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

‘Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (1 of 6)

Posted on October 7, 2025 by irishmarxism

Reading ‘Fragments’ I was reminded of the statement by Marx that ‘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.’

Fragments sets out to record the struggles of the Irish left (in the Irish state) over the past few decades so that the reader can form a view on its successes and failures. In doing so we can apply Marx’s prescription and determine to what extent it shows the left ‘what it is really fighting for’ so that it can be conscious of the lessons that should be learned.

There are some obstacles in the way, including the variety of authors with different viewpoints although an introduction and conclusion is meant to summarise the results. The major problem is the definition of what it means to be ‘left’. In the introduction Sinn Fein and the Green Party are listed as left even though the major theme of the book is the response to the implementation of austerity following the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and the consequent bankruptcy of the State.

During this period Sinn Fein presided over austerity while in a coalition government with the DUP in the North, while the Green Party entered into a coalition with Fianna Fáil in 2007 that bailed out the banks and inaugurated widespread cuts in social welfare and wages.

As part of the relaunch of Stormont in 2015 the ‘Fresh Start’ agreement committed the parties, including Sinn Fein, to reducing NI civil service staff numbers: ‘Between April 2014 and March 2016, the NICS is set to reduce headcount by approximately 5,210 and between April 2015 and March 2016 a further 2,200 will exit from the wider public sector.’ The Green Party supported the bank bailout that the state could not afford, which resulted in the intervention of the Troika of the European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF, along with the huge austerity necessary to satisfy their demands.

Even taking account of the elastic possibilities permitted by employing a relative term such as ‘left’, it is difficult to sustain any claim that these parties are in any substantial or verifiable way left-wing. Sinn Fein was described by a comrade of mine a long time ago as containing members with left-wing opinions and right-wing politics. The party has, in the meantime, fully confirmed this judgement while in government. The Green Party began life as The Ecology Party promising ‘a radical alternative to both Capitalism and Socialism’ but in office twice it has displayed no alternative to capitalism and therefore no alternative to socialism.

Looking at political struggle through the lens of ‘left’ versus ‘right’ has therefore the potential to obfuscate as much as it clarifies. A more illuminating approach is to set out the class nature of the politics of a political party and to explain why different parties with generally similar class natures have the politics that they do, even if they have different colouration.

Thus, as a nationalist party, Sinn Fein is a petty bourgeois party that considers the Irish people as one, with any class distinctions completely secondary and subordinate to the interest of the nation and its state, which can represent the true interests of all the people simply because of their nationality. The Green Party claimed at its birth to have a radical alternative but also rejected a class approach through its largely petty bourgeois base and ideology. It confirmed its class character by its members enthusiastically joining Fianna Fáil in government (voting 86% in favour) and by its commitment to the banks and austerity.

It might appear difficult to assign a class identity to some parties, and any classification has to be justified, but this is precisely the point of identifying the class nature of the forces involved. As petty bourgeois parties, both Sinn Fein and the Greens have imposed austerity on workers while espousing radical rhetoric. Calling them left is an attempt to obscure this and works to introduce doubt that they will not always fall on the side of the capitalist class in a struggle.

Fragments demonstrates this repeatedly, even when making secondary observations, for example that individual members of Sinn Fein were active in the Campaign Against the Household and Water Taxes but that the party was not: ’This form of partial (non-)commitment proved to be the defining feature of Sinn Fein’s approach to most political struggles of the time.’ (p37)

Approaching politics this way allows us to make judgements of other ‘left’ parties such as the Labour Party and Social Democrats etc. and permits an understanding of their behaviour during this period. While the Labour Party paraded its ‘Labour’s Way’ as resistance to ‘Frankfurt’s Way’ while in opposition, it had no alternative to austerity when in government. The doubling of its vote in the 2011 general election was a prelude to its consequent decimation in the next one. ‘Labour’s Way’ didn’t become Frankfurt’s Way’, not having an alternative meant it always was.

Was the 2011 vote for Labour therefore a victory for the ‘left’ and was its subsequent decimation a defeat? Did those who voted Labour in 2011 make an advance in consciousness or do so by deserting it in 2016? Or were they just registering disappointment and resignation?

Fragments offers the view that despite Labour delivering austerity when in office ‘the new government retained a huge amount of goodwill . . . 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’, while ‘the ‘honeymoon lasted for much of 2011 . . .’ (p31) So, were these views completely discarded when the Labour Party was dumped out of office? Was there any real advance in consciousness of an alternative when it happened? Is roping the Labour Party into ‘the Left’ clarifying either history or the future?

Today, all these parties are allied in supporting Catherine Connolly for the post of President with the additional enthusiastic support of People before Profit and Solidarity. The latter’s politics are supposed to be based on the view that existing power in capitalist society does not come from parliament but from the permanent state apparatus and the economic and social power of the capitalist system, yet they promote the idea that election to a post that is admitted not only to be without power, but forbidden to exercise any, would be a major advance.

Paul Murphy, People before Profit TD, states on Facebook that ‘this is a rare opportunity for the left to come together, and elect a voice for workers, for women and for neutrality. Change starts here.’ This is a left that includes all the parties above that have been tried and tested.

In doing so all sorts of illusions in the role of bourgeois politics and institutions; about the ability of one person to represent the nation, and all the people within it; because of a one-off vote, and of the way ‘change’ can be made, are strengthened against an alternative view that real change comes from the organisation and struggles of the working class itself.

Are such views ‘Trotskyist’, as Paul Murphy’s organisation is called in the book? Or is this term used because that is just how it is usually described, or should such a designation not require some comparison of its political practice to a reasonable account of what Trotskyism is? The umbrella term of ‘left’ addresses these questions by rendering them unimportant, and this is a problem.

To anticipate one message of this review; Fragments provides enough testimony to show that a different approach is necessary and that an alternative is required to the illusion that there is a ‘left’ that should be united to advance the cause of the working class.

It demonstrates, in its own way, that only a class analysis can explain events, including the actions of the state, why it succeeded in imposing austerity and why the resistance to it was unable to rise to the challenge. Explaining all this in terms of whether certain actors, institutions or policies were ‘left’ or ‘right’ is hopeless not only because of the vagueness of the terms but because all of these acted out of material interests, as they perceived them, and these in turn were based on objective factors that were fundamentally determined by class relations.

Forward to part 2

‘The People’ before Profit? – Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (part 67)

Posted on July 19, 2025 by irishmarxism

The substitution of ‘the people’ for the working class as the subject of struggle is presented In Ireland, in an almost classic case, by the People before Profit organisation, whose reformist politics are based on actions demanded from the Irish capitalist state. While ‘people’ are to come ‘before profit’, ‘people’ replaces the working class, while coming before profit still leaves profit in place. And anyway, aren’t capitalists people as well?

This precept fails to bring to the fore the ‘property question’, demanded by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, whereby the profit of capital arising from exploitation of the working class is not de-prioritised but abolished!

It might be argued ‘what’s in a name’, were it not for the fact that the name was deliberated on and selected precisely in order to avoid clearer identification with the working class and socialism. Presumably because reference to ‘the people’ is more readily acceptable; postponing the task of raising awareness of the paramount role of class and denying the centrality previously accorded to it by anyone calling themselves Marxist. In asserting the priority of the people, and so rejecting the primacy of class, the organisation is setting an example to be followed, not one to be excused or ignored.

Failure to root socialist politics in the material reality of the working class leaves it rootless and prey to the material reality of other forces – we have already pointed to the role of the state in the political alternative offered by People before Profit – but the ideologies encompassing this are many. Nationalism and racism require denial of the separate political interests of the working class – socialism is international while racism denies working class unity. It is precisely class interest that is the alternative to these reactionary programmes, not acceptance of the prior interests of an undifferentiated people.

It is possible to fill this missing foundation with moral claims to ‘humanity’ which bases internationalism on ‘human rights’; the ‘self-determination of (capitalist) states’, or protection of minorities based simply on their being a minority. Similarly, it is possible to oppose racism based on human rights, ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’ and opposition to ‘hate’, but these are even more vague and useless than the concept of ‘the people’. Their employment by many on the left, tellingly often paraded under the banner of a ‘social justice’ movement, is testament to a collapse into liberal (i.e. bourgeois) politics compared to which the 19^th century republicanism we have been examining in the previous posts looks positively revolutionary.

If class is not primary and immediately necessary in order to take forward a movement and programme what is opened up is the intrusion of a wide variety of identity politics that makes nationality, race, or sex etc. the primary means of securing freedom from oppression. This in turn can lead to ‘intersectional’ coalitions that further divide while pretending to unify.

It leads to rejection of the view that the working class is the only social force able to create a new society and which alone can unite the oppressed through the abolition of class. It thereby simply becomes one segment of society with no reason to prioritise its role more than any other. Petty bourgeois ideas of individual subjective identity flourish where the nebulous abstraction of ‘people’ becomes the source of power to change the world. With this view of politics the numerous instantiations of the people come to substitute for the working class, which in turn leads to the search for a mechanism for them to do so, and which is invariably found to be the state.

In 1849 Marx criticised the naive belief in a single “will of the entire people” rather than that of a singular ruling class (or grouping of classes) that might represent its own interest as that of society as a whole, or at least of its large majority:

‘For the National-Zeitung there exists one will of the entire people, which is not the sum of contradictory wills but a united and fixed will. How is that?

That is—the will of the majority.

And what is the will of the majority?

It is the will which emerges out of the interests, life situation, and conditions of existence of the majority.

In order to have one and the same will, the members of the majority must therefore have the same interests, the same life situation, the same conditions of existence, or must be temporarily linked together in their interests, their life situation, their conditions of existence.

In plain words: the will of the people, the will of the majority, is not the will of separate estates and classes but of one single class, and of those classes and fragments of classes that are socially—i.e., industrially and commercially—subordinated to this ruling class.

“What should we say to that?” Is the will of the entire people the will of the ruling class?’

(Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 8 p272, Articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung)

Marx, in The Civil War in France, noted that the Paris Commune ‘was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class—shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants—the wealthy capitalists alone excepted. The Commune had saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever-recurring cause of dispute among the middle classes themselves—the debtor and creditor accounts.’

It was necessary then (as it is now) for the working class to be the ‘universal’ class and to represent the needs of a society oppressed by the prevailing system: ‘For the first time in history the petty and moyenne middle class has openly rallied round the workmen’s Revolution, and proclaimed it as the only means of their own salvation and that of France!.’ (Marx, The Civil War in France, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol. 22 p336 & 496)

This was not something that Marx learned only from the Commune but was something strikingly demonstrated by it, particularly the need to win the majority of the population that was then composed of peasants. How this need is addressed today depends on the particular class composition of society, but this requires that the idea of a unified people is abandoned and the various classes and their interests identified. In relation to the peasantry, for example, it did not mean strengthening or enlarging their individual property, while a programme based on the demands of ‘the people’ would leave this wide open.

In the writings through which he and Engels formulated their particular politics, The German Ideology, he argued that ‘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 represent 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 represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.’ For the working class, this is realised through the abolition of all classes, including itself.

Marx identified this early in his political development (in 1843) before becoming a ‘Marxist’ and expressed himself in the language of the philosophy of the time: ‘No class of civil society can play this role without arousing a moment of enthusiasm in itself and in the masses, a moment in which it fraternises and merges with society in general, becomes confused with it and is perceived and acknowledged as its general representative, a moment in which its claims and rights are truly the claims and rights of society itself, a moment in which it is truly the social head and the social heart.’ (Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

For this to happen the working class must win others as allies to its programme. This can only be done if, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, socialists ‘disdain to conceal their views and aims.’ It will not be done by pretending that its views are those of an amorphous ‘people’. You can only rally others to your flag if it is your flag.

Back to part 66

Forward to part 68

Part 1

‘The People’ vs the Working Class

Posted on July 5, 2025 by irishmarxism

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.

Part 66 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism

Back to part 65

Forward to part 67

Part 1

Some comments on the Greek referendum

Posted on June 29, 2015 by irishmarxism

The decision of the Syriza Government to call a referendum on the proposed austerity proposals of the Troika (European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF) in return for another ‘bailout’ programme reminds me of the Irish austerity referendum three years ago. It gave rise to one of the first posts on this blog.

The Irish people voted by a large majority to support austerity. Will the Greeks do the same?

The Irish voted reluctantly to accept austerity (how else could you do so?) because there was no alternative at hand. The arguments of the Left that the Irish State could lead a growth agenda of Keynesian stimulus hardly convinced when that State had just bankrupted itself bailing out the banks.

Both the reason for the defeat and its effects have not been appreciated. Of the latter it is enough to ponder the proposals of the trade unions behind the largest sustained opposition to the austerity agenda – the Right2Water proposals for ‘A New Fiscal Framework for a Progressive Government’, which proposes additional State expenditure of €9.4 billion over 4 years. This would amount to less than 4.5% of the 2014 level of Government expenditure.

The Right2Water’s ‘Policy Principles for a Progressive Irish Government’ contains a section which proclaims the need for additional investment in the water and sanitation system of “between €6 and €7 billion”, which leaves just around €2.5 to €3.5 billion for education, health, investment and everything else. This is not so much an alternative to the current Government’s strategy as a variant of it. So much have horizons been lowered.

According to the authors of this document the rules of the EU will be adhered to while seeking flexibility within them and negotiating additional scope for spending. But the case of Greece exposes that the rules of the EU, ECB and IMF can be bent to suit.

So the claim that joining the Euro was irrevocable has been discarded by the leading powers in the EU to be replaced as the biggest threat to the Greek Government and people – vote against our austerity plan and you are voting to leave the Euro.

The propaganda campaign by the EU leaders includes European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker, who says he feels ‘betrayed’, and complains about a lack of “good faith” and “sincerity” from the Greeks. This from a man who presided over the building of Luxembourg into a tax haven. Yet he sees fit to question the Greek Government and people over their right and capacity to raise taxes. Has the tax evasion facilitated by Luxembourg not contributed to the Greek predicament?

Christine Lagarde of the IMF proclaims she wants “adults in the room” with whom to negotiate, attempting to infantilise the Greek Government representatives and by extension the Greek people. This is the Lagarde who has been placed ‘under investigation’ in a fraud case. One can’t help but recall the behaviour of the previous head of the IMF, Dominic Strauss-Kahn. Getting fucked by the IMF is a pleasure for no one.

In the current case this involves Troika demands for drastic reductions in the pensions of some of the poorest Greek pensioners and increases in VAT that will hit both those who will pay increased prices and the small businesses compelled to charge them.

On the Left these demands of the Troika are likewise treated as in effect an ultimatum which should lead to exiting the Euro – as the only effective response to the unceasing demands for austerity. What for the leaders of the EU is a threat which the Greek people should retreat from is for some on the Left a major part of the solution. What for the former is a recipe for chaos is for the latter the way out of it.

In my view the former are correct. Exiting the Euro would lead to a new Drachma that would involve massive devaluation and a large reduction in Greek workers’ living standards. Cutting one’s own throat is not preferable to having someone else do it. If Greece is thrown out of the Euro it naturally has no choice but that is not a choice it should itself make.

It is clear however that the choice at the end of the day is not Greece’s to make. It is not in a position to compel a significant reduction in austerity or debt relief even while many commentators who support the austerity demanded admit that debt relief is inevitable. The reason that they demand austerity nevertheless, even while recognising that it has failed, is that they seek the removal of the Syriza Government.

The EU leaders tried it last week and now seek it this week through refusing to accept Syriza’s huge concessions, refusing to extend the ‘bailout’ and through freezing ECB liquidity provision to the Greek banks.

The Greek workers should reject the austerity plan from the EU and reject the non-solution of leaving the Euro. Only on the basis of fighting austerity and refusing a go-it-alone nationalist solution can it minimally seek to build a movement that would stem the demands for austerity. What the Greek crisis shows is that such austerity can only be fought at an international level.

What does this mean?

Well, let’s look at what the Channel 4 journalist Paul Mason, who is covering the crisis, had to say. Exit from the Euro may be inevitable he says because of democracy – the population of Northern Europe would not support the transfers required to reverse austerity inflicted on Greece while the Greek people may no longer accept it.

In this he is at least partly right. Only an international campaign of solidarity with the Greek people, which explained that the bailout was not for them, but for the German and French banks and hedge funds who invested in lending to Greece, could explain the real function of austerity and lay out the grounds for convincing those outside Greece to reject it. On this basis it might force a retreat from the austerity demanded by other EU Governments, including the repulsive Irish one.

Within Greece it would require not just an ‘OXI’ vote but a mass movement that would compel implementation of a Syriza programme to tax the oligarchs through occupations to open the books of these businesses and in doing so help put in place a rigorous system of tax collection.

In itself this would only form the starting point of a workers’ alternative – one that is based on development of worker owned production. Such workers’ cooperatives are the alternative to the weak and crony capitalism from which Greece suffers. It offers practical proof of the socialist alternative and is a basis for its growth this side of political revolution. The latter in turn will gain credibility from practical demonstration of a socialist programme.

The lack of such international and domestic conditions caused defeat for Irish workers in their referendum. A very different vote in Greece would be a step forward for Irish workers now.

On the other hand the very worst result would be defeat in the referendum and a Syriza Government implementing austerity.

While the Dutch hatchet-man Jeroen Dijsselbloem again reveals the Euro leaders agenda of getting rid of the elected Greek Government – “ who are we trusting” he says if Syriza promised to implement the austerity it had just rejected, Varoufakis is quoted as saying that Syriza would do just this. “If the people give us a clear instruction to sign up on the institutions’ proposals, we shall do whatever it takes to do so – even if it means a reconfigured government.”

Such an approach would discredit any sort of Left alternative and pave the way for a hard right Government to eventually push through austerity on a demoralised workers’ movement.

The long resistance of Greek workers to austerity has given hope that we are not yet at such a result and that the struggle against austerity will continue.

Has the Irish Left missed the boat?

Posted on June 13, 2015 by irishmarxism

An article in the ‘Village’ magazine presents the argument that the Left has missed the opportunity to translate widespread opposition to water charges into a significant challenge to the status quo in the coming general election.

As a hard fact that must be faced, the author of it notes that it’s now possible to imagine not only a Fine Gael and Fianna Fail coalition but even the re-election of a Fine Gael/Labour Party Government. What a kick in the teeth that would be! Rather like the re-election of the Tories in Britain. “It’s time for some serious self-criticism” he says.

The conclusion drawn, although it remains totally unexplored, is that the people “have found the alternatives unconvincing.” That is, they have found the left alternative unconvincing.

It’s not clear to me from the argument of the article that many ever did but I’m not going to go very far in this post in looking at this either.

Instead I want to reflect on the response that the article has evinced from the Socialist Party TD Paul Murphy. While there appears to be a debate here the grounds of it are very narrow indeed.

In his call for self-criticism Ronan Burtenshaw first points to opinion polls which showed a rise in support for independents during 2014, from 18% or 22% (depending on the poll) to 32% and 30%. Support for the two established right-wing parties on the other hand had fallen from 30%/28% and 22%/22% for Fine Gael and Fianna Fail respectively to 19%/21% and 21%/19%.

The problem he points to is that in May this year one poll showed support for independents down to 24% and another back down at 22%. Since he explains the original increase as a result of a series of mass mobilisations against water charges he argues that the effect of this “has evaporated pretty much completely.”

Paul Murphy argues that Ronan’s conclusion is wrong –

“His conclusion, that the fall in opinion polls is because people looked at the alternatives and found them to be unconvincing, simply does not flow from the data, or his preceding analysis. Instead, I would contend that the opinion polls worsened primarily because of the decline of major mobilisations as well as because the low point for the government wasn’t fully capitalised on by a sufficiently authoritative force to consolidate the indicated trends.”

The second part of this explanation is part-admission of Burtenshaw’s case – his argument that the alternative was not convincing might be seen as just another way of saying that there was no sufficiently authoritative force to consolidate gains.

Of course what Paul Murphy is arguing is that if the forces arguing for the left alternative were bigger its alternative would have been accepted by more people and there is nothing inherently unpersuasive about the left alternative. But this leaves aside the problem why the left was not bigger and why its argument, if it was persuasive, did not lead to further growth than it did, or rather did not allow growth to be maintained. If it was persuasive would it not also have been authoritative and, if authoritative is a euphemism for being bigger, how did being persuasive not lead to this increased size?

Paul Murphy argues that Burtenshaw’s case has two flaws, the first of which is that it ignores the temporary impact on the popularity of the governing parties of victory in the referendum on marriage equality. He says that this allowed the Labour Party in particular “to wrap itself in a rainbow flag and present itself as socially progressive . . . I think much of that can be reversed as people are reminded by the real role of the Labour Party”, which includes further privatisation of Aer Lingus.

By the way, Murphy accuses Burtenshaw of ‘confirmation bias’. That is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories. But Murphy is guilty of this himself, no more obvious than when he dismisses the Labour Party’s role in the marriage equality referendum. The “real role of the Labour Party” that Murphy wishes to counterpose to its progressive role in the recent referendum includes support for such liberal measures as marriage equality.

But Paul Murphy’s bigger argument is that the decline in opinion poll ratings was due to the absence of visible mass mobilisations around water charges such as the huge demonstrations that started in Dublin and around the State in the last quarter of 2014. There is no doubt some merit in this argument but it is not as strong as it is presented and does not bear the weight he places on it.

But he also acknowledges two things which again support Burtenshaw’s argument about the weakness of the Left’s alternative. The first is admission that the role of the leaders of the Right2Water campaign cannot be substituted by the campaigns of the Left, (which calls into question the creation of separate campaigns by the Left groups).

Second is the acknowledgement that protest demonstrations cannot in themselves be the answer. They cannot substitute for a movement, one that is organised with permanent structures, which provide it with a life of its own outside the calls of unelected leaders to come onto the streets. So Murphy admits that “It may not be the case that the same level of mobilisation could be achieved now.”

So if the decline in poll ratings is at least partly due to the decline in mass protest and the decline in mass protest is at least partly unavoidable this looks very much like another admission of the weakness of the Left alternative. Even with support from the Right2Water leaders a series of mass protests could not continue to have the same effect as the first demonstrations that were such a shock to the political system.

Partly this is because the political consciousness of many participants does not go beyond protest politics, involving illusions that the Governing parties will listen, content that they have protested, or simply unable to find a way to turn anger and protest into an alternative.

Less importantly, but necessary to learn, the decline is due to the excessive weight put on the tactic of non-payment by some on the Left. This tactic might be helped by regular mass demonstrations of opposition but this is not an absolute requirement. It does not justify a separate campaign with this tactic as its raison d’etre, with its necessary downgrading of creation of a genuine democratic and united campaign that the Right2Water should have been and should still become.

So another illustration of weakness is the inability of the Left to effectively challenge the Right2Water leadership to create a genuine democratic campaign.

The weight put on the tactic of non-payment can be interpreted to mean that more or less on its own it will deliver victory, so why be so concerned about anything else? But this anything else, as I have noted before, includes the opposition responding to a particular tactic with one of its own such as deducting payment out of incomes.

The Government has also responded by major concessions in terms of the amount to be paid. As I have also noted before with the carrot comes the stick and shortly after the carrot came the attempts to criminalise and intimidate opposition activists through arrests.

So no tactic by definition is a guarantee of success.

The anything else also involves the whole austerity offensive to which non-payment is so clearly not relevant. Cuts in services, unemployment, increases in taxes and wage cuts are not going to be prevented or reversed by non-payment so an anti-austerity campaign that features so heavily on non-payment as the key to success has a big question to answer about how success will be achieved in all the other, bigger areas in which austerity has bitten into workers’ living standards. How if only non-payment works can we fight back in these other areas?

The biggest challenge to the Left which the anti-water charges campaign cannot by itself answer is the seeming success of the governing parties in implementing austerity and now being in a position to claim success.

The upturn in economic fortunes is real. Unemployment has fallen, the series of major cut-backs has ended and new increases in public spending, cuts in taxation and pay Increases are promised.

The contribution of Eoin Ó Broin from Sinn Fein makes a number of correct points in relation to this:

“Trying to read the poll-on-poll movements against specific political events is always speculative.

Fine Gael’s poll decline in the second half of 2014 was as much to do with the controversies surrounding medical cards, penalty points and Garda Ombudsman as it was to do with the politics of water.

Indeed middle class discomfort with water charges during 2014 had more to do with the initial charging regime, the handing over of PPS numbers and the excessive costs of Irish Water than with principled opposition to the charges and privatisation.

It is not at all clear that the Right2Water mobilisations had any material impact on Fine Gael’s poll numbers or standing with the electorate during 2014.

Replacing Shatter and Reilly with Fitzgerald and Varadkar coupled with the impact of job growth and tax cuts on middle class voters is clearly driving the Fine Gael poll recovery.

Alan Kelly’s revised water package will also have eased the concerns of some middle class voters.”

While one can argue that it is very unlikely that the protests had no impact on the polls, it would be hardly deniable that both the polls and the protests flowed from the same anger at austerity and the charges in particular. As I have pointed out before, the fact that there appears a clear way of defeating them, through non-payment, has been a big spur to mobilisation.

Also suspect is Ó Broin’s focus on the influence of the events he mentions on the middle class. There is no reason why changed economic conditions will not have influenced many working class voters as well

Finally, there are two other aspects upon which those involved in this debate are not really so very far apart. Regardless of the recent movement in the polls, they all note positively the long-term decline in the support levels of the three establishment parties (Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Labour).

Burtenshaw points out that these parties received over 90% of the vote in every election from 1965 to 1989 while he quotes one recent poll that now puts their support at 57%.

However the participants to the discussion acknowledge, but refuse to digest, the reality that the majority of the electorate have not broken from the politics that delivered them austerity. The evidence for this is pretty clear – from the 57% figure just quoted, to the election of a Fine Gael Government in 2011, the passing of the austerity referendum in 2012 and the character of much of the opposition to the established parties today.

The biggest and most coherent bloc of this opposition is Sinn Fein, which only the politically naïve could believe will oppose austerity in any comprehensive way. The experience in the North is well known to political activists on the Left, while workers supporting Sinn Fein will take it at its word, and will then judge it on its actions. Sinn Fein is no more than a more modern version of the old populist Fianna Fail and neither its nationalism nor its political practice is left wing, never mind socialist.

Meanwhile the Left has collapsed its political judgement and political practice into seeking a ‘left’ alternative instead of a socialist one. It moved from an analysis based on some version of socialism to one in which the alternative must be ‘left wing’, to one that is simply termed ‘anti-establishment.’ But much of this anti-establishment vote is not even left-wing never mind imbued with any sort of socialism.

As Burtenshaw states: “In the vast majority these new independent voters weren’t defining as Left but were a nebulous grouping, supporting a wide variety of positions, who found a degree of representation in being “independent” of established politics or wanted an alternative to “party politics” as practiced in Ireland.”

Of independents he notes that “this category, of course, included People Before Profit and the Anti-Austerity Alliance, though neither registered more than one percent at any stage.”

No one disputes this, but it rather puts into perspective any illusion of a Left Government after the next election.

Burtenshaw is right that the Left needs to be self-critical.

The spontaneous outburst of anger that arose in the anti-water charges demonstrations and the organisation of it thereafter will not of itself create the working class movement that is needed.

It will not be a question of surfing the wave of working class struggle; not a question of seizing some short term opportunity that will render history the long term weakness of Irish workers’ political consciousness, and it is not a question of what the Left does or does not do before the next election.

In the next post I’ll look at the most important aspect in which the contributors to the discussion are more or less agreed – the political programme to be advanced as the solution, whether currently estimated to be convincing and authoritative or not.

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