Self-emancipation of the working class

Posted on August 21, 2026 by irishmarxism

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 83

In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels stated that ‘the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.’ (The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p495). They argued that ‘modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.’

‘Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.’

This, however, is only one tendency of capitalist development, albeit the most important, in that capitalism has spread across the globe, ironically, as many who have considered themselves Marxists have argued the decisive importance of the obstacles to the development of capitalism (and therefore of the growth of the working class). This has come in the form of the purported regressive effects of imperialism, set out, for example, in the ideas of dependency theory within which it is supposed to develop underdevelopment. Without this development of capitalism however there could be no talk of the proletariat becoming the ‘independent movement of the immense majority’ or of ‘society . . . more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps . . . Bourgeoisie and Proletariat’.

If this were not the case then Marx’s view, expressed in The Communist Manifesto would not be correct; that ‘the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society . . . Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . . ‘

This constant revolutionising of the conditions and relations of production makes and remakes the working class, creating and destroying the material bases of its life, its organisation and its class consciousness. As we noted in the previous post, it does not sweep away all previous ‘venerable prejudices and opinions’, which continue to weigh on the consciousness of the working class and oppressed, but develops new ones that are newly ‘venerable’ and sacred but equally inimical to the development of working class consciousness. Politicised religion still plays an important role in many countries, including, for example, Christian fundamentalism in the US and Islamic fundamentalism in the Muslim world. New theories of identity have been developed whose effect is to erase the importance of class and class struggle and divide the working class, often proposing impossible claims; for example that humans can change sex.

Marx and Engels grew up and matured when the process of worldwide capitalist development was beginning to create an industrial working class in only a few countries in the world and when this class was relatively small in some of them. They never, however, broke from the central principle that the emancipation of the working class was to be achieved by the working class itself, even when its lack of development required alliances with other classes and forces in tasks that did not immediately and directly involve their full emancipation. Had Marx based his politics on the worst oppression of the by far biggest class at the time, he would have advanced the politics of the peasantry.

Engels noted that the proletariat, as it ‘evolved itself from these propertyless masses as the nucleus of a new class, as yet quite incapable of independent political action, appeared as an oppressed, suffering estate, to whom, in its incapacity to help itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without or down from above.’ (Anti-Duhring Part 3 Section 1 Historical)

After Marx’s death, and nearing the end of his own, he reviewed their joint experience, concluding that ‘the time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in on it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are fighting for, body and soul.’

‘The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work that we are now pursuing, and with a success which drives the enemy to despair. (Engels 1895 Preface to The Class Struggles in France)

In this, he restated views that Marx had come to early in his political development in which he rejected the abstract universality of the state as simply the ‘political heaven’ of the atomistic individualism entailed in private property. The state presents its members as ‘equal in their heaven of their political world, but unequal in their earthly existence of society’ (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Collected Works Vol 3 p79). At this point in 1843 Marx had yet to identify the proletariat as the universal class and the means to end the alienation entailed by bourgeois private property, but he had already rejected the state as the means of doing so, ironic, as I have said so many times, that many of his self-declared disciples today take precisely this view.

His general approach at this time was set out as follows: ‘we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to. The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. (Letters from Deutsch-Französische Jahrbüche, Collected Works Vol 3 p144).

The politics that Marx and Engels developed did not therefore consist of moral claims that are ahistorical and forever categorical, or other timeless principles divorced from existing society; it did not comprise of virtuous panaceas or utopian schemes that should be imposed from outside, but were rather to be developed from the existing struggles and from within the society of which they were expressions. Today, we might also add that it is not based on subjective experience, of the reaction of oppressed groups to their own oppression in, for example, various forms of identity politics, but in an understanding of their position within the relations of production and how their specific oppression is related to them. From this their role in overcoming this oppression as part of a movement to transform these relations can be developed out of their own struggles.

‘All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.’ Politics and struggle which is incapable of presenting such a perspective is incapable of promising emancipation. Still less are those who, whether consciously or in effect, see other workers as the ‘privileged’, with their ‘privilege’ as the font of oppression, and therefore the enemy to be defeated

The first public statement of their general politics in The Communist Manifesto, as Engels much later explained, was therefore based not on a set of ready-made ideas, which instead they developed throughout their lives, but on the current reality and history of existing classes, struggles, and movements:

‘Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the “educated” classes for support.’

‘Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany.’

’Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, “respectable”; communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that “the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself,” there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it. (Preface to the Fourth German Edition of the Communist Manifesto, 1890 F Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works 27 p59-60)

Back to part 82

The scope of self-emancipation. Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 82

Posted on August 8, 2026 by irishmarxism

2017 Women’s March in Washington, DC. (Flickr/Vlad Tchompalov)

Socialism is possible because of the socialisation of production through the growth of the productive forces. Only one agent can accomplish this socialisation such that it is a cooperative and consciously planned development, and is the instrument of the actual producers themselves, the working class. As these producers are the main productive force in the world the object of the process is the development of the producers themselves, of human development itself.

‘This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which it must be effected. It can only be effected through a union, which by the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, which are required to accomplish the appropriation, and the proletariat moreover rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.’ (Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 5 p88)

No other agent can carry out this endeavour, so that only the working class can abolish bourgeois private property through revolution. This cannot be the more numerous (until very recently) peasantry; some combination of petty producers and peasantry; some combination of women, petty producers and peasantry or of oppressed nationalities, ethnic groups and races etc. As such, these play no role in the existing relations of production such that they could create a new cooperative society.

As the oppressed their struggle against their subordination must transcend their particular oppression and only as constituents of the working class can they take hold of the means of production to transform class relations, end their own oppression and abolish exploitation. Only acting as a class can they abolish class in general and rid the world of the material want that lies behind the social inequality of all kinds that provides the basis for continuing social conflict and oppression. Divorced from class struggle their opposition to their oppression will not ensure its ending, while a class struggle that ignores their oppression cannot promise universal emancipation because the working class would not then be united as a universal class.

The working class is made up of many oppressed forces, including the female half of humanity, so that its struggles must embrace the specific interests of these oppressed groups in order that the working class is united, not as allies but as equal participants in self-emancipation. Marxism provides the basis for the necessary unity that can overturn racism etc. and not just modify it, for example through equality of races among the capitalist class and elite layers of society, and within the working class itself.

We have explained in many previous posts how human productive activity is central to human development and is key to all social liberation – to the relations between individuals and cooperative control of society; to the growth and transformation of civilisation; freedom from want, removal of alienation and social inequality as the basis of social conflict e.g. sexual oppression and racism; and replacement by social cooperation, the creation of free time that allows for the development of each individual and the creation of a realm of freedom as the grounds of human flourishing.

From all this follows that the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself – the bedrock principle of Marxist politics upon which all else is built. Marx even suggests that unlike previous revolutions in the form of private property, for example from feudal to bourgeois, the appropriation of this by the working class will be easier!

‘The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.’ (Marx Capital Vol 1, Chapter 32)

When the working class puts itself forward as the new ruling class it must make its interests the interests of the new society in general: ‘For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to present its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution comes forward from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society, as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.’ (Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 5 p60)

Marx goes on to say that ‘Every new class, therefore, achieves domination only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously; on the other hand the opposition of the non-ruling class to the new ruling class then develops all the more sharply and profoundly. Both these things determine the fact that the struggle to be waged against this new ruling class, in its turn, has as its aim a more decisive and more radical negation of the previous conditions of society than all previous classes which sought to rule could have.’ (Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 5 p61)

In this way the struggle of the working class is more difficult. We see this in the innumerable struggles of oppressed or subordinated groups who seek their own liberation or emancipation not as a part of this general movement of emancipation but as particular claims, separate and often opposed to the general and universal objectives of emancipation that lies within the working class struggle to abolish capitalism and establish socialism as the rule of the associated producers.

This is illustrated not only by the partial struggles against discrimination and domination that do not seek to go beyond equality within capitalism – of nations, races, and sexes etc. – but also of those supposedly class struggles, in reality economistic struggles, that determinedly do not go beyond particular claims within the bounds of capitalism. Within the latter the universal (and political) character of the struggle of the working class is consciously rejected by typically reformist politics that nevertheless often presents itself as socialism.

It is no accident that these ‘pure’ working class struggles – over employment or higher wages etc. – often look not to the power of the working class but to the capitalist state as their saviour, so that the state is certified as the universal representative of society; against which proposition Marx began his search for an alternative that became his journey to working class emancipation. This tendency, existing as a function of capitalism and the state itself, was enormously strengthened by the history of the working class movement. As Marx noted in The Communist Manifesto The proletariat goes through various stages of development . . . If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies . . .’

The development of capitalism has demonstrated that this subordination of the working class, and its movement, to the bourgeoisie is repeated again and again. On the war in Ukraine, for example, many ‘socialists’ have lined up behind their bourgeoisie and state on behalf of the cause of one of its constituent allies (Ukraine) on the basis of fighting the enemy (Russia) of its purported enemy (its own bourgeoisie.)

The underdevelopment of the working class led to the early attempts to establish a socialist society failing and inevitably falling back on the state in circumstances in which the class was a minority and only the state could impose any sort of ‘universality’, as in the direction of society and the bending of social and economic arrangements to achieve it. This is the summary story of the Russian revolution and the ‘model’ of state socialism that it proclaimed, and which further contributed to the view of the state as the carrier of the universal interests of the working class.

These became the ‘digressions, the temporary and local aberrations’ that Engels mentioned the day after Marx died, which were ‘inevitable’ but which, upon his death, ‘will now proliferate.’ And proliferate they have. Even the most radical interpretations of the first state-wide attempt to create a new socialist society often fail to recognise the lesson that it is not even a healthy workers’ state that will avoid the bureaucratic deformities and degeneration experienced and then celebrated as Stalinism. It is the working class directly controlling society’s social and economic arrangements with the role of the state to defend them – not constitute them – that will do so.

Capitalism involved the general destruction of feudal and other constraints that rendered people unfree not only socially but also legally so that in both ways they were bereft of individuality. It permitted the idea of individual freedom and thus the idea of its realisation, even if its social arrangements effectively circumscribed it and strangled its development. It has shown that it cannot yet eradicate all ‘the ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions’ inherited from previous medieval societies that Marx proclaimed in his sweeping anticipatory judgement in The Communist Manifesto.

It also, however, created the grounds not only for the perpetuation of various forms of existing social oppression but also the possibility of recognising them and struggling against them. This is the basis for new ideologies and movements of oppressed groups that realise that the possibility for ending their oppression now exists. In themselves they have no universal aims because they seek only sectional liberation, but their existence not only implies that the universal emancipation promised by the working class must account for them but that it must encompass them or the emancipation that the latter claims is not universal.

Back to part 81

Forward to part 83

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 80 – Universal Emancipation

Posted on July 4, 2026 by irishmarxism

We noted at the end of the previous post that the state and nationalism are held up as the instrument and ideology of society as a whole and that they manifest the individual’s general and universal interests and will. Just as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights are the declared principles of today’s capitalist system so were the Rights of Man and the Citizen the banner of the bourgeoisie in Marx’s day. Of course, states are national states and in competition with each other to varying degrees, while the state has its own interests and defends the class system on which it is based. Its nationalism requires other states and their nationalism in order to make sense. The ideology of capitalism in general still appeals to rampant individualism, inequality and Adam Smith’s invisible hand, in which free markets create incentives for the universally self-interested to act unintentionally in the general interest. The claims of capitalism to represent general and universal interest are thus riven with contradictions.

For Marx, we have seen that the universal requirement to labour, and creation of the cooperative relations that develop the productive forces, are the grounds for universal development that must break through the limitations and restrictions of capitalism. Having no property to defend itself (understood as the means of producing a livelihood) the working class has no interest in extending exploitation but rather only in collectively ending it. This is the basis for abolishing alienation in general and rooting out the various forms of oppression that exist such as the oppression of women and of racial groups.

The rule of the working class can progressively end the injurious aspects of the division of labour and the alienation it engenders: the subordination of women through the sexual division of labour, and the international division of labour that is the product of imperialism. This requires the working class to live and act as an international class, one opposed to national divisions, and itself the objective product of capitalist universalisation of exploitation, often labelled as ‘globalisation’.

In The Communist Manifesto Marx presented an alternative to other existing ‘socialisms’, which then existed and suffered from the ‘undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation’. Two consequences of this were that existing socialist thinkers and movements appealed ‘to society at large, without distinction of class’ while ‘caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.’

Today, when class struggles have inflicted a string of defeats on the working class, many socialist thinkers and movements have reverted to these early responses, with repeated setbacks hardening their conceptions which are then passed down to succeeding generations. So, we have the state as the (potential) representative of working class interests (through such things as ‘left’ governments) and socialism as the product mainly of a suffering working class (from economic crises, austerity, discrimination and poverty etc.).

Socialism, when it is considered at all, is now routinely presented as a response to oppression, with a more recent tendency to seek to sanctify the oppressed with the degree of suffering experienced and then to present responses specific to their particular claims and interests. Alternatives to the working class look to address the diversity of oppression through the varieties of those oppressed acting on their own behalf – at most with ‘allies’ or in ‘coalitions’ – by making advances through the state against discrimination and inequality. They do not start by seeking the unity of the working class to carry out the tasks Marx reserved for it while recognising that it consists of many of the elements of the various oppressed groups that have specific interests in addition to that of their class.

Historically it is not the most oppressed who create new societies, as Marx’s invocation of the history of class struggle in The Communist Manifesto illustrates:

‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.’ Yet, slaves, serfs and journeymen did not create new forms of society even as the old disappeared. Within capitalism, ‘society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.’

Classes other than the working class often suffer more than it, often individually or as a whole, but “of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class’. ‘The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary . . . they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.’

These classes develop ideas that typically permit them to understand society in a way most comfortable to their own role within it, not how they might be the creator of a new one, and justify their outlook in terms that assume and validate ‘common sense’ views, superficial appearances and prejudice. Modern fractions of the middle class – professional layers or those whose job it is to produce ideas (writers, journalists, teachers and lecturers) can often develop sophisticated ideas that do not in the end challenge capitalism, never mind promise an alternative to it.

Reconstitutions of the middle class can produce newer versions of older petty bourgeois ideas, such as nationalism or fascism, with self-declared progressive responses often dressed up in confused manifestations of previous socialist programmes. The absence of independent working class positions in their political programmes is the tell-tale sign that what is involved is purely petty bourgeois politics that eschews class struggle and gives primacy to the actions of the state.

‘The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.’ (The Communist Manifesto): ‘All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 495)

It is a tribute to the continuing ability of capitalism to revolutionise its forces and relations of production that ideas promising a radical rupture are generated, which nevertheless do not challenge capitalism. These ideas are often created in universities but reveal their non-threatening character by their rapid adoption by capitalism’s ideological apparatus, through television, newspapers, social media, publishing and big corporations, and most particularly in state bureaucracies. These ideas have included complete and total opposition to any claim to universalism, often in such a total way as to be self-refuting, including opposition to the idea of truth itself.

Marx argued ‘that the economical emancipation of the working classes is . . . the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means’ while most political movements today that view themselves as progressive have been set up with the belief that this is most definitely not the case. Many calling themselves Marxists unfortunately agree with them. (Provisional rules of the Association Pp. 14–16 in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 20)

This was Marx and Engels view from some of their earliest writings to the last. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx claimed that “the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation” while in The German Ideology the revolution of the working class “leads to the abolition of . . . domination in general”. Towards the end of his life, Engels stated in the Preface to the 1888 English edition of the Communist Manifesto that “a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class — the proletariat — cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class — the bourgeoisie — without, at the same time, and once and for all emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class-distinctions and class-struggles.’

In periods of reaction the social basis of many sections of the petty bourgeoisie leads them into reactionary politics, particularly those engaged with small capital such as farming or small business. They often exploit themselves and are exploited by larger capitals, or consider themselves oppressed by the demands of the state, which ironically because of this is seen as their potential saviour. In their own way they suffer from capitalism and its socialisation into huge multinationals and monopolies but do not see these as harbingers of the alternative.

Under the rule of the working class majority smaller capitals will lose the unilateral power to exploit their workers – through their workers being able to join the majority of their class in working, controlling and managing their own workplaces; while the petty bourgeoisie will either cease to see their own class existence as small capitals to be to their benefit, or find that they are unable to compete with the larger worker-owned enterprises. It is their strained existence under capitalism and the promise of a non-exploitative society that forms the basis for their social subsumption into the working class and the universal character of the emancipation that it promises them and others.

Back to part 79

Forward to part 81

The fuel protests and the best of the left’s politics? (2 of 2)

Posted on May 18, 2026 by irishmarxism

Almost as important as a correct political programme in approaching the fuel protests is an accurate analysis of them – what sort of movement was it?

People before profit were clear that it ‘supports these protests’ but wanted ‘to go further’ and to ‘deepen the movement.’ Moreover, the politics of it were basically sound – ‘The basic demand is right!’

The protests themselves and the movement that created them were to be supported, and although PbP criticised the role of the far right, it asserted ‘let’s keep coming back to the real issue of unbearable price increases and where they come from.’ The point of this article is that the question that we started with is not one that can be skirted by ‘coming back’ to what provoked it; it is the correct response to the protests which is the question posed.

People before Profit were impressed by the fact that ‘for several days Ireland has seen some of the most militant protests in years: roads blocked, fuel depots and the Whitegate refinery targeted, fuel supplies thrown into chaos.’ It justified them by saying that ‘protest to be effective must be disruptive and polarising.’

In fact, the purpose of protesting is not to polarise – that may be a consequence – the intention is to win support, not to polarise it. And the same is true of being disruptive. Blockading Whitegate oil refinery helped create shortages of fuel supplies but it was unlikely the ultimate purpose of bringing the state to a standstill would have been widely supported. Its immediate purpose was to gain control and the question then becomes who is gaining it? What is the character of the protest movement achieving it? The same question arises in supporting ‘militancy’. The north of Ireland has undergone a huge number of very militant protests over many years and quite a few of them were entirely reactionary.

People before Profit say enough about this movement to point to a problem with simply wishing for it ‘to go further’ or to ‘deepen’ it. ‘We also have to be honest about the class character of these protests. This movement is led by people who own companies, employ workers and have access to expensive machinery.’

It was not therefore a movement led by the working class. ‘Some of the most visible leaders have made racist, misogynistic and homophobic statements publicly’ and ‘some of the loudest figures attaching themselves to these protests are cheerleaders for Trump, for racism, and in some cases for Israel.’ That is, they were supporters of those that caused the war that caused the fuel price increases.

PbP goes on to say that ‘Though workers and farmers are present in numbers, they are not dictating the pace or demands at this stage . . . many working class people [are] looking on sympathetically, in some cases inspired by the militancy of the protests. This has happened because the movement of organised workers, the trade union movement, has completely failed to give any lead on the cost-of-living crisis. In that vacuum, people will turn to whoever appears willing to fight.’

So, what we have is a movement of the petty bourgeoisie whose ‘most visible leaders’ are reactionaries but which has the working class ‘looking on sympathetically.’ This is not therefore a movement to be supported, to be deepened, or taken further. It is one to be exposed and challenged so that workers stop being onlookers and take matters into their own hands.

PbP itself puts one thing correctly: ‘a movement dominated by small business owners and owner-drivers, with far-right figures hovering at its edges, cannot win the demands that working people actually need’ – but this conflicts with its perspective of ‘supporting these protests’, wanting ‘to go further’, and to ‘deepen the movement.’ What was needed was an entirely different movement.

It attempted to defend its approach by stating that ‘The answer is not to sneer at that militancy. It is to deepen it, broaden it, root it in working class demands, defend it from repression, and stop reactionaries from hijacking it. We should take inspiration from the fact that the current disruption is forcing the government to act.’

The problems with this defence were that it was not working class militancy that was in evidence and what militancy there was, including in the movement that actually existed, should not have been deepened and broadened. Its class character had to be changed, which could not be done simply by attaching oneself to it, but only by creating an entirely separate one to it.

The article we quoted in the first part of this post that approved of People before Profit’s approach points to the experience of some socialists in the protests in France by the gilets jaunes and their engagement with it in order to ‘address the proletarian elements of the movement specifically.’ Unfortunately, its author has to recognise that when PbP TD Paul Murphy visited a protest in Dublin to offer support he was harangued and sent on his way by protesters that were described as ‘political grifters trying to drag this movement in a poisonous direction.’

This article criticises Sinn Féin for one of its members being photographed with a far-right figure supporting the protests, but seeking to deepen and broaden the movement would have seen People before Profit do the same. They would be standing beside the ‘political grifters.’ What would have prevented Paul Murphy being sent away, and framed any photograph as a right wing figure getting photographed with Paul Murphy, would have been him turning up at the protest with a couple of hundred workers with their own demands challenging the ‘poisonous direction’ being taken. But this begs the question.

People before Profit arrived at the wrong perspective because it sought to hitch a ride on the ‘sympathy’ that many workers had for the protests. It saw an opportunity and sought to harness it. In other words, it was an example of its opportunist politics: seeking a quick short-term gain at the expense of an immediately more difficult defence of principle that its correct characterisation of the reactionary leadership of the protests should have led it to.

It did state that ‘We must demand that our unions enter the fight. . . . . The unions have the membership, the resources and the leverage to force real change on the cost of living. It is time to use them.’ Unfortunately, the unions were too busy getting ready for a new pay agreement with the government. PbP called on ‘every trade union branch, every shop steward, every community organisation should be discussing what action can be taken and building for it now’, but this is precisely one role that PbP itself should play, not simply demand it of others.

The electoralism of PbP and its orientation to an NGO form of campaigning meant it had helped set up an ‘Affordable Ireland Campaign’, except it proved irrelevant. Even the British socialist who hailed its intervention acknowledged that this ‘was not given serious thought before the rush to support the blockades.’

He also acknowledges the leading role of reactionaries in the protests, ‘far-right figures were providing digital signal boosting, rhetorical defiance, and organisational presence that kept the blockades in place after the initial wave of genuine industrial grievance had done its work.’ ‘This movement is led by people who own companies, employ workers and have access to expensive machinery.’ Like PbP he does not examine the importance of the movement having no coherent and democratic character while saying that workers ‘are not dictating the pace or demands at this stage.’

Yet, while he praises People before Profit’s political demands; notes the reactionary leadership of the protests so that workers did not ‘dictate the demands’, and that ‘the political character of the movement’s organisational core was not incidental to its demands’, he leaves aside that PbP supported them. Even if he were right – and he’s not – about a ‘movement whose base was genuinely working-class’, it would only signal that the far-right had taken leadership of a working class struggle, a position which he appears to reject despite, and not because, of his analysis. This would have been a bigger problem than the working class simply being onlookers.

Back to part 1

The fuel protests and the best of the left’s politics? (1 of 2)

Posted on May 11, 2026 by irishmarxism

Political commentators are claiming that the much-publicised role of figurers from the far right in the recent fuel protests herald a significant development in its power and reach. The potential for this development also resides in the continuing war and blockade against Iran. It is forecast that if this does not stop before the end of June the run-down of existing stocks will see the price of Brent, a global oil benchmark, climbing to $150-$200 a barrel. In any case, a more general increase in prices is in the pipeline with an even greater hit on working class living standards.

This is not a question of ‘energy poverty’ – poverty is poverty and covers multiple items of consumption, which will become increasingly apparent as a result not just of rising prices but also of the failure of incomes to keep pace. Poverty demoralises those affected and those who might be vulnerable to falling into it, as well as the whole class that witnesses the deprivation that the state will permit. It will not just be a crisis of poverty but of expectations of the many who won’t go into poverty but will wonder what sort of life they’re going to have if this is what they get out of a period of a much-trumpeted economic success.

The ingredients that led to the protests are not going away; hence the importance of what the socialist movement can learn from them. A review of the experience by a British socialist here is therefore a useful point to continue to do this, following up on our initial assessment. The article reviewed compares the intervention of People before Profit with that of Sinn Fein and ends by saying that ‘the fuel protests showed PBP’s politics at their best.’ Even an initial thought can’t help but including how this could be true given its peripheral involvement and profile.

Perhaps this is justified by an examination of what the PbP political programme says, so let’s look at this. If we do, we can’t help wondering what the condemnation of the role of Sinn Fein does for People before Profit’s strategy of a left government, which has Sinn Fein as part of it. If SF has just failed in opposition, in what sense could it be a partner in anything pretending to be a meaningfully left alternative government? And if it is as bad as it is claimed, the likelihood of a left government in the near term is zero; in which case it’s not the alternative that People before Profit claim it is. In programmatic and strategic terms, it is a black hole into which everything else is sucked into and out of which there is nothing to see.

The author of the article himself demolishes this perspective in his response to the following comment by one of his readers: ‘In real terms PBP are the smallest part of a rickety anti-FFG coalition, within which SF is absolutely hegemonic. PBP are dependent on their transfers, work with them on a local level and have committed to going into government with them on some sort of a united front basis. I don’t say this to be annoying but just that it’s a bigger predicament than supposedly class independent programmes can solve.’

The author says that ‘The commenter is right that PBP’s class independence is real at the level of programme but constrained at the level of electoral arithmetic’ and that ‘the question of whether “external support contingent on a minimum programme” in practice becomes unconditional support for an SF government that delivers none of it is not answered by the programme document alone. It is answered by what PBP does when Sinn Féin fails to implement the programme . . .’ That Sinn Fein will not join in implementing a left programme that should be supported is presented here as a given. ‘PBP’s position is to offer external support to a Sinn Féin government that implements a minimum programme of reforms — which Sinn Féin will almost certainly not implement.’

So, the project of a Left Government as the alternative to 100 years of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael rule is not real; it’s a fraud that cannot work. So how is it an alternative? Is PbP going to spend the next number of years pushing an expected failure? Is it going to going to take responsibility for this failure, through its calling for transfers to Sinn Fein, or votes for it where it does not stand? Is it going to admit that it never expected it to work? And what does it think those persuaded to vote for it will think of this, or any further ideas it puts forward? Why would such an experience of failure not lead to demoralisation?

If this overall issue is not satisfactorily addressed or the questions that follow from it, what are we to make of the policies put forward by People before Profit that the article praises?

The comparison with Sinn Fein is put like this: ‘People Before Profit showed up with a programme. Sinn Féin showed up with a tax cut. The difference between those two responses is not tactical. It is the difference between a politics that names the system and a politics that names the government.’ This is a strange assertion since People before Profit’s proposals consistently condemn the government and don’t mention capitalism, i.e. ‘the system’.

What it condemns instead is ‘profiteering’, which is not at all the same thing. Reflecting its own name, profit is not to be replaced but rather something – ‘the people’ – prioritised before it. What level of profit is ‘profiteering’ is a matter of judgment, or rather a question of ownership and control. The main suggestion is for price caps, but it is acknowledged that previous government action to compensate for price increases was ‘wiped out almost immediately by the scale of the global commodity crisis.’

PbP wants ‘to set the maximum price for petrol, diesel, natural gas, electricity and heating oil in order to provide price stability and safeguard the people from huge price increases’ while acknowledging that ‘Ireland imports all of its oil requirements at prices determined by global markets.’ This is also almost true of gas, while around 80% of total energy is imported. In 2025 the average Brent price was $69.14 but could hit $150-$200 according to some forecasts.

The Irish government cannot control these prices and cannot promise price stability. In other words, it cannot control the capitalist world market. The proposed mechanism for doing so by PbP is explained in relation to home heating oil – that PbP would ‘establish a rebate scheme to compensate retailers for price differentials with wholesale costs.’ Since it can’t control these costs, it can’t know how much tax receipts are going to be handed over to retailers. The article by the British socialist states that PbP has a programme ‘and it was costed’, but unless it knows what the price of oil is going to be then this is complete nonsense.

PbP states that ‘Our demand is that companies are forced to open their books and fully justify any and all price increases.’ But who is going to look at the books and ensure that there are not ‘other’ books that reveal a truer position? And who is to decide what constitutes ‘justification’? Far from naming the system, and not the government, the entirety of the measures demanded by PbP is to be carried out by the government, which raises two problems. First the actual government that is in office that won’t do it and secondly the flaws in the idea of a ‘left’ government that we noted above.

People before Profit proposals entail taxing data centres but also want a ban on the construction of new data centres, a not entirely consistent position. Like limits to prices, there are definite constraints to what this sort of action can achieve, which is why socialists do not believe simply reforming the current system can meet the needs of the vast majority. Nationalisation of the energy industry, as it proposes, is not socialism and is not – in the words of the British socialist – ‘democratic ownership’, which can only arise from workers’ ownership. Large sectors of the energy industry are already owned by the state, including the largest electricity generator; the owner and operator of the transmission and distribution system, and the largest supplier of electricity to customers.

From the Marxist political point of view the most mistaken and false claim about the programme of People before Profit is that its ‘architecture deserves to be named specifically, because it is the clearest illustration of what distinguishes a transitional programme from a fiscal one.’ In fact, it is nothing of the sort: a socialist transitional programme is about what the working class must do to defend its interests and in doing so establish its own society. The People before Profit proposals are essentially about what the government should do, knowing that it won’t, and knowing that its own alternative proposals for government won’t either.

Forward to part 2

Should we be inspired by the fuel protests?

Posted on April 12, 2026 by irishmarxism

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.

Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (6 of 6)

Posted on December 15, 2025 by irishmarxism

The most damning judgements in Fragments are that the movements since 2008 ‘failed to identify an avenue through which society might be changed’; ‘it is unlikely the Trotskyist People before Profit will manage to articulate a viable alternative . . . and the steps between the current situation and the long-term goal of socialism are less clear than ever before. The radical left ‘were engaged in a form of politics incapable of realising its own aims.’ (p183, 191, 192 & 181)

The left made gains during the years covered by the book, expressed in some relatively modest electoral successes, but this was achieved though pursuit of a strategy and practice that might be considered as one of least resistance, which had inevitable shortcomings and meant these ‘steps’ were not an ‘avenue through which society might be changed’; entailed a lack of articulation of ‘a viable alternative’; lacked clarity over how to achieve ‘the long-term goal of socialism’ and gave rise to the perception that its politics was ‘incapable of realising its own aims.’

This is not only a question of an absence of a revolutionary socialist programme, which we have already noted in previous posts. The left has worked under the assumption that achievement of its objectives requires a revolutionary party, which alone would understand the necessity for revolution and how it may be achieved, and that in its various forms it is the nucleus of this party, which is considered to be revolutionary because its leaders truly believe in revolution (regardless of how it looks from outside). This obviously means that its own activity and building its own organisations are the absolute priority.

I am reminded of the slogan that the duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution, except socialist revolutions are not primarily made by revolutionaries but by the working class in its great majority. The emancipation of the working class can be the work only of the working class itself, as someone famous once said. This is one of many principles widely acknowledged but without understanding what it entails. Revolutionaries are ‘the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class . . . which pushes forward all others [with] the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.’ (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto).

The working class party is built not solely or even mainly by the activists of the left but mainly by the working class itself, with the socialist movement playing the role just mentioned. Instead, the mantra of building the party is reduced to building the existing left organisations not as a consequence of the development of mass working class movements but separate from them. Revolutionary organisations can only develop if they find within the working class this growth of socialist consciousness, which is itself partly a result of their own activity but only as an integral part of the struggles of the working class itself.

We have noted the need to challenge the existing leadership of the trade union movement as an example of what is needed to begin addressing these tasks. We have noted that the limits of single issue campaigns means that they were not a substitute, however useful they may be otherwise, and that the political education that was given was the failed statist politics that subordinates the class’s own activity to that of the capitalist state. This view has come to dominate understanding of what ‘socialism’ is and reflects the historical domination of social-democracy and Stalinism.

This was rudely demonstrated by the left’s customary call for nationalisation being appropriated by the state in relation to the banking system when it faced collapse; which was carried out to protect both capitalist ownership and itself, while dumping the cost on the working class. I have seen it defended on the grounds that this was not ‘socialist’ nationalisation, but this complaint just admits its unavoidably capitalist character. Could capitalist state ownership be anything other than capitalist? How could the capitalist state introduce working class control and ownership when it was its own ownership that was asserted?

Progress through the lines of least resistance does not necessarily involve conscious opportunism, precisely because it does involve progress, but like all opportunism it sacrifices long term principle for short term gains. Gains which can more readily dissolve as circumstances change and change they always do. The approach of appearing more ‘practical’ and attuned to workers’ existing consciousness by declaring that one can leverage the state to do what the workers movement itself must do, through a ‘left government’ for example, does not educate, in fact miseducates, the working class.

This does not invalidate the struggle for reforms that of necessity are under the purview of the state, but these are of benefit not only, or so much, for their direct effects but for their arising from the agency of the working class through the struggle to impose its will on the state and capitalist class. Reforms are ultimately required to create the best conditions for a strong workers’ movement, and not as solutions to their problems that act to co-opt workers to dependence on the state. Handed down from above they can primarily be seen as performing the latter role.

The alternative of seeking to mobilise workers when their organisations are bureaucratised and the majority are either apathetic or antipathetic, is often seen as less practical, less advised, and ‘ultra-left’. However, the point of socialist argument and agitation is often not with the expectation of eliciting immediate action but to advance political consciousness, which sometimes might be seen as widening what is called the ‘Overton window’.

This approach addresses the argument that only in revolutionary times or circumstances can one advance revolutionary demands. All independent action by the working class is a step towards its own emancipation, no matter how small, just as reliance on the state is not. Reforms won from the state are significant such steps if they involve independent organisation of the workers’ movement to achieve them. As Marx said in the Communist Manifesto in relation to workers’ struggles: ‘Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers.’

Something similar was pointed out by James Connolly, who knew that temporary victories would not yield permanent peace until permanent victory was achieved, and that for such victories ‘the spirit, the character, the militant spirit, the fighting character of the organisation, was of the first importance.’ Fragments’ statements that the left ‘failed to lay deep social roots’ and ‘failed to develop a mass political consciousness’ is the authors judgement that this didn’t happen.

It is banal and trite to acknowledge that demands need to be appropriate to their circumstances, but this must also encompass two considerations. First, that even in situations in which it is almost impossible to achieve the working class mobilisation that is required, it may still also be necessary to say what must be done in order to achieve the desired outcome.

Second, only by always putting forward an independent working class position, which most often does not involve any call to more or less immediate revolutionary overthrow, is it possible for workers to begin to realise that an independent working class politics exists that has something to say about all the immediate and fundamental issues of the day. As I have previously noted, this begins by instilling in workers the conception of their own position and power as a class, not that of an amorphous ‘people’. What this involves in any particular circumstance is a political question and the subject of polemical differences that are unfortunately unavoidable.

The fall of the Celtic Tiger demonstrated that such crises on their own will not bring about the development of socialist consciousness – that capitalism is crisis-ridden and must be replaced by a society ruled by the working class. One of the earliest posts on this blog noted evidence that these crises most often do not. In order that they deliver such object lessons it is necessary for a critical mass of the working class to already be convinced that their power is the alternative to capitalism and its crises. This requires a prior significant socialist movement integral to working class life and its organisations.

We are a long way away from this, with one reviewer of the book in The Irish Times noting that its editors had excessive optimism about the experience of the Irish Left over the period. The reviewer makes other comments that are apposite. The argument of this review is that the book records enough experience to show that optimism is unjustified, at least on the basis of continuation of the political approach recorded by it.

The project of a left government that would be dominated by Sinn Fein, with secondary roles for the Labour Party, Social Democrats and Greens is not the road to address the failures noted at the top of the post. The project is a chimera that is incoherent and cannot work. In (un)certain circumstances it might spur a further development of consciousness and independent working class organisation and activity, but this is by far the less likely outcome and is not, in any case, what is being argued by the projects’ left supporters.

The left is always in a hurry, partly because of the preponderance of young people involved but more decisively because of the project itself, which is not based on building the strength and consciousness of the class as a whole but of building the left organisations themselves, particularly through elections. The next one is always the most vital. The former is the work of years and decades to which the project of ‘party building’ and ‘the immediacy of revolution’, understood as insurrection, does not lend itself. These are outcomes that cannot be willed by socialists but determined ultimately by the wider class struggle and the decisions of countless workers as well as by their enemies.

Elections allow socialists ‘a gauge for proportioning our action such as cannot be duplicated, restraining us from untimely hesitation as well as from untimely daring’, and ‘a means, such as there is no other, of getting in touch with the masses of the people that are still far removed from us, of forcing all parties to defend their views and actions.’ It is not a means to arrive at a government that is ‘left’ of the current bourgeois duopoly but right of socialism, and that peddles illusions that the current capitalist form of democracy can deliver fundamental change.

Back to part 5

Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (5 of 6)

Posted on November 25, 2025 by irishmarxism

Fragments makes a series of observations about the political consciousness of the Irish working class, some of which we have already noted, such as the view of many on the Labour Party entering office that ‘the crisis was clearly not their fault and . . . the harsh austerity measures they took were seen as both forced by the Troika and, while painful, necessary.

It records the view of another author that the first year of crisis saw a large number of demonstrations but these ‘dried up once the public realised the magnitude of the banking crisis, and they were replaced by years of “muted protest”. Certainly, there was a sense of powerlessness at the scale and suddenness of the economic crash, a degree of acceptance of the official narrative . . .’ (p31)

It notes that the muting of protest was partially the result of emigration, particularly of the young with 106,000 leaving from 2009 to 2013. ‘However, the muting of opposition was also due to the influence of the Labour Party and trade unions, which contained protest and channelled anti-government anger down institutional routes from 2009 to 2011.’ (p30). These organisations did indeed push anger down the road of inevitable failure, and yes, they were betrayed, but how was this possible?

One contributor notes that by late 2013 ‘it is difficult to overstate the feeling of exhaustion and disillusionment’, with the radical left ‘comprehensively defeated on the one anti-austerity struggle they’d seriously fought – household taxes.’ The ‘public mood was judged sullen but compliant’ and was successfully ‘blackmailed’ into voting yes to the EU’s fiscal Treaty in 2012 ‘even though this treaty restricted the possibility of future government spending” (p 40-41)

I wrote about this result at the time, noting that: ‘At 60 per cent Yes against 40 per cent No there is no room for doubt. It is a decisive endorsement of government policy and a mandate for further cuts and tax increases. The result should not have been unexpected given the political forces ranged in support of the Treaty, the support of big and small business, the failure of the trade union movement to oppose it and the inevitable support of the mass media. In the general election last year the Irish people voted by a large majority for a new government in no important way different from the previous one and with no claim to pursue significantly different policies.’

I also noted that ‘Austerity isn’t popular despite the vote and never will be. Even the Yes campaign was under instructions not to celebrate its victory . . . In October last year when the Austerity Treaty was originally being negotiated an opinion poll recorded 63 per cent opposed to it with only 37 per cent supporting.’ I noted that some people had changed their minds or perhaps did not have the confidence to follow through on their opposition. This might have united around the demand to repudiate the debt taken on by the state on behalf of the banks and their bondholders, but this also meant opposition to the Troika upon whom the state had become reliant. It also meant opposition to the administration in the US, even though its Secretary to the Treasury Timothy Geithner thought it was ‘stupid’ to guarantee the banks liabilities.

I wrote a number of blogs on the issue of repudiating the debt here, here and here, and the disastrous and ‘stupid’ decision to bail out the bondholders in the first place. Doing so was a real political challenge and required an alternative that didn’t exist. Without this the failure of the opposition to austerity was inevitable, even if the question of the debt was only one element of the necessary political alternative.

Where the book completely fails is the neglect of what the political content of the alternative might have been, although this is revealing. In recording the activity of the left its non-appearance reflects the absence of this in the anti-austerity movement as a whole and the failure to win any significant section of it to a socialist perspective.

The same contributor noted above goes on to say that at a later time ‘A proper balance sheet would recognise how the Labour Party and the aligned section of the union movement were rendered powerless to influence or sidetrack the anti-austerity movement.’ (p 42). He points to the drop on the Labour vote from 19 per cent in the 2011 general election to 7 per cent in the 2014 local elections and the ‘victory for left-wing independents and Trotskyist parties alike.’ (p 43)

He argues this was possible because in 2014 100,000 marched against water charges in October followed by 150,000–200,000 in November and 80,000 (in Dublin alone) in December in what was ultimately a winning struggle. We have already noted the limp role that was expected of the trade unions and political parties in the campaign in the previous posts but the argument that the Labour Party and trade union leaders could not divert the campaign is correct.

It won because it was a community campaign based on mass protests, blocking the installation of water meters and non-payment of bills. Independents and left wing candidates benefited from their role in the campaign which also distinguished itself by exposing the equivocating role of Sinn Fein. Despite the political weaknesses of the campaign that we noted previously its tactics were able to beat the counter-measures of the government where the previous campaign against household charges could not.

The campaign proved that individual campaigns, given the right circumstances, could defeat particular austerity measures even where the wider offensive was continued successfully. It should be recalled that the water charges campaign took off almost a year after the state exited the Troika bailout programme. It is also worth recording again the failure to draw the right political lessons as the trade union official who contributed the chapter on the campaign finishes his story by endorsing the statement by ‘one of the world’s greatest authorities on water’ that:

‘The Irish system of paying for water and sanitation services through progressive taxation and non-domestic user fees, is an exemplary model of fair equitable and sustainable service delivery for the entire world.’ (p 61)

In fact, the Irish water industry was wasteful and inefficient and state ownership is neither democratic nor socialist. For this, workers’ cooperative ownership or the demand for workers’ control would have been necessary but the Irish left, like so much in the rest of the world, have become habituated to statist views of socialism that Marx repudiated but that have become entrenched through the domination of social democracy and Stalinism over the last one hundred years.

With such a political platform the problem of the state being the solution, when the solvency and policy of the state was the problem, was once again avoided because doing otherwise would raise the question of ownership and control that would show the platform’s inadequacy.

The main victory in Fragments of Victory was thus necessarily limited and could not be a springboard to address the many deficiencies of the resistance identified in the book. These included the failure ‘to build lasting political and social institutions’ and ‘no lasting form of working-class self-organisation.’ Reliance on capitalist state ownership as ‘an exemplary model’ illustrates why a problem could not be addressed: that ‘the steps between the current situation and the long-term goal of socialism are less clear than ever before.’ (p192)

The view that the trade union bureaucracy was ‘rendered powerless to influence or sidetrack the anti-austerity movement’ is therefore only partially true. The politics of the bureaucracy, and of the Labour Party, were not challenged by a wider political alternative and the much-trumpeted militant tactics of the campaign were no substitute for it.

back to part 4

Forward to part 6

Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (4 of 6)

Posted on November 17, 2025 by irishmarxism

In the previous post I argued that the leadership of the trade unions were unable and unwilling to challenge austerity because it would involve a political challenge to the state it had decades of ingratiating itself with it as its ‘social partner’. However, I also noted that ‘the undeveloped and inadequate political consciousness of the working class itself [was] also a major factor’ in the union movement being unable to successfully resist austerity.

The socialist critique of the bureaucratic leadership of the trade unions is not that its passivity never reflects the views of its members but that the occasions in which members are prepared to take action are often betrayed and their passivity reinforced through ensuing demoralisation.

Protests and demonstrations (called by trade unions early in the economic crisis and also later) are only useful in so far as they are necessary steps to more effective action: by rallying the troops and persuading others that there are alternative courses of action and the means to achieve them. Otherwise, they are what they are defined as, simply public expressions of objection, disapproval, or dissent, and public exhibitions of the attitude of a group toward an issue.

There is currently no other rival union leadership that believes in independent working class politics that is separate from and opposed to the state and seeks to increase the class’s political consciousness. Bureaucratic organisation stifles any democratic control that might permit episodic bouts of struggle to advance and accumulate an understanding of class politics. Lack of democracy and low participation are both causes and effects of political weakness.

Both the leadership and membership are wedded to the view that fundamental change can come only through the state as the only (legitimate) agent capable of achieving it. All sections of ‘the left’, from Sinn Fein to supposed ‘Trotskyists’, have a political programme that hold that achievement of governmental office will enact this social transformation, and campaign on this basis. How a capitalist state will permit this is never explained.

Of course, People before Profit and Socialist Party pay obeisance to the view that the capitalist state will have to be overthrown but this plays a role analogous to republicans’ view that the legitimate government of Ireland resides within the IRA.

During the crisis there was little to no awareness of the possibility of an independent working class political force as more than perhaps a vehicle to pressurise the state, or with a view to having its representatives occupy positions in its parliament so that they could legislate sought after policies and adopt necessary measures.

This reflects the widespread support for the democratic credentials of the state and its political system, further legitimised by the country’s colonial history and the struggle against it. This gives the nationalism that is the express ideology of almost all political parties a progressive veneer and a reactionary essence.

Accompanying this is an acute awareness of the weakness of the small Irish state and its dependence on US investment and EU membership, where most power resides in the much larger European states. There are some illusions in the independent sovereignty of the state but also awareness of its constraints. When the Irish state became bankrupt the view that it could not resist the demands of the EU and US that it bailout the banks was reluctantly accepted because there appeared no alternative.

When your politics is based on winning concessions from the state, and/or the perspective of being the official government of the state, it is difficult to present these as possible when that state is bankrupt and your proposed actions are opposed by much more powerful states. Not only does it look unconvincing, it actually is. Hence the comment in the book, in relation to the Dáil, of the ‘futility of marching to an institution that was taking its own marching orders from elsewhere.’

One contributor to Fragments, writing about the trade union input into the one anti-austerity campaign that was successful – against water charges – reports that ‘political economy training . . . was the most impactful part of the campaign’. (p57) Except this training appears to have been peddling the same mistaken conception that state ownership is the answer that the whole crisis, and the response to it from the Irish state, should have utterly dispelled.

This campaign morphed into the Rights2Change movement that on paper united much of the left and some trade unions. Its programme of rights, which went beyond the question of water, made sense only if the state had an obligation to satisfy them, and it didn’t begin to address the claims by the government about the lack of state resources to do so. A programme based on the supposed moral obligations of the state was as weak as the commitment of the various organisations to the project. It demonstrated only that this spectrum of organisations was united in illusions in, and subservience to, the capitalist state.

Two aspects mentioned in the book illustrate these weaknesses: ‘throughout the period of Right2Water’s existence, nobody was working on the campaign full time. The bulk of the work on the union side was done by two or three trade union officials who also had their day jobs.’ (p61)

As to the unions role as a ‘pillar’ of the campaign, it was to ‘bring organisational skills . . . politically neutral; provide economic and political research; have activists in workplaces all over the country and bring financial assistance.’ (p 55) Nothing about workers action in the workplace and what sort of action its ‘activists’ should fight for.

The role of political parties was equally somnolent – to ‘bring political knowledge; an ability to raise issues in the Dail and have activists in communities all over Ireland.’ (p55) Again, without an acceptance that political debate over aims and strategy was absolutely required, as opposed to already accepted, there was no specifically political input sanctioned for political parties.

Like so many left campaigns, broadness was confused for depth, and political shallowness for agreement and unity. One ridiculous outcome was that at one demonstration ‘we ended up with 36 speakers or acts.’ (p53) One unambiguously positive legacy of the campaign claimed by the writer is that the ‘unions and progressive political forces were in place to prevent the movement from being co-opted by the far right.’ (p60). Not a high bar.

If the original platform for the campaign was weak (that water was a human right), there remained differences on appropriate tactics, so it could be no surprise that this attempt at turning a ‘mass movements’ into a’ story of mass organisation’ rather than simply mass mobilisation’ was a failure (p180-1 &182). This meant that it was ‘large but ephemeral’, ‘failed to lay deep social roots’, ‘failed to identify an avenue through which society might be changed, and given this, . . . failed to develop a mass political consciousness around the capitalist nature of our society or around what needs to be done to change it.’ (p183)

Sowing illusions in the state and failing to educate those mobilised on its unreformable class nature is guaranteed not to ‘develop a mass political consciousness around the capitalist nature of our society.’ The major success of resistance to austerity set out in the book came nowhere near this because it didn’t try, and it didn’t try because the left didn’t know what this would have to involve.

Back to part 3

‘Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (2 of 6)

Posted on October 9, 2025 by irishmarxism

In the book’s introduction we are informed that after the 2016 general election one in 20 members of the parliament was a Trotskyist”, which would, for example, translate to over 30 MPs at Westminster. In the conclusion it notes that this election was ‘perhaps the greatest electoral success of Trotskyism in any western country ever’, ‘the development of one of the strongest electoral lefts in western Europe’ (p177)

Except this avoids the question of what manifesto – what political programme – did these ‘Trotskyists’ get elected on that was in some way supported? Was it in any way a revolutionary socialist one and if not, in what sense was it a vote for Trotskyism or for Trotskyists? What wider movement, if any, did the vote reflect? How isolated was it, or was it the vanguard of a much wider radicalisation?

Fragments initially appears to be organised around the concept that there is some identifiably coherent ‘left’, except reading it reveals that this is not the case. There is however some commonality that we alluded to at the end of the previous post, but it is this commonality that is itself incoherent.

We are informed that the Irish were one of the ‘strongest electoral lefts in western Europe’ and that this ‘left’ not only includes the ‘Trotskyists’ but also Sinn Fein; so we know that however strong this left became in electoral terms its political unity is at the very least questionable. You can assemble the various parts but it becomes less an alternative the more it is put together.

On page1 we learn that the left ‘won some victories’ (a near unique achievement in western Europe during this period) that ‘other countries could learn from.’ Yet in this introduction we are also informed that the austerity following the economic crisis ‘created a collapse of living standards, experienced by many’ with emigration that exceeded ’even the highest rates . . . of the past’.(p 13)

On page 3 we learn that apart from Sinn Fein other left wing parties and campaigns ‘have struggled in the face of the new political challenges’ while despite ‘widespread support for leftwing politics, the left has failed to build lasting political and social institutions . . . After a decade that saw the left win real victories, mobilise hundreds of thousands and transform the electoral landscape, in many ways the left finds itself in a strangely weak position.’ These judgements are all in one paragraph!

In the conclusion, after noting some successes, including electoral gains, it states that ‘despite these successes, the left is in many ways as weak as it was pre-2008. No lasting form of working-class self-organisation has emerged. Union density is lower now than it was in 2007. No mass parties have emerged.’ (p177-8)

On the next page we learn that ‘These apparent advances by the left in Ireland contrast sharply with the decline of its counterparts in most of the West . . . the left in many countries is in a worse position than it was before the crisis.’ (p 178). ‘The advance of the left in Ireland is even more striking when the political situation in pre-crisis Ireland is compared with that of Western European states.’ (p179).

It notes the failure of Syriza in Greece and Irish hopes for it, although Ireland did not even produce a Syriza and, as the book acknowledges, its defeat led Sinn Fein to shift its rhetoric to the right, opening the door to junior partnership in government with one of the two main bourgeois parties. Gerry Adams is quoted –“I have to say, I never really subscribed to that notion of a left-wing government, certainly not in the short term. I mean, who are the left.” (p 171) A very good question, to which Adams gives one element of an answer – it doesn’t include Sinn Fein.

This favourable comparison with the rest of Europe sits uncomfortably with the observation that ‘Missing in Ireland, especially in the early years, were the massive explosions of protest seen in other countries during 2009–13’. (p 184).

Nevertheless, we are told that ‘The material successes of the Irish left and its social movements have been unique . . .’ (p185) and ‘the achievements of the social movements since 2008 are striking. There are some real, substantial victories. Hundreds of thousands were mobilised. And the political culture of Ireland was definitely changed. The neoliberal consensus . . . is over.’ ‘Today the left in Ireland is no longer marginal. While in almost all of Europe the last few decades have witnessed the decline of the left. In Ireland it has grown in strength’ demonstrating ‘what can be achieved.’ ‘There is today in Ireland significant support for the left . . .’ (p191)

These advances were apparently based on an already well-positioned movement because ‘in some ways, the left in Ireland was well prepared for the crisis.’ (p185). By this is meant that it was not focused on identity politics and ‘cultural questions’ although in fact this is not the case. It is just that the majority of the Irish left have swallowed gender identity politics for example with hardly a debate, mirroring the introduction of gender self-id recognition carried out by the state purposely also without debate.

The conclusion presents ‘two key findings’, including that ‘the 2008-18 period saw the emergence of major mass movements that have both fundamentally changed Ireland’s political life and can provide lessons for the left internationally.’ (p188)

‘Trickier to identify, but unquestionably real, Ireland is a more leftwing country than it was in 2007 . . . Between the summer of 2021 and the summer of 2024, the left consistently outpolled the right, whereas before 2008, the left only had a third of the support for rightwing parties.’ Also adduced as evidence is that there is now recognition of the need for state intervention to solve the housing crisis. (p184). The problem with the latter however is that this state intervention has largely been to incentivise private sector solutions, which the left has denounced.

The success is qualified – ‘looking forward, the achievements of the last 15 years seem rather more fragmented’ and even the ‘electoral gains arising from a period of struggle . . . is now very much in the rear-view mirror.’ In the same paragraph it notes that the campaign victories over abortion rights and water tax ‘failed to result in lasting organisations.’ (p191). The other ‘side of the coin’ as the book puts it. (p3)

Capitalist crisis did not see ‘the re-emergence of working-class self-organisation and provide a space for the activity of the radical left’ while ‘mass movements were less a story of mass organisation than mass mobilisation’ (p180-1,182)

The movements since 2008 were ‘large but ephemeral’, ‘failed to lay deep social roots’, ‘failed to identify an avenue through which society might be changed, and given this, they have failed to develop a mass political consciousness around the capitalist nature of our society or around what needs to be done to change it.’ While they apparently ‘frequently terrified the ruling elite’ ‘they have never presented a serious challenge to the existing order.’ (p183)

Despite the positive evaluation and even with the qualifications, which leave a rather confusing picture, the real damaging conclusion is contained in these comments:

‘In many ways, despite the victories of the left since 2008, the future looks bleak.’ (p190). ‘It is hard to believe Sinn Fein will deliver the change that many desire . . [and] It is unlikely the Trotskyist People before Profit will manage to articulate a viable alternative . . .’ (p191) So despite short-term victories’, ‘the steps between the current situation and the long-term goal of socialism are less clear than ever before.’ (p192)

The book’s last words are that ‘it is clear that fragments of victory are not enough.’ (p 192) with the fatal verdict that despite the ‘striking’ advance of the left and ‘the apparent success of the Irish left’, the radical left ‘were engaged in a form of politics incapable of realising its own aims.’ (p179 &181)