process.

It wasn’t so much because of the personality traits that even respectful obituary writers found impossible not to mention of him.  That Peter Mandelson said he had ‘never encountered anyone as rude in my life’; or that he had a ’notorious temper’ passed down from a grandfather who was in the Royal Irish, and then Royal Ulster, Constabulary; or that he was argumentative just like his father.  Neither was it his arrogant angry public persona.

Bertie Ahern in ‘The Irish Times’ couldn’t help noting that he had ‘a short fuse’; the obituary in ‘The Irish News’ labelled him ‘to some extent a cynical politician’, and ‘The Belfast Telegraph’ political commentator stated that ‘he was a hard man to like.’    Much the same could be said about Hume, although he usually hid it better.

For someone who was a unionist politician for decades and then leader, it says something that Arlene Foster, who trod the same path, thought it necessary to state that ‘I never doubted that David fundamentally believed in the Union’, which must sit beside other observations that the Pope is a Catholic.

The much-hyped achievement of peace following historic agreement between the two sectarian tribes appeared as the pinnacle of Hume’s work and long political career.  Trimble, on the other hand, had not been so prominent for so long and when he did appear he did so as the next voice of unionist intransigence and supremacism.

His earliest notoriety came as a member of Bill Craig’s Vanguard movement, which is the closest unionism came in ‘the Troubles’ to becoming a mass fascist movement.  He also played a role in the Ulster Workers Council strike in 1974 that brought down the Sunningdale power-sharing agreement and which succeeded not simply because of extensive unionist opposition, but crucially because of widespread paramilitary intimidation and the complete failure of the British state’s armed forces to challenge it.

He then came to prominence in 1995 when he walked arms aloft with Ian Paisley as they celebrated the disputed march of Orangemen through the Catholic Garvaghy Road in Portadown, in what was seen as another act of sectarian triumphalism. This was widely seen to break the deal brokered previously to avoid residents having their noses rubbed in it, something he denied. But given the prominence of the dispute at Drumcree over a number of years and the loyalist killings associated with it, it was viewed as a victory over the whole Catholic population.

This action however helped him win the leadership of the Ulster Unionist Party shortly after, and his reputation for being hard-line was reinforced when he met the loyalist paramilitary killer from the Portadown area, Billy ‘King Rat’ Wright, during the Drumcree dispute the following year.

Thus, while Hume’s actions in giving birth to the Good Friday agreement appeared consistent with his prior political activity, Trimble’s role could only be presented as some sort of conversion, necessary to sell the Belfast Agreement as not some sort of unionist victory.  As we can see from Arlene Foster’s remarks, this proved difficult.

Victory may come in many colours but plenty of unionists believe it can only come with red, white and blue ribbons.  And this was Trimble’s problem, his achievement and his significance.

While it is claimed that the Good Friday Agreement was the creation of Hume and Adams it was built by the British.  The role of Hume and Trimble was to modify it as they were able and sell it to their constituencies.  That it is estimated well over 90 per cent of nationalists voted for it shows that this was not a difficult job for Hume.  Not so for Trimble.  Various numbers are quoted for the level of unionist support in the referendum that approved the deal, but the highest that looks reasonable is 57 per cent. And Trimble’s problems only started there. 

His even more difficult fight was within his own party to defend the deal, with repeated confrontations taking place within the Party’s ruling Council involving those opposed to the Agreement who sought to get rid of him.  At the meeting in May 2000 Trimble won only narrowly by 53 to 47 per cent.  The Party split, a part led by Jeffrey Donaldson joining Paisley’s DUP, which quickly became the main unionist party.  In effect, the majority of unionists now opposed the Good Friday Agreement; something studiously ignored by the media who don’t want to register this fact as the underlying reason for the repeated failure of the new Stormont to work as intended, even when it is sitting and not otherwise in suspension, as it is today.

Supporters of the Agreement, especially nationalists, must therefore acknowledge that they owe more to David Trimble than they might care to acknowledge, for given their enthusiasm for it his personality and previous history is secondary.  The relative failure to celebrate his role is understandable since his sectarian constituency just about voted for the deal at the time and without the enthusiasm of Irish nationalists.  But that is why his role was important in a way Hume’s was not.  Since then, of course, their approval has fallen and the deal has been subject to changes unaccompanied by the initial hype.

The failure of his achievement in the Agreement to bring the stability anticipated could not be ignored in the obituaries but we have been told that while ‘it has many flaws’, compared to the alternative ‘it is infinitely preferable’ (John Manley, ‘The Irish News’).  For ‘The Irish Times’ obituary writer ‘it is better than the alternative: another failed powersharing experiment and a possible return to violence . . .’

It is a moot point whether instability due to lack of a deal in 1998 is worse than instability as a result of its existence now: whether instability resulting from continued search for a deal is worse than that arising from the achievement of a deal that continually breaks down.  From the start the absence of widespread political violence has been identified with the Good Friday Agreement by politicians and the media but the origins of the deal and the experience of its (non) operation show the two are not the same.  That such identity is required is explained by the lack of any other merit to the sectarian arrangements put in place that repeatedly fail and fall over.

Trimble was a reactionary and the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement he fought tenaciously for was no exception.  Latterly he was a keen exponent of Brexit and opponent of the Northern Ireland Protocol.  So much for the politics of stability.

‘The Irish Times’ obituary records that the standout line in his Nobel peace prize acceptance speech in Oslo included the remark that Northern Ireland had been ‘a cold house for Catholics’.  This, however, is a euphemism for decades of discrimination and repression.  The Agreement he fought for was designed only to make modest changes to what was considered a modest injustice.  Turning the heating up was not a solution to a house that should be condemned. 

Social forms of emancipation 

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Photo: https://www.positive.news/uk/the-uk-workers-co-op-filling-in-fast-fashions-gaps/

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 48

In the previous post I noted that Marx states that solving the problems thrown up by social revolution will be possible when the conditions are present or “in the course of formation” with the implication that if they are not present or insufficiently in formation they cannot be accomplished.

These tasks include the development of the forces of production and of the working class and its movement so that it takes into its own hands these forces.  Only through the massive socialisation of production carried out by capitalism is it possible to make these forces the collective power of the working class.  Individual production such as peasant holdings, guild production, or petty commodity production in general, cannot support collective ownership.  In the terminology of the Preface of 1859, the new relations of production would not be appropriate to the forces of production.

The massive development of today’s socialised production could only come about through the huge accumulation of means of production and transport etc, which cannot now function without equal development of massive amounts of data and information.  These have developed through accumulation of these means as capital by the capitalist class.  This in turn is simply invested surplus value that could not have been accumulated without the massive growth in the exploitation of the working class.

All this entails certain characteristics that are important to understanding the prerequisites for socialist revolution, understood both in terms of the development of the productive forces, before and after the occurrence of working class political revolution, and for the political revolution itself. 

The advance of the forces of production has involved the prodigious increase in the international division of labour with implications for their continuing development, and how they must develop further under working class control and direction.  It also makes clearer than was the case in Marx’s time that political revolution by the working class cannot succeed on a purely national basis, something that would already be universally accepted had the working class movement succeeded in developing international organisation, which therefore remains a crucial task.

The existing forms of socialisation also inevitably involve enormous increases in the concentration and centralisation of capital, which assists the possibility and potential for collective ownership by the working class.  This has necessarily involved an enormous increase in planning both within and between individual productive forces.  Engels recognised this in his critique of the Erfurt Programme, when referring to paragraph 4 of that programme’s criticism of “the planlessness rooted in the nature of capitalist private production”

Engels suggested that this “needs considerable improvement. I am familiar with capitalist production as a social form, or an economic phase; capitalist private production being a phenomenon which in one form or another is encountered in that phase. What is capitalist private production? Production by separate entrepreneurs, which is increasingly becoming an exception.”

‘Capitalist production by joint-stock companies is no longer private production but production on behalf of many associated people. And when we pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”

The opposition between capitalism and socialism is not therefore about a simple counter-position of market and plan, since development of the latter within capitalism also helps lay the ground for the new relations of production that define the new working class society. It is the class that rules, that carries out the planning and that determines its scope and character that makes the difference, not the existence of plans themselves.

This also means that whatever role market relations initially have in the transition to cooperative production – before and after political revolution – will arise from the existing planning within capitalism, its degree of development beforehand and the capacity to expand and advance it thereafter.

The material relations of production that herald socialism also therefore refer to the forms of ownership that exist before political revolution, that will serve to help bring it about as well as help progress its success thereafter:

“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour.  They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage.”

As Engels said in a letter to Bebel: 

“Marx and I never doubted that in the transition to the full communist economy we will have to use the cooperative system as an intermediate stage on a large scale.”

It is not therefore simply a question of some quantitative development of the forces of production, which is the limited way that it is often considered, but the necessary characteristics of that development – including the social forms that it takes – that affect the sufficiency of the material preconditions for socialism and the associated requirements for successful political revolution.

So, Marx does not say that just because the forces of production have developed – to whatever level – the new society will emerge out of it. If it does not then it (the old society) may well continue to develop its forces of production.  The creation of the new is a conscious act.

This is because it is the working class itself, as it is organised in production, that is the prime productive force, which comes into conflict within the prevailing relations of production, i.e. the class relations of subordination and exploitation, and which means the contradiction between the forces and relations is not a simple resolution in favour of the forces, as some bourgeois analysis might seek to contend.  An early formulation by Marx appeared in the Poverty of Philosophy:

“For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself, it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. The organisation of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society.” 

In Value, Price and Profit Marx explains to workers that ‘They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society.’

Thus, the way the social forms of production have developed under capitalism are also part of the material circumstances that face the working class in its task of overthrowing and transforming it.  This includes the international nature of the division of labour and of the classes necessarily based on it; the increased removal of the capitalist class directly from the greatest means of production with the substitution of professional and technical staff that shade into the working class; and the forms of socialised ownership arising, including development of its cooperative forms, which can all act as more direct preparation of the working class for its new role as master of society.

Marx presented no systematic view on how all these elements might come together just as he did not provide a blueprint about how the new society would be planned, as the latter grows out of the former and not from some prior schema.  It has however been stated repeatedly that this would arise directly out of existing society and not from some invented first principles, whether that be a certain plan or state structure; especially as the latter must become subordinated to general society and not its master.

Back to part 47

Forward to part 49