The fuel protests in Ireland have involved the blocking of main roads, including O’Connell street in Dublin city centre, the M50 motorway around the city, sea ports and an oil refinery, leading to disruption of supplies and closure of hundreds of petrol stations.  Originally taken by surprise, and then taking a softly-softly approach, the state has moved the Garda to clear some protests away while negotiating concessions with representative bodies of some of the protestors, including seeking permission from the EU for cuts to excise duties.

The protests are mainly formed by hauliers, agricultural suppliers and farmers; in general, small businessmen and the self-employed.  In class terms, the petty bourgeoisie.  The mass of the population, including workers, are also badly hit by the rise in prices and there is general sympathy with the demand for measures by the government to reduce the impact of rising prices; especially given the large budget surpluses the state has garnered in the last number of years through the Irish state being a tax haven for a small number of US multinationals.

A number of far right figures have attached themselves to the protests and the People before Profit TD Paul Murphy was more or less chased away when he went to meet one protest in Dublin. A flavour of some of the self-appointed protest spokesmen who have attempted to sideline the trade associations is James Geoghegan who has revenue judgements of more than €500k against him, plus animal cruelty convictions.  Another prominent figure has previously stated he couldn’t care less if Greta Thunberg got raped or beaten, while claiming that instead of ‘free Palestine’ flags, some people will be waving ‘free Dublin’ ones.

The ignorant and abusive taunts by some protesters received by Paul Murphy has not stopped him stating that the protests should be supported.  He has called on ‘ordinary people’ to take mass action in effective protests; yet the existing protests are by ‘ordinary people’ in so far as this means anything at all, and they have had some effect.  He states that the working class should take inspiration from them and calls on it to take mass action while trade unions should take the lead.   

While there is evidence of limited prior organisation, the protests are essentially spontaneous.  The principal participation is by forces that the two main bourgeois parties rely on as a base, and they are not forces that the working class should take inspiration from.  The prominence of reactionary and far right figures is not accidental while there is no form of democratic control of any sort of progressive movement or organisation.

The social base of the protest is not therefore working class and claims to be representing the ordinary people of Ireland simply exposes the vacuous nature of basing politics on ‘the people’ that we have criticised before, and which Murphy’s party has been guilty of.  He is right that the working class should have a mass campaign and the trade unions should take the lead, but they haven’t and they won’t.  The left has not built a larger movement or an opposition inside the trade union movement and cannot rely on a working class spontaneous movement to rival that which has just erupted.

This weakness of the left has been reviewed before and the current situation is illustrative of the results.  The perspective of a left government championed by People before Profit has now obviously nothing to do with a left movement that would act in situations like this. The putative components of it, such as the Labour Party, Social Democrats and Greens have all opposed the protests while People before Profit supports them.  Sinn Fein, as usual, triangulates. Any such future government would therefore simply be an administration put together by horse-trading jobs and policies and would have no social movement that could conceivably drive it forward and represent it, which is presumably what PbP envisages?

The weakness of this perspective, demonstrated by the protests, is shown in two other ways, one significant and one symbolic.

Murphy says the protests should be supported because they have the same aims as People before Profit, which had previously sought to introduce price caps through legislation in the Dáil.  First, it’s not clear that the protests do have the same objective and are not directed at caps on the fuels used by the protesters.  Secondly, the idea of price caps is a utopian one in any case.

They cannot provide the ‘security’ claimed for them because they can’t promise to cover massive price increases such as have been incurred, which is precisely their purpose; and claims to stop ‘profiteering’ don’t work in a system in which profiteering is its whole purpose.  This is, after all, why socialists think an alternative socialist society is required.  If profiteering could be eradicated, we wouldn’t need socialism.

The second, symbolic reason, were the reactions of the protesters to Paul Murphy’s presence at the protest.  They portrayed him as simply another politician, which in so far as he thinks legislating in the Dáil will do away with profiteering, is actually close to the truth!  The far right get away with this because of the grain of truth involved–that the left has built only an electoralist base in a few working class areas based on their own variety of clientelist practices.  The jibes about Murphy’s identification with gender identity simply illustrate how easily the right can paint the left as divorced from working class concerns, aside even from the stupidity of the view itself that we have repeatedly demolished.

There is nothing wrong in seeking measures to get amelioration of sudden price increases but that is all they can be and it is misleading to pretend otherwise.  Oil and gas prices are set on the capitalist world market and cannot be avoided by any country and certainly not by one like Ireland.  It’s why socialists are internationalists, because socialism can only be international for it to make sense and to work.  Within capitalism, the working class can defend itself by actually doing it themselves; by fighting for higher wages and by building a movement that seeks to go beyond these struggles towards the only definitive solution.

It is also true that socialists should seek to win over middle layers of the population to the cause of the working class, but this is only possible if the working class itself has been won and has built a movement that can convince others.  Before this, it simply means surrendering to all sorts of misleading and reactionary petty bourgeois ideas.

Numerous people have commented that because the crisis has been caused by Trump and the US imperialist attack on Iran, it would have made more sense to protest and blockade the US embassy.  Far from the existing protests inspiring such an action, much of the social base of the protests is as likely to support an Irish O’Trump as protest against US imperialism.  Once again, we have a lesson that not all those who oppose our enemies, in this case the Irish government, are our friends.