Engels once said that ‘Marx and I, for forty years, repeated ad nauseam that for us the democratic republic is the only, political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalised and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.’
The context was a claim against him that when ‘the socialist party, will become the majority’ it will ‘then proceed to take power.’ Engels however stated that ‘For a start, I have never said the socialist party, will become the majority and then proceed to take power. On the contrary, I have expressly said that the odds are ten to one that our rulers, well before that point arrives, will use violence against us, and this would shift us from the terrain of majority to the terrain of revolution . . .’
Responding to the question of what form this power would take – ‘Will it be monarchic, or republican, or will it go back to Weitling’s utopia’, Engels replied that of course the Reichstag deputies are republicans and revolutionaries, the question of a Republic being the most controversial political question in Imperial Germany at that time.
Engels goes on to ask whether it is implied ‘that the German socialists attribute no more importance to the social form than to the political form? Again he would be mistaken. He should be well enough acquainted with German socialism to know that it demands the socialisation of all the means of production. How can this economic revolution be accomplished? That will depend on the circumstances in which our party seizes power, on the moment at which and the manner in which that occurs.’ (Engels, Reply to the Honourable Giovanni Bovio MECW Vol 27 p271)
What Engels is making clear is that the fight for democracy is vital to the struggle of the working class to achieve political power not that it is necessary to have a republic as the first step to communism. Even where the question of a Republic was the unmentionable political issue, the objective was ‘the socialisation of all the means of production.’
On a separate occasion he said that ‘If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power in the form of the democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat . .’ (emphasis added – SM) On the question of a Republic he explains the content of the demand, if it is not possible to employ the term itself: ‘But the fact that in Germany it is not permitted to advance even a republican party programme openly, proves how totally mistaken is the belief that a republic, and not only a republic, but also communist society, can be established in a cosy peaceful way’
‘However, the question of the republic could possibly be passed by. What, however, in my opinion should and could be included is the demand for the concentration of all political power in the hands of the people’s representatives. That would suffice for the time being if it is impossible to go any further.’ (Engels A critique of the draft Social-Democratic programme of 1891, MECW Vol 27 p227)
Engels in his postscript to Marx’s Civil War in France wrote ‘And people think they have taken quite an extraordinary bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.’
‘From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine . . .’ The bourgeois republic was not therefore the mechanism to advance towards communism.
Marx noted of the Paris Commune that ‘the political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery.’
In one review of Citizen Marx, Mike Macnair states that ‘the conception of the democratic republic as the necessary first step to communism was, in fact, Marx’s conception: comrade Leipold has, I think, shown this beyond rebuttal.’ If this is taken to mean that the struggle always and everywhere involves firstly a fight for a bourgeois republic then we see that this is not the case. In the Paris Commune the struggle went immediately beyond it and Leipold argues that Marx never looked at the struggle for bourgeois democracy – a bourgeois republic – in the same way after it (see the previous post).
It is not true today because in many countries, capitalism is ruled by states with a democratic and republican form. There are all sorts of restrictions and qualifications to this bourgeois democracy, and Marx noted and opposed them in his day, but this did not transform the working class struggle – and communists bringing ‘to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question’ – into a struggle first for a bourgeois ‘democratic republic’. This is simply old-fashioned Stalinism in which the working class struggle is always limited to a fight for bourgeois democracy, and only when successful, then a struggle for socialism. This never comes because the bourgeois allies asserted as necessary in the first struggle betray not only the struggle of the working class for socialism but also any struggle for democracy that involves the working class as an independent force.
Macnair appears to accept grounds for rejecting this approach today, on the basis that ‘It is nonetheless arguable that the more advanced stage of the spread of capitalism across the whole globe, and its decline at its core, means that we should focus more on socialisation: the immediate need to move beyond markets and privately-owned concentrations of capital as the means of coordinating human productive activities. . . . In this sense socialisation is more immediately posed than it was in the later 19th century.’
This means that the working class is the majority of society, with the existence of a much more developed capitalist system that brings to the fore the question of working class dissolution of capitalist private property through socialisation of the productive forces. To defend this process requires a Commune type state and not a bourgeois republic that will, no matter how democratic or republican, stand upon and defend capitalist property relations.
Unfortunately, Macnair rejects this – ‘There are two problems with this line of argument’ he claims. ‘The first is the Soviet case’ in which economic planning failed. He argues that ‘Democratic republicanism is essential to effective economic planning; and, because it is essential to effective economic planning, it is also essential to believable socialism/communism.’
In fact, the Soviet Union was not an example of an ‘advanced stage’ capitalism and the initial major problem with socialisation of production was the small size of the forces of production that could most easily be socialised, and thus the associated weakness of the working class that would carry it out. This experience is not therefore an argument against working class socialisation of the forces of production and a state form of the Commune type adequate to defend this process.
The second problem he identifies with a ‘focus more on socialisation: the immediate need to move beyond markets and privately-owned concentrations of capital’ is not so much a structural feature of the current stage of capitalism (that it rules out socialisation) but an obstacle to it. What he poses is an obstacle to any and all independent political action by the working class, including reform of the capitalist state that Macnair poses as the ‘necessary first step to communism.’
He writes that it is ‘illusory to imagine that it is possible to fight for “workers’ democracy” against the bureaucracy, without simultaneously proposing a constitutional alternative to the regime of the capitalist state as such. Without challenging the capitalist constitutional order, it is impossible to render transparent the dictatorship of the labour bureaucracy in workers’ organisations.’ The capitalist state must be democratised before the working class movement can also be so transformed appears to be the argument.
Democratising the capitalist state requires a force to do it, which presumably is the working class, but as long as the workers’ movement is strangled by bureaucracy this is not going to be done. In terms of voting, elections in most minimally democratic bourgeois republics involve a bigger turnout than elections within trade unions, which illustrates the necessity to politicise the working class movement. The prior task to making changes to the capitalist state is to dissolve illusions in it, including that it can be ‘really’ democratic and that it can be made a (more?) neutral mechanism that can be employed by the working class for its own ends.
Any mass mobilisation of the working class will face the immediate task of sidelining or removing the labour bureaucracy because the organisations and mobilisations this bureaucracy stifles are the workers own. This task will need to be both independent of any change to the ‘constitutional order of the capitalist state’ and go beyond it. Constitutional forms can change but the essential nature of the state remains. Prioritising changing this is to invest in the capitalist state the power of making changes that only the self-emancipation of the working class can accomplish. Why would a capitalist state, again no matter how democratic or republican, help ‘render transparent the dictatorship of the labour bureaucracy in workers’ organisations?’
Removing or otherwise destroying the labour bureaucracy will undoubtedly be accompanied with the need to struggle for goals outside the workers’ organisations, but these struggles should not be under the misapprehension that what we need is reform of the capitalist state constitution in order to change the constitution of the workers own organisations. In so far as we often seek to change the operation of the capitalist state it is often to remove its influence on workers’ organisations. The functioning of this state is not an example to follow, or an aid to understanding working class interests, but an obstacle to overcome including the many illusions workers have in it.
Attempts to give a place to republican politics within socialism that it should not have ignores the class character of even the most radical republicanism and inevitably drags us back to accommodation with the capitalist state. This is not a lesson Citizen Marx teaches.
Republicanism and Communism differed on the nature of the revolution that was required and so disagreed on the social force that would accomplish it. For the former it was ‘the people’ and for the latter the ‘proletarians of all countries’, which should ‘unite.’
Republicans accused communists of “ignoring the rest of humanity” while they viewed the people as the non-elite sections of the population, which may or may not have included the capitalist class, depending on the particular republican view. Karl Heinzen, for example, did not see the new bourgeoisie as the enemy.
Marx argued that “The people . . . was a vague expression” to be replaced “by a definite one, the proletariat . . .” The attempt to use the former combined various classes with an assumed common interest so that any separation within them was an unwarranted division that set back their common interests.
Even were a “privileged class” identified such a view failed to identify the different interests of the ‘non-privileged’ classes as if they had common class interests, including, for example, the working class, independent artisans, peasants and other petty bourgeois classes.
Only an identification of class and their associated interests could specify their material interests that might unite them or divide them. Such an analysis was inevitable as soon as one identified the particular class interest of the “privileged class”, which might prove to be varied – feudal princes or modern capitalists for example – which would then identify the subordinate class(es) they oppressed and exploited. Talk of “the people’ obscured the interests of all classes, particularly the subordinate ones, and most importantly for the creation of a new society, concealed or blurred the interests of the working class.
Marx argued that failure to identify the separate interests of the different classes making up “the people” resulted in a false understanding of contemporary political realities. So, in the elections to the French Constituent National Assembly in 1848 the republicans’ “imaginary people” were replaced by the “real people” the majority of whom voted for the candidates of the anti-republicans and elected the representatives of the bourgeoisie and landowners.
‘Accordingly, when a struggle is impending, they do not need to examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources too critically. They have merely to give the signal and the people, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 11 p 65)
In the event of defeat ‘then either the fault lies with pernicious sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps, or the army was too brutalised and blinded to comprehend that the pure aims of democracy are also the best thing for it, or the whole thing has been wrecked by a detail in its execution, or else an unforeseen accident has this time spoilt the game. In any case, the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as he was innocent when he went into it, with the newly-won conviction that he is bound to win, not that he himself and his party have to give up the old standpoint, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to ripen to suit him.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 11 p 65-66)
Politics based on the purported interests of ‘the people’ create imaginary interests that are not shared. Marx gives the example in France of its famous fraternité, which in the 1848 revolution ‘found its true, unadulterated and prosaic expression in civil war, civil war in its most terrible aspect, the war of labour against capital.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 7 p 147)
Marx accused the republican, Karl Heinzen, of invoking the solemn concept of ‘humanity’ to distract from the fact that while individuals may adopt a position that does not accord with their class position, this cannot be true of ‘whole classes which are based on economic conditions independent of their own will.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 330)
The result is to deny the reality of class struggle, which has the result not of abolishing it but of confirming the interest of the bourgeoisie. In 1850 Marx and Engels wrote that:
‘The struggles of the various classes and factions of the classes against each other, whose progress through their individual stages of development actually constitutes the revolution, are in the view of our evangelists only the unfortunate consequences of the existence of divergent systems, whilst in reality the reverse is true, the existence of various systems is the consequence of the existence of the class struggles. This itself shows that the authors of the manifesto deny the existence of the class struggles. Under the pretext of combating dogmatists, they do away with all specific content, every specific party point of view, and forbid the individual classes to formulate their interests and demands vis-à-vis the other classes. They expect them to forget their conflicting interests and to become reconciled under the flag of a vagueness as shallow as it is unblushing, which only conceals beneath the apparent reconciliation of all party interests the domination of the interest of one party—the bourgeois party.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 10 p 530)
Concepts such as ‘the people’ are unable to identify the specific interest of classes and are very rarely appropriate terms of analysis. Their use usually denotes a false unity of interest behind which lies the interests of the capitalist class. This can also appear credible because the social system, the dominant mode of production, aligns with the interest of the dominant class. So, the claim to represent or act in the interests of the people is also the primary ideological justification of the capitalist state.
The concept of the people is incapable of exposing the claims of the state to act on behalf of the people because it rejects the separate interest of the working class. At most it permits the view that the state is imperfectly or unsatisfactorily acting on behalf of the people but that it can be made to act in a way that remedies this. This is the basis for the view that the state can reform the social system in such a way as to truly implement the interests of ‘the people’ and therefore that the state itself can be made to carry this out by reforming itself. It is what Marxist call reformism, which denies that a replacement of capitalism and its state is necessary or possible.
A photograph of the Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, London, 1848
Marx supported the struggle for democratic rights because he believed that a bourgeois republic with political freedoms would make the class struggle between capitalists and workers arising from social inequality more transparent, less disguised by monarchical rule. It would weaken the legitimacy of authority more generally and stimulate working class political development. Without this freedom the working class would not develop the political capacity to become the ruling class.
Bruno Leipold, in his book Citizen Marx, notes that Marx adopted many of the democratic demands of republican revolutionaries that constituted these political freedoms, ensuring that implementation of democratic rights was not restricted by measures from the bourgeois state specifically designed to nullify them. (Citizen Marx p244). He notes that this enthusiasm led to what proved to be over-optimistic expectations of what would follow as a result. So, Marx and Engels appeared to endorse the view in 1846 that the introduction of the Peoples Charter would mean that the working class “will become the ruling class of England” (Marx and Engles Collected Works Vo 6 p 58, ‘Address of German Democratic Communists of Brussels to O’Connor, quoted in Citizen Marx p245)
In The Communists and Karl Heinzen Engels stated that ‘the Communists for the time being rather take the field as democrats themselves in all practical party matters. In all civilised countries, democracy has as its necessary consequence the political rule of the proletariat, and the political rule of the proletariat is the first condition for all communist measures.’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 299)
Leipold discusses their optimistic expectations of universal (manhood) suffrage in his book (p 245-249) but he also notes Marx’s view of the experience of the French Second Republic, which originated in a democratic revolution but which was usurped by a coup d’état led by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who later declared himself Emperor. This experience had shown that although “bourgeois rule as the outcome of universal suffrage . . . is the meaning of the bourgeois constitution” their democratic commitment crumbles the “moment that the content of this suffrage, of this sovereign will, is no longer bourgeois rule.” On “March 10 universal suffrage declared itself directly against the rule of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered by outlawing universal suffrage.” (Citizen Marx p 246 and 247). Marx was therefore wrong when he claimed that “The classes whose social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate, proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, it puts in possession of political power through universal suffrage.” (Marx The Class Struggles in France, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 10 p79)
In country after country, we can see the fraudulent character of bourgeois democracy. In the United States measures to suppress voting are routinely employed while the constitution that is so revered contains significant undemocratic institutions and practices. The political system is dominated by massive amounts of big business money and individual capitalist wealth. The repression unleashed by Trump and the multiple law and order organs of the state has demonstrated its class nature and renders pretence of its hallowed democracy cynical. In Europe, triumvirates of Starmer, Macron. Scholtz or Merz participate in a proxy war that no one voted for and are either deeply unpopular and/or elected on historically low votes but endowed nevertheless with full powers.
The defective features of bourgeois democracy are particular to each country but their universal existence in one form or another is due to the capitalist character of society and the social power this entails for the capitalist class and its retinue of helpers.
Marx was later to learn that a different form of state was required to break the power of these forces and embody real democracy. This was discovered in the Paris Commune of 1871, when the working classes of that city overturned the ruling authorities and imposed their own rule. Marx noted that:
‘The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.’
‘While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes . . .’
‘It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.’
‘Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery.’
Republicanism promised the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ but only social emancipation can deliver it.
Marx’s criticism of the republican politics of Heinzen was just as cutting as that of Engels, with the title of his writing setting out its nature and the necessary response – Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality. He described it as ‘constantly preaching morality and constantly offending against it’ and again contrasted the approach of communism to that of republicanism:
‘Incidentally, if the bourgeoisie is politically, that is, by its state power, “maintaining injustice in property relations”, it is not creating it. The “injustice in property relations” which is determined by the modern division of labour, the modern form of exchange, competition, concentration, etc., by no means arises from the political rule of the bourgeois class, but vice versa, the political rule of the bourgeois class arises from these modern relations of production which bourgeois economists proclaim to be necessary and eternal laws.’
This type of analysis was not a question of simply understanding the world better but informing to what extent it was possible to change it, thus informing the correct approach to doing so:
‘If therefore the proletariat overthrows the political rule of the bourgeoisie, its victory will only be temporary, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in the year 1794, as long as in the course of history, in its “movement”, the material conditions have not yet been created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and therefore also the definitive overthrow of the political rule of the bourgeoisie.’
Where Heinzen declared that “You are trying to make social questions the central concern of our age, and you fail to see that there is no more important social question than that of monarchy or republic.” Marx said that ‘The question of property, depending on the different levels of development of industry, has always been the vital question for a particular class. In the 17th and 18th centuries, when the point at issue was the abolition of feudal property relations, the question of property was the vital question for the bourgeois class. In the 19th century, when it is a matter of abolishing bourgeois property relations, the question of property is a vital question for the working class . . . It so happens that the “social questions” which have been “dealt with in our own day” increase in importance in proportion as we leave behind us the realm of absolute monarchy.’
Today, the realm of absolute monarchs for the vast majority of countries has passed and the spread of capitalism has created a larger and larger working class that puts the social question to the fore. If working class revolution is not currently on the agenda in any country it is not because the class struggle between the working class and capitalism does not exist but because the bourgeoisie has had a relatively long period of winning it. Because the question of absolute monarchy was on the agenda in Marx’s time and capitalism and the working class were undeveloped, Marx had to reckon on how to orient in these circumstances so that the working class could take an independent position and advance its own interests. The latter is the task today in an analogous situation in so far as the forces seeking to do so are again weak, although for very different reasons.
It is not therefore the case that the 19th century is a foreign land buried in a past epoch but that Marxists today can learn from the original Marx in how to defend and advance working class politics when it is politically weak. This includes rejection of the claimed alternatives – in their approach to understanding society and identifying the forces that will create a new one – that existed then and are put forward now. They are not exactly the same, but neither are they wholly different.
So, while Marxists see the property question as primary, the bourgeoisie today turns its back on it when presenting its own ‘solutions’ to the social question. Marx noted that ‘Nowhere . . . does social inequality obtrude itself more harshly than in the eastern states of North America, because nowhere is it less disguised by political inequality.’ He notes that it is here, and in other ‘constitutional or republican representative state[s], that the “question of property” has become the most important “social question”, it is very much the narrow need of the German bourgeois that interjects: the question of the monarchy is the most important “social question of the time”. It is in a very similar way that Dr. List, in the foreword to his Nationalökonomie* expresses his so naïve irritation that pauperism and not protective tariffs should have been “misconstrued” as the most important social question of our time.’
Today the question of tariffs is again to the fore – for the location of the largest capitalist firms across the world; the rivalry of the various capitalist powers through the creation of huge trading blocs, including the question of Brexit; and the pursuit of trade wars by the strongest power in an attempt to prop up its eroding supremacy. In these circumstances the modern reactionary alternative, that in the mid-19th century was embodied in the petty bourgeois politics of artisan workers and the peasantry, is now embodied in the idea of the resurrection of national sovereignty and equality between nations, which has never existed and never will.
Marx noted that the 19th century version of middle class reform was ‘just a matter of avoiding extremes! What rational political constitution would be compatible with these extremes, these oh so abominable extremes! . . . take a look at Heinzen’s “federal republic” with “social institutions” and its seven measures for the “humanisation of society”. We find that each citizen is assured a “minimum” of wealth below which he cannot fall, and a maximum of wealth is prescribed which he may not exceed’.
‘Has not Herr Heinzen solved all the difficulties, then, by reiterating in the form of state decrees the pious desire of all good citizens that no person should have too little and none, indeed, too much, and simply by so doing made it reality? And in the same manner, which is as simple as it is splendid, Herr Heinzen has resolved all economic conflicts. He has regulated property according to the rational principles corresponding to an honest bourgeois equity. And please do not object that the “rational rules” of property are precisely the “economic laws” on whose cold-blooded inevitability all well-meaning “measures” will necessarily founder . . .’
These measures promised by republicans, which Marx ridicules as impossible under capitalism, were prompted to address the oppression of the absolute monarchy and the state then existing:
‘The violently reactionary role played by the rule of the princes only proves that in the pores of the old society a new society has taken shape, which furthermore cannot but feel the political shell—the natural covering of the old society—as an unnatural fetter and blow it sky-high. The more advanced these new elements of social decomposition, the more reactionary will even the most harmless attempt at conservation by the old political power appear. The reaction of the rule of the princes, instead of proving that it creates the old society, proves rather that its day is over as soon as the material conditions of the old society have become obsolete.’
While it was not possible for the working class to pose its own solution immediately, Marx defended them in independently supporting steps towards the political freedoms that they could employ to further their own cause:
‘The workers know very well that it is not just politically that the bourgeoisie will have to make broader concessions to them than the absolute monarchy, but that in serving the interests of its trade and industry it will create, willy-nilly, the conditions for the uniting of the working class, and the uniting of the workers is the first requirement for their victory.’
‘They can and must accept the bourgeois revolutions a precondition for the workers’ revolution. However, they cannot for a moment regard it as their ultimate goal.’
Today, the ‘violently reactionary role played by the rule of the capiatalist class only proves that in the pores of the old society a new society has taken shape, which furthermore cannot but feel the political shell—the natural covering of the old society—as an unnatural fetter and blow it sky-high.’
These current political forms of capitalism are embodied in the nation state and their regional and world-wide alliances. They are incapable of serving the interest of humanity and are instead the mechanisms by which inter-capitalist rivalry threatens to precipitate a world war from which humanity may not emerge again, except perhaps as a species put back millennia in its civilisation.
The political shell to be broken today is this system of states; ‘its day is over’ and ‘the material conditions of the old society have become obsolete’. It is not, however, opposition to globalisation and the utopian pursuit of a return of national sovereignty that is the solution. Workers should reject the reactionary calls of nationalism, the shutting of borders and opposition to immigrant workers. Nor should it swallow the lies that their lives and freedoms are safe with their own ruling class but threatened by that of foreign rulers, so that they must unite with the former in war against the latter. Capitalist war is always draped in the robes of freedom and justice and the war cries today against Russia on behalf of the Ukrainian state are no different that the pleas on behalf of poor little imperialist Belgium during the horrors of the First World War.
Just as 150 years ago, the development of capitalism creates the ‘conditions for the uniting of the working class, and the uniting of the workers is the first requirement for their victory.’ We should not reject the creation of these conditions internationally in order to return to a past nationalism. Socialism is international or it is not socialism and we should not seek to support the division of the world working class but go beyond the unity it has achieved.
Marx’s progress beyond 19th century republicanism was based on the materialist analysis of the development of society at that time, and so it should be today. His alternative was not moralistic criticism but the working class and its political movement.
Marx’s materialist understanding of history identified the contradictions of capitalist society, the struggle of classes and the alternative of working class rule. Republican critics of communism rejected all of this with criticisms that have been repeated ad nauseum since. The Italian republican Mazzini damned it for reducing man to existing in “the cold, dry, imperfect theory of economists, nothing more than a producing machine,” while the German republican Karl Heinzen stated that “humanity is not always determined by ‘class’ or the size of their wallet”. (Quoted in Citizen Marx p265)
Both Engels and Marx criticised Heinzen, and not just from a theoretical perspective but with a view to the political consequences of his approach, which opposed the materialist analysis that was the foundation of their politics. Engels accused him of not appreciating where the political struggle was starting from and what should therefore be done:
‘Scarcely had the way back been cut off for him when he declared the necessity of an immediate revolution. Instead of studying conditions in Germany, taking overall stock of them and deducing from this what progress, what development and what steps were necessary and possible, instead of obtaining for himself a clear picture of the complex situation of the individual classes in Germany with regard to each other and to the government and concluding from this what policy was to be followed, instead, in a word, of accommodating himself to the development of Germany, Herr Heinzen quite unceremoniously demands that the development of Germany should accommodate itself to him” (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p292-293)
He criticised his argument about the nature of the revolution that was required, whether a purely political one or also a social one was necessary:
‘He declares the princes to be the chief authors of all poverty and distress. This assertion is not only ridiculous but exceedingly damaging. Herr Heinzen could not flatter the German princes, those impotent and feeble-minded puppets, more than by attributing to them fantastic, preternatural, daemonic omnipotence. If Herr Heinzen asserts that the princes can do so much evil, he is thereby also conceding them the power to perform as many good works. The conclusion this leads to is not the necessity of a revolution but the pious desire for a virtuous prince, for a good Emperor Joseph . . . the exploitation by the landowners and capitalists is after all surely responsible for nineteen-twentieths of all the misery in Germany!’
The role of the revolutionary party (understood as a general movement) was therefore different:
‘Its task is to reveal the oppression of the proletarians, small peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie, for in Germany these constitute the “people”, by the bureaucracy, the nobility and the bourgeoisie; how not only political but above all social oppression has come about, and by what means it can be eliminated; its task is to show that the conquest of political power by the proletarians, small peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie is the first condition for the application of these means’. (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 pp292-293, 294)
The republican demands of Heinzen, including his social ones, were therefore inadequate, not least because for him they were ‘not a means but an end.’ In fact, as we saw in the previous post, in so far as these arrested economic development – ‘free competition’ – without seeking to go beyond it they were reactionary:
‘All measures, therefore, which start from the basis of private property, and which are nevertheless directed against free competition, are reactionary and tend to restore more primitive stages in the development of property, and for that reason they must finally be defeated once more by competition and result in the restoration of the present situation.’
What made the demands of the communists appropriate was their arising from existing social conditions and their role within a continuing working class struggle (while those of Heinzen represented petty bourgeois politics, of the peasantry, for example). This included that they necessarily had to be considered in an international context:
‘Herr Heinzen—one of the most ignorant men of this century—may, of course, not know that the property relations of any given era are the necessary result of the mode of production and exchange of that era. Herr Heinzen may not know that one cannot transform large-scale landownership into small-scale without the whole pattern of agriculture being transformed, and that otherwise large-scale landownership will very rapidly re-assert itself.’
‘Herr Heinzen may not know that a country as industrially dependent and subservient as Germany can never presume to undertake on its own account a transformation of its property relations other than one that is in the interests of the bourgeoisie and of free competition.’
‘In short: with the Communists these measures have sense and reason because they are not conceived as arbitrary measures but as consequences which will necessarily and of themselves ensue from the development of industry, agriculture, trade and communications, from the development of the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat which is dependent on these; which will ensue not as definitive measures but as transitory ones, mesures de salut public arising from the transitory struggle between the classes itself.’
Engels therefore condemned the republican demands of Heinzen for being arbitrary arising from ‘obtusely bourgeois visions of putting the world to rights; because there is no mention of a connection between these measures and historical development’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 296)
Engels quotes communist criticism of Heinzen that they ‘have made fun of his sternly moral demeanour and mocked all those sacred and sublime ideas, virtue, justice, morality, etc., which Herr Heinzen imagines form the basis of all society.’ He criticises politics based on morality instead of recognition that this morality arises from society and that it is the material reality of this from which one must start. (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 301)
We are left with the seeming incongruous republican politics of a call for immediate revolution based on a limited democratic programme that, in so far as it seeks to go further, is out of kilter with the state of German development and what it can likely support. Engels acknowledges the latter by stating that:
‘. . . the Communists for the time being rather take the field as democrats themselves in all practical party matters. In all civilised countries, democracy has as its necessary consequence the political rule of the proletariat, and the political rule of the proletariat is the first condition for all communist measures.’ (The optimism involved in this is take up in a future post)
Engels goes on: ‘Communism, insofar as it is a theory, is the theoretical expression of the position of the proletariat in this struggle and the theoretical summation of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat.’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 10 p 299 and 304)
The reality of working class struggle and revolution in less developed capitalist societies that in themselves are not ripe for socialism, not least because they have a relatively small working class, has thrown up enduring controversy and countless debates. In relation to them, this early article by Engels retains its relevance through its general approach compared to an earlier revolutionary republican – not socialist – alternative.
A recently published book has examined the influence of republicanism on Marx’s politics and explained that it was the main rival to socialism for the allegiance of the developing working class for much of the 19the century. (Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought, Bruno Leipold) It explains that socialism at this time was largely anti-political, in that it thought political struggle was irrelevant to the emancipation of the working class, and that it was Marx (and Engels) combination of socialism with political conceptions from republican political thought that propelled them to elaborate their politics, including the fight for the political rule of the working class (see Marx’s own statement of what he considered his own contribution to be).
In doing so they superseded both non/anti-political socialism and radical democracy that did not seek the overthrow of bourgeois private property. Marx condemned those republicans who see “the root of every evil in the fact that their opponent and not themselves is at the helm of the state. Even radical and revolutionary politicians seek the root of evils not in the nature of the state, but in the particular state form, which they wish to replace with a different state form.” As Leipold notes, Marx thought that ‘Workers thus needed to move on from seeing themselves as “soldiers of the republic” and become “soldiers of socialism.” (The King of Prussia and Social Reform, Marx quoted in Citizen Marx p161 and 163).
It would therefore be a mistake, in acknowledging the contribution of republican thought to Marx, to give it a centrality to his politics that it doesn’t have, which danger depends of course on what might be claimed for it.
It should be noted that Marx was to develop his ideas on the political power of the working class and the state considerably from 1844 and also that the vast majority of what is called socialism today, including the claims of many ‘Marxists’, wholly propagate what Marx criticises here, often professing to agree with him while doing so.
Leipold argues that Marx moved beyond republicanism after coming to an awareness of the shortcomings of existing republican revolutions in America and France; from meeting prominent socialists and social critics in Paris, including reading the writings of his future friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels; and meeting French and German workers in their various underground communist worker organisations. One result was Marx’s identification of the role of labour in human flourishing, rather than overturning the exclusion of workers from full political participation, which was the centre of republican politics (see the previous posts on alienation). The emancipation of the working class was not only its alone since “in their emancipation is contained universal emancipation”. (Marx, quoted Citizen Marx p175).
This did not mean the exclusion of the fight for political rights, which Marx and Engels both thought was vital to and for the political development of the working class, but that democracy ‘had become completely inextricable from social issues so that “purely political democracy” was now impossible and in fact “Democracy nowadays is communism”’ as Engels put it in 1845. (Citizen Marx p 172).
This new political commitment led to disputes with republican revolutionary thinkers even before Marx and Engels’ writings on the nature of their communism had been fully published and made known. Many of the criticisms made by their opponents are still common so the responses to them are still important to a presentation of their politics today.
Their political opponents at this time also consisted of a diverse group that they termed “true socialists”, who substituted moral claims for class struggle, and eschewed the fight for political rights that Marx considered “the terrain for the fight for revolutionary emancipation” even if it was “by no means emancipation itself.” (Citizen Marx p190). These rights included trial by jury, equality before the law, the abolition of the corvée system, freedom of the press, freedom of association and true representation.” (Citizen Marx p213).
Through this approach Marx and Engels were able to rebut the criticism of radical republicans that they were effectively on the side of reaction in the political struggle against autocracy. In turn they denounced republican revolutionaries as petty bourgeois who demanded a ‘social republic’ or ‘democratic republic’ that did not “supersede [the] extremes. Capital and wage-labour” but “weaken their antagonism and transform them into harmony”. (Marx 1851-52, quoted in Citizen Marx p222).
Republican politics was petty bourgeois because it did not reflect the potential collective working class ownership of the forces of production, which required such ownership because of their increased scale and division of labour, but instead sought the widening of individual property ownership. This reflected the still large number of artisan workers whose individual ownership and employment of their own labour was being undermined by expanding workshop and factory production. For Marx, to seek to go back to craft production was a harkening to a past that could not be resurrected and was thus reactionary.
The grounds for Marx and Engels criticism of revolutionary republicans and non/anti-political socialists was their materialist analysis of existing conditions (which various forces were opposed to) and which included identification of the social force – the working class – that was to overthrow these conditions and inaugurate the new society. In the previous posts of this series, we have set out how these conditions were to be understood – centring on the developing socialisation of the productive forces – and the necessary role of the working class. These grounds required the prior development of capitalism and the irreplaceable role of the working class in the further development of the socialisation of production.
The alternative to capitalism developed by Marx was therefore an alternative to capitalism, not to some prior feudal or semi-feudal society; not dependent on some overarching moral ideal or future model of society, and not on the basis of the degree of oppression suffered by different classes or parts of the population under existing conditions.
In the first case there would be no, or only a very small, proletariat as a result of underdeveloped forces of production, which would limit their existing socialisation and therefore preclude collective and cooperative production. In the second, Marx and Engels were averse to ideal models arising from individual speculation about the future form of society, and were aware that the application of moral criteria to the construction of a new society was subject to the constraints of the existing development of the forces of production and attendant social relations. In the final case, there were more oppressed classes than the working class, the peasantry for example, which until recently was also much more numerous, and more oppressed layers of society, including women, and working class women in particular.
Their ideas and politics were therefore not crafted to be superficially appealing but to be appealing because they corresponded to reality, one that was to be humanised by a class that itself had to undergo as much change as the society it was called upon to transform. As Marx and Engels noted in The German Ideology:
‘Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.’
In his book ‘Citizen Marx’ Leipold notes that the implications of this were “a hard pill for workers to swallow.” (p243):
‘But we say to the workers and the petty bourgeois: it is better to suffer in modern bourgeois society, which by its industry creates the material means for the foundation of a new society that will liberate you all, than to revert to a bygone form of society, which, on the pretext of saving your classes, thrusts the entire nation back into medieval barbarism.’
I remember giving out leaflets at a Sinn Féin demonstration on the Falls Road in about 1993. The demonstration was called to support the Hume-Adams Agreement, hammered out between the leaders of the SDLP and Sinn Féin after several secret meetings. No one knew what was in the Agreement, but thousands of republican supporters came out to show their support for it.
I don’t think my comrades, or I, ever had such a keen and eager crowd as the demonstrators queued up to get a copy. It was clear that they thought they might find out what it was they were demonstrating in support of. That in itself told us an awful lot about the political consciousness of rank and file republicans at the early stages of the peace process – they were going to faithfully follow their leadership, wherever it led them and swallow whatever they were told.
Many, many subsequent leaflets, and meetings through the long peace process changed nothing of their approach, or raised in them any consciousness that they might require a more critical approach, one that involved some scepticism of where their leadership was taking them.
Only a few years before, in 1987, Sinn Féin had published a document called ‘A Scenario For Peace’ in which it set out its proposals for a settlement to end the conflict. It included that Britain should declare its intention to withdraw; the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Ulster Defence Regiment would be disbanded; ‘political’ prisoners should be unconditionally released; and Britain should provide a subvention for an agreed period to facilitate harmonisation of the northern and southern economies. In return, unionists would be offered equal citizenship within the new Ireland.
Well, the Hume-Adams talks were not about this agenda, and neither was the peace process. The British have not gone, the RUC and UDR were indeed disbanded but the former was replaced by the PSNI and the latter were a unit of the British Army, and it certainly hasn’t gone away. Political prisoners were released but not unconditionally, Britain imposed austerity (and Sinn Féin helped implement it).
The peace process in its various guises is now longer than the war it was supposed to end, and the former looks harder to get to the end of than the latter did. When it was announced that the devolved Stormont Assembly was coming back, and a Sinn Féin leader, Michelle O’Neill, would be first minister, it was declared by Mary Lou McDonald that this showed that a united Ireland was “within touching distance”. Of course, the Provisional republican movement has been promising a united Ireland since the early 70s, that is, for over half a century. A unionist commentator noted recently that a recent opinion poll showed no increase in support for a united Ireland in the North over the last couple of decades.
Some columnists have claimed that the real significance of the return of the DUP to the Assembly and Government is this accession to the post of first minister of Sinn Féin, even while they admit that this is symbolic since the unionist deputy first minister has equal power. No decision can be taken by the first minister if not agreed by the deputy and the post cannot be filled in the first place without unionist agreement.
In order to minimise unionist opposition to the deal between the DUP and British government over the ‘Irish Sea border’ the process of getting DUP agreement and all it entails is being rushed through. The DUP Executive thus voted for the deal without seeing it; fittingly appropriate to the return of what passes for democracy in the North of Ireland.
This democracy, in the shape of the Stormont Assembly, has been suspended at least eight times, ranging from a single day to a couple of years. It has been functioning for only sixty per cent of its existence and subject to a number of reviews and changes with yet more changes now widely canvassed. The sectarian, corrupt, incompetent and clueless governance it has provided and the future problems considered inevitable by everyone who thinks about it (and many don’t) means that the rules are not the problem.
Public services, from health to roads, are routinely described as being in crisis, while others such as education and voluntary organisation are subject to open sectarian practices. It has been claimed that these issues can only be put right by local governance, but its track record shows that it is as much responsible for the decay as British rule. The repeated suspension allows the alibi to be sold that were it not for suspension public services would be much better. The previous suspension following the Sinn Féin walk-out, after the DUP-implicated Renewable Heat Incentive scandal, showed levels of incompetence that could more easily be explained as corruption.
The return of Stormont is therefore no step forward, never mind a panacea, and is mainly an unstable framework to accommodate sectarian competition, one that has not proved to be very stable. It stands on its rotten foundations only because there is no outside force to push it over, while those that have knocked it over temporarily have been internal. It is widely accepted among the population and further afield because no alternative seems possible, which is why the DUP have gone back in. This also helps explain why the misgivings of many unionists, and significant opposition, will be unsuccessful in stopping the Assembly’s return.
The opposition has no credible leadership, which would have to come from within the DUP itself, and there is as yet no real sign of this. Further demoralisation of unionism is therefore one (welcome) result.
That this is the case throws light on the claim by the DUP leadership that their new deal is a significant victory. Packaged as a joint British government/DUP initiative, and launched by a joint press conference, there is not the slightest pretence at non-partisanship by the British: ‘Safeguarding the Union’ is the name of Command Paper1021.
Its content in 77 pages could safely be accommodated at one tenth of the length. The measures introduced include proposed legislation to say that Northern Ireland is part of the UK – who would have thought it? It has proposed legislation to ‘future-proof the effective operation of the UK’s internal market by preventing governments from reaching a future agreement with the EU like the Protocol’, which by definition cannot achieve what it claims. It also includes a ‘commitment to remove the legal duties to have regard to the “all-island economy” in section 10(1)(b) of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018.’ A bit of red meat for the DUP, and sticking it to Irish nationalism North and South, that will make little or no difference.
It promises that ‘Legislative change to recognise the end of the automatic pipeline of EU law . . . which applies in Northern Ireland is now properly subject to the democratic oversight of the Northern Ireland Assembly through the Stormont Brake and the democratic consent mechanism.’ This implies either future bust-ups with the EU if single market changes are not incorporated into the Northern Ireland market, or a formality to cover regulatory alignment. The Brexiteers in Britain are aghast at this as they no doubt realise it might not be the former.
Media reporting has suggested that the EU Commission has yet to look at the Agreement but that ‘no red lines’ have been crossed; however, it is hard to believe it has not been agreed and only kept quiet in order to help the DUP sell it as an act of undiluted British sovereignty.
The ‘democratic consent mechanism’ that is held to act as a check on unwelcome EU encroachment states that it can be triggered by a majority of local members of the Assembly and not by some ’cross-community consent’ mechanism. It is hard to be optimistic that this whole area will not entail future argument.
Other measures include promises on maintaining trade flows that can’t be honoured and a number of new quangos that will deliver more red tape that Brexit promised to get rid of.
The main gain pointed to by Jeffrey Donaldson is the removal of routine checks on certain exports from Britain to Northern Ireland that were set to reduce anyway but are now declared to be zero. This is on goods, such as retail to consumers for example, that will stay in Northern Ireland and not considered to be at risk of going further into the Irish state and thus the EU single market proper.
Donaldson has, however, claimed too much – that there is unfettered trade between GB and NI and therefore no sea border. The command paper states that ‘there will be no checks when goods move within the UK internal market system save those conducted by UK authorities as part of a risk-based or intelligence-led approach to tackle criminality, abuse of the scheme, smuggling and disease risks.’
‘Abuse of the scheme’ must mean that checks will be made if it is suspected that goods purportedly sent for sale only in Northern Ireland are actually heading further. The acceptance of such controls by the DUP has so far been rather successfully sold by the leadership as simply a common sense measure that ensures that checks are made at the Northern Ireland ports instead of a long and windy North-South border.
This problem arises only because of Brexit, which the DUP supported, and of course the argument makes sense in its own terms; except those terms mean acceptance that there is a trade border on the Irish Sea because there had to be one somewhere, and its not south of Newry and north of Dundalk. The opponents of the Agreement among unionists are therefore right that single market membership means EU law applying in Northern Ireland. They go wrong when they, like the other hard Brexiteers, assume that the British government must pursue widespread non-alignment, without which Brexit makes even less sense that it already does.
In the last few weeks public sector workers in the North have engaged in very large strike action in pursuit of wage demands designed to recover some of their lost real incomes. It has, however been subsumed under the politics of Stormont return, even while the trade unions have demanded that the British Government pay up and not use the lack of an Assembly as an excuse. It was supposedly putting pressure on the DUP to get back so the workers could get payed when the DUP didn’t, and doesn’t, give a toss.
The return of Stormont has not been lauded and celebrated as in previous ‘returns’ and the population is jaded by repeated failure and broken promises of a ‘new approach’. The real new approach required is, unfortunately, a long way off.
What attitude should we take to resistance movements, such as Hamas? Boffy’s Blog has a critique of a letter submitted to the ‘Weekly Worker’ that answers this question. He particularly criticises the following paragraph:
‘Lazare says that Marxists do not side with rightwing groups claiming to speak in the people’s name. Wrong. In the 1950s we supported Eoka in Cyprus against the British. Likewise we supported the IRA. Lazare fails to understand that the nationalism of the oppressor and oppressed is not the same. It is all very simple. We support the struggle of the oppressed.’
This opens up a range of issues, but let’s start by breaking them down:
‘Lazare says that Marxists do not side with rightwing groups claiming to speak in the people’s name. Wrong.’
This claim, I think, is wrong. Why would we – socialists/Marxists – side with right-wing groups? What would these groups be doing that would warrant support? Any anti-colonial or anti-imperialist struggle they would be involved in might put us ‘on the same side’ of such a struggle, only so long as they were actually involved in struggle, but would not mean that ‘we side with them’. Any such struggle they carry out against imperialism will not be one against capitalism, i.e. not be waged against the system that at a certain historical stage we call imperialism.
They will not seek the emancipation of the working class and will seek instead the creation of a new capitalist state. They will therefore have, or seek to advance, common class interests with the oppressor, therefore making their opposition defective, temporary and prone to betrayal. They will not seek to make the working class the leadership of the struggle or seek to guide it to overthrow capitalism but will seek to thwart those that do.
To understand this it is helpful to defiine the class nature of the groups we are supposed to side with. These can be bourgeois, or more often petty bourgeois, in which case it is necessary to see them as inimical to the interests we serve and as rivals, even if we sometimes are temporarily ‘on the same side’ with them in any particular struggle or issue at any particular time. In all cases the socialist movement must organise itself separately from them and against them.
‘In the 1950s we supported Eoka in Cyprus against the British. Likewise we supported the IRA.’
Here, I will limit myself to the Marxist approach to the IRA. The political tendency I belonged to did not support the IRA. We did not endorse its programme and did not support its armed struggle. We took the view – going back to James Connolly – that, as with the whole tradition of Irish republicanism, it was a revolutionary nationalist movement that was united around the principle of armed struggle, a struggle that was parasitical on the mass anti-imperialist struggle and was bound to be defeated, which it was.
This did not mean that we were not ‘on the same side’ in a struggle against imperialism; did not mean that we did not defend it against charges of being a purely terrorist and criminal organisation; did not work with republicans in campaigns against British imperialist repression, or did not support a united Ireland and the smashing of the Northern State. Tactical cooperation in united campaigns were possible and existed; but we organised separately and under our own banner and not as supporters of Irish republicanism or its movement. The formula ‘unconditional but critical support’ did not apply.
To ‘give support’ must be taken to mean political support arising from political agreement and no such agreement existed between Marxism and Irish republicanism and obviously does not exist now that it has surrendered its own programme.
‘Lazare fails to understand that the nationalism of the oppressor and oppressed is not the same.’
Whether Lazare understands this or not is not what I want to address. I want to agree that ‘the nationalism of the oppressor and oppressed is not the same.’ The former is reactionary, and the latter can have a democratic content that socialists would seek to advance. However, not being the same does not mean that we support the nationalism of the oppressed, which is the usual next step that many mistakenly take.
We are not nationalists of any sort or variety and identification of some democratic content to any nationalist cause does not make us so. Our support for the struggle against colonialism or imperialism is based on the interests and politics of the working class, which are universal across nations, both for the oppressed and the oppressor nations.
Nationalism, no matter what its variety, places primacy on the nation and asserts that it creates some separate and common interest that encompasses all its members. Socialists and Marxists reject the claim that all the people within a nation have common interests, even (especially) in opposing colonial or imperialist rule, because they are impacted differently by this rule and thereby have different interests in removing it.
‘It is all very simple. We support the struggle of the oppressed.’
In general socialists and Marxists do ‘support the struggle of the oppressed’ but it is not ‘all very simple’ because we do not start from this assertion but from the interests of the working class and the struggle for socialism. More will be said about this in a future post.
Supporting the struggle of the oppressed against their oppression (and not for any other reactionary objective) does not mean we necessarily support the organisations leading their struggle or their methods. This is another step that many mistakenly take but this is based on assumed moral obligations and not on political accordance, unless one shares the same political programme and strategy as these organisations.
In the past this step has led the British ‘Troops Out Movement’ to move from support for the withdrawal of the British Army from Ireland – opposition to the oppressor – to essentially support for Sinn Fein, even after this movement had effectively abandoned its struggle against British rule.
This is itself an example of the mistake of supporting the nationalism of the oppressed because this nationalism will, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, be ‘defective, temporary and prone to betrayal’ even of its own proclaimed objective. Even in success, anti-colonial movements have created new capitalist states in which ‘national liberation’ has encompassed the continuation of social and political oppression.
Marxism identifies the working class as the universal class that is the only force that can create the conditions to end all oppression. This includes national oppression. The working class is not the most oppressed section of society so moral claims based on those suffering the most extreme poverty, exclusion, prejudice or discrimination, or some ideal of justice does not explain its role or potential emancipatory function. This is true across the world, in all its struggles and applies to all of them.
The local election results in the North of Ireland have given rise to more commentary that another step has been taken towards a referendum on Irish unity and a united Ireland. The success of Sinn Fein in becoming the largest party at local government level in council seats and votes has provoked this reaction, as have its previous victories. The two have almost come to seem synonymous.
At the same time the two are repeatedly separated by the selfsame commentators who argue that any vote for a united Ireland in a referendum would have to go way beyond Sinn Fein’s support. If a vote for this party is an indicator of impending unity, then there is an obvious problem. Its vote in the local elections was 30.9 percent of the ballot so even after an increase in its support of 7.7 percent it is not yet a third of those voting.
It is argued that other pro-unity candidates add to the forward movement of Irish nationalism, except that the other major nationalist party, the SDLP, is slowly dying. Its vote fell by 3.3 percentage points to 8.7 per cent. Together the two major nationalist parties gathered 39.7 per cent. Even with the addition of the pro-unity parties on the left and right, People before Profit and Aontú, the total rises only to 41.5 per cent. The total for the three main unionist parties is 38.1 per cent; Irish nationalism gained more votes than the these parties.
In the 2019 local government election the three Unionist parties plus smaller unionists gained 41.87 per cent of the vote while the comparable Irish nationalist and pro-unity parties won 37.73 per cent. At this election the DUP was the largest party and the Unionist vote was higher than that of Irish nationalism.
Local elections, however, are the least accurate electoral indicator of the relative strengths of the two camps; the turnout in 2023 was only 54 per cent, an increase of 2 per cent on the 2019 vote. Commentators have noted that the turnout in 2023 was higher in predominantly nationalist than unionist areas by as much as 10 percentage points in some places. Irish nationalism therefore won only 22 per cent of the electorate while many unionist voters stayed at home. During any referendum on a united Ireland it can hardly be expected that unionists will be so apathetic or demoralised, unless political circumstances make them so, unlikely to be a result of the vote itself.
In the 2022 Assembly elections, where the turnout was almost 63.6 per cent, the vote for the three Unionist parties was 40.1 per cent while the pro-Irish unity vote comparable to the most recent local elections was 40.7 per cent. The recent local election results are not the first time the Unionist parties have fallen behind.
Twelve years ago in the 2011 Assembly elections, Unionism polled 47.65 per cent while Irish nationalism trailed behind at 42.81 per cent. The decline in the Unionist vote over these years is therefore clear and it is this decline that has provided most of the impetus to claims that a nationalist referendum victory is a realistic prospect in the short to medium term. The 2011 result however also reveals what the advance of Sinn Fein has hidden – that the nationalist share of the vote hasn’t increased: 42.81 per cent in 2011 and 41.5 per cent in 2023.
The missing piece of the jigsaw is the rise of the Alliance party: from 7.84 per cent in 2011 to 13.3 per cent in the recent local election. The question then becomes the political nature of this party – unionist with a ‘small u’ or nationalist; or what it presents itself as – simply ‘other’.
So let’s start with the third alternative–that Alliance cannot be said to have a position on the national question. Even if this were so the national question will face Alliance and its supporters with the choice sooner or later and ‘other’ will not be on the ballot paper.
Alliance is definitely not an Irish nationalist party, does not pretend to be or pretend to hide it, and while it has a significant Catholic support, this has consciously decided not to vote for Irish nationalism. While it may be more likely than other Alliance supporters to vote for unity in a referendum, its existing vote is for the status quo and the status quo is continued British rule.
The party was originally set up as an openly unionist party that presented itself as non-sectarian; one that divorced its unionism from any religious identity. It has moved from this to present itself as neither Unionist nor nationalist but with a soft, ‘small u’, unionist support that is repelled by the sectarianism of the Unionist mainstream, with many also rejecting Brexit. In a referendum, all other things being equal, the majority of Alliance voters can be expected to support continued British rule, as will the party itself.
The ’other things being equal’ is what will matter for many; the political circumstances will at some point be decisive. These include the reality of what a united Ireland might offer and the configuration of the forces fighting for and against it. This includes the approach of the British state and the extent of violent unionist opposition. What the election results demonstrate is that this point is not yet near, whatever about Sinn Fein becoming the largest party and Irish nationalism garnering more votes than ‘big U’ Unionism. This does not mean that nothing is really changing.
Unionism continues to decline. Its support for Brexit and rejection of the deal negotiated by the British state with the EU indicates a political movement fighting against its own interests. These are still considered to include a sectarian supremacy that is no longer possible and opposition to economic forces that might make the Northern State more attractive, even while it strengthens the all-island character of potential economic prosperity. No longer able to make its claims on the basis that it is the majority within the gerrymandered state, it simply declares its veto based on its own existence. This existence has always been one of sectarian privilege.
The other significant change has been within Irish republicanism, which having ditched its armed struggle against British rule has found itself with no clothes it cannot discard. From opposition to British imperialism it now stands foursquare behind the western imperialist proxy war in Ukraine. Its representatives have acclaimed its recent success as a result of its brilliant electoral campaign. This put a united Ireland on the back-burner but purposively elevated its attendance at the British king’s coronation, ‘to show their respect’.
It seems not to occur to them that monarchy is the epitome of denial of democracy and deserves zero respect. When Celtic and Liverpool football fans demonstrate a higher level of awareness of very basic democratic and republican principles we can appreciate the level to which Sinn Fein has sunk (with all due respect to those fans).
If this seems a rather glib or flippant remark, we can recall the explanation by another Sinn Fein member who stated that its approach was anticipation of the mutually respectful attitude between an independent Ireland and Britain when it was united. We are almost back to the original Arthur Griffith Sinn Fein that supported a Habsburg Empire-like dual monarchy.
What this illustrates is the relevance of the Marxist theory and programme of permanent revolution. This argues that the democratic tasks associated with the development of capitalism, such as national independence, should be part of a working class programme and struggle and that it was possible for this struggle to develop into one that went beyond purely democratic questions, and the limits acceptable to capitalism, to be a struggle for working class rule.
This does not mean that such struggles cannot be led by other classes, but that these could not be relied upon to advance the struggle in a thoroughly democratic way or for a consistent and comprehensive democratic outcome. It matters who leads the struggle, because different classes will lead it to very different ends.
Marxists always defined Sinn Fein as a petty bourgeois organisation, which drew a reaction of complete incomprehension from republicans who were working class and living in solidly working class estates in Belfast, Derry or Dublin. However, the movement’s political character was defined not mainly by its support considered in sociological terms, including its rural support or its ties to Irish American money, but by its politics.
This politics previously imagined a radically reconfigured capitalism, which the capitalist class opposed, while not seeking to overthrown the system itself, never mind forwarding real working class rule. The Irish capitalist class had no great interest in challenging British imperialism and the Irish working class has interests that go way beyond a united country that cannot provide for its needs.
As the possibility of a united Ireland is claimed to be approaching the democratic content to the struggle is more and more denuded of democratic content. The obsequious kowtowing to British royalty does indeed show respect but not to democratic and republican principles. The various scattered proposals to accommodate unionism in a united Ireland are also indicators of the inconsistent approach to a democratic outcome.
Many European countries have achieved unification after the defeat of the popular revolutions that sought to enact it in a more democratic way, such as Germany and Italy. For socialists support for a united Ireland is a struggle to advance beyond a partitioned Ireland and not one that leaves every other component and trappings of the Irish and British capitalist states intact.
When measured against these tasks, the local government elections in 2023 are not even a minor tremble in the ground beneath the system that must be brought down.
Sráid Marx 