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

Posted on November 25, 2025 by irishmarxism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

back to part 4

Forward to part 6

‘Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (3 of 6)

Posted on October 20, 2025 by irishmarxism

The summary conclusions in the previous post raise a host of questions about the struggle against austerity following the crash of the Celtic Tiger: the lack of permanent organisation; the lack of working class consciousness and awareness of its specific political interests; lack of credible political programme and the inability to ‘articulate a viable alternative’; reliance on electoralism and thus on Sinn Fein, and lack of clarity on ‘the long-term goal of socialism’.

This is quite a list, and it is to the book’s credit that they are recognised. What is also recognised, more by implication than by explicit critique, is that this is the result of the conscious approach taken by ‘the left’, which the book sees as one of failure qualified by some success. It also implies that the answer to overall failure is not simply more and better activity. For the left however, it is the roller-coaster of activity that is consciously seen as necessary to keep the show on the road.

If we briefly look at these issues, the first question is why ‘mass movements were less a story of mass organisation than mass mobilisation’ and were ‘large but ephemeral’. These mobilisations were campaigns so were inevitably time limited and impermanent. The issue is why they were temporary when their object of attack – austerity – had not been defeated and why the permanent organisations that did exist failed to keep the campaign going?

The second question is posed mainly to the trade unions and particularly ICTU, which called initial demonstrations and then left the stage. Two further questions then arise – why did they do so and why were they able to get away with it?

The first answer is that since 1987 the trade unions have seen the state as a ‘social partner’ and very definitely not an antagonist – never mind enemy, and conducted themselves as partners in not opposing austerity itself but only seeking to modify its implementation. This to be done in the normal way of partners, through lobbying and negotiation.

The decline in strike activity and union density during the period of partnership was therefore not simply a result of economic conditions because they improved dramatically in the 1990s, at first rather slowly in terms of employment and then rapidly. In 1986, just before the first deal, there were 309,198 days ‘lost’ in strikes and in 2007, just before the crash, a total of 6,038 days. By 2022 this had fallen even further to 5,256 while union density declined from 46 per cent in 1994 to 30 per cent in 2007.

Economic power and state revenue shifted to foreign multinationals that unions largely failed to organize, resulting in many skilled, educated, and younger workers being excluded. One of the early results of partnership was the 1990 Industrial Relations Act that made illegal a strike unconnected to a ‘legitimate’ trade dispute, which successfully thwarted solidarity action – one of the very purposes of a trade union movement. ‘Partnership’ also did not prevent the bosses refusing to recognise or negotiate with trade unions

Since the crisis was one of solvency of the state, arising from it guaranteeing the deposits and liabilities of the banks that it could not itself finance, the response was cuts in state services and the pay of public sector staff. The initial ICTU response was therefore a public sector strike that recognised its weakness in the private sector. Bourgeois politicians and its media made hay with accusations about the privileges of these workers that sought to divide private sector workers from those working for the state, which the unions had themselves done little to prevent through their failure to organise across the whole working class.

Private sector workers were met by a withdrawal of their bosses from the social partnership arrangements, one result of which was their repudiation of sectoral pay arrangements. This demonstration of the hollowness of partnership with the state and bosses, both of whom had withdrawn, did not prevent the unions going into another deal in 2010, the Croke Park Agreement, which gave way to Croke Park 2 as more cuts were sought. When the proposals for it were initially rejected by a large majority of members the union leaders were able to manoeuvre ultimate acceptance by warning of the consequences of rejection while providing no strategy for fighting for its members decision.

‘Mass mobilisation’ was not therefore meant to involve ‘mass organisation’ but dependence on the trade union’s own bureaucratic organisation. Its purpose was to assist union leaders’ lobbying with some pressure from below that was to be applied to the government while releasing it from the working class, amounting to simply blowing off steam. By February 2013 ICTU speakers at one of their demonstrations gave over the stage to musicians before many marchers had arrived at the finish in order to avoid being heckled. They avoided it afterwards by not having any demonstrations at all.

Mobilisation wasn’t mean to be permanent, and it wasn’t meant to be an alternative to social partnership and the union bureaucrcay. Although it was formally dissolved by the state it never ended given the objectives and strategy of the trade union leaders who simply pursued it unofficially, originally pushing the idea that the Labour Party in government might mitigate the worst effects of austerity.

The trade union movement, through its bureaucracy, is wedded to the state. Most of its members are in state employment and the state facilitates its organisation through facilitating membership subscriptions, while the share of members in the private sector has declined. The alternative offered by the trade union leaders was therefore the Labour party in government; rises in taxation instead of expenditure cuts, and ‘sharing the burden’ rather than its repudiation. While the unions’ organisational weakness was material, they were partly responsible for this themselves, and while this weakness was also the basis of political passivity and failure, this too was partly their leaders’ own responsibility.

If we look to answer the questions about the lack of permanent working class self-organisation and failure to maintain mobilisation against austerity, we need to look at the prior commitment to social partnership and dependence on the state, which itself had become dependent on the Troika of the European Commission, European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The unions were, and are, not the expression of the self-organisation of the working class and for this their leadership is partly responsible, with the undeveloped and inadequate political consciousness of the working class itself also a major factor. While in times of social peace the union leaders can represent the passivity of the membership, in times of heightened political awareness and activity they consciously act to limit this independent action and the possibility and potential for advancing political consciousness.

Had there been any permanent opposition to social partnership within the trade union movement prior to the crisis it might have presented a starting point to build an alternative to the union bureaucrats. Any opposition however was generally of a temporary campaigning character while the bona fides of the bureaucrats became generally accepted. No independent political alternative was built within the trade unions, reflecting the political weakness of the left outside it.

In these circumstance the bureaucracy was able to mobilise spontaneous anger, demoralise it and then dump it, getting away with it primarily because the politics of the union movement went unchallenged. This in turn partly reflected the political weakness of the left.

Back to part 2

Forward to part 4

Derry TUC publishes a Workers’ Charter

Posted on May 9, 2020 by irishmarxism

On May Day Derry Trades Union Council (DTUC) launched a Workers’ Charter and published it in local newspapers. It argued the need for trade unions and for workers to organise to push for real change.

The Charter raised ‘the Red Flag of workers’ unity and socialism’, calling for ‘a Living Wage for all’ and ‘a shift in the balance of wealth and power away from corporations and the rich and towards the rest of us.’

We should therefore ask ourselves – what does this wealth and power consist of, where does it come from and how do workers shift the balance?

If the Coronavirus crisis has taught us anything, it is that the wealth of society is the product of the labour of the working class, with some of the lowest paid workers recognised as key to the functioning of society.

So if they are so crucial, why is this not recognised in the remuneration they receive?

The reason that they enjoy so little of the fruits of their labour is that their labour power is exercised for the production of profit, because production only takes place in pursuit of it, and is derived only from the labour performed by workers for which they are unpaid. That is why they must now work and why they are paid so little. They don’t own or control the corporations that they work for, which provides the enormous incomes and wealth of those who do, so the economy is not a function of need but of the expansion of this unpaid labour.

The supermarket workers do not own Tesco, which is paying out a £900m dividend to its owners despite getting a tax break, but they are absolutely necessary for this dividend to exist. Many firms loaded with debt will get Government bail outs while the private equity firms that own this debt sit on $2.5 trillion of cash. The state will not take this into account as they do the meagre incomes and savings of workers who apply for welfare.

The rich owners of corporations are rich because they own the means of producing the wealth of society. Their wealth and power comes from control over the production that generates current income and accumulated wealth. Health Service workers such as cleaners, nurses and doctors are exposed to danger because they also don’t own and control the NHS. They have no more control over their pay and conditions than those who work in private hospitals or private care homes. If they did the shortage of personal protection equipment would not have existed.

The answer to shifting the wealth and power in society is therefore to shift ownership and control of production to the people who work to create this wealth.

Derry TUC correctly point out that vast sums of money have been found to cover the Covid-19 emergency after years of tiny wage increases for health service and other workers – ‘the money was there all along’. It wants a tax-free payment of £1,500 for all front-line workers plus an additional four bank holidays a year.

But the money wasn’t there all along. It has been borrowed. It’s now a question of whether, how and who will pay it back. Money was found for the financial crisis of 2007-08 but austerity was imposed to pay for it.

The DTUC statement says that the government is putting the ‘economy’ and profits ahead of protecting people and public health.

But the ‘economy’ is also about the production of all the goods and services that are required to protect people and their public health. Not only the goods and services the NHS needs, that NHS workers need, but all the other economic activity that pays the taxes that funds the health service and other services, including any tax-free payments of £1,500.

The ‘economy’ is not something separate from the activity of working people, that has needs wholly separate from their needs. That is the lie peddled by the Government and bosses. The working class is the working class because it is the prime productive force of the ‘economy’.

The ‘economy’ is not just the production of profit but also the production of what people need in order to live in a civilised society. We cannot survive without continuing to produce and no amount of additional money will be of any use to us if we cannot continue to produce. Working people will be the first to suffer, and the last not to, if whole parts of the ‘economy’ are closed down.

That is the prime contradiction of the capitalist system – that it is production for profit but must also satisfy human need – and capitalism incurs crises because of this opposition.

The battle now is to ensure that the terms and conditions of those workers who return to work are safe and acceptable, and that depends on workers being ready to go to work organised and ready to stand up to the demands of their bosses. That is the lesson from health workers already having to face a lack of PPE. This requires introducing as far as possible mechanisms of workers control.

It also means the organisation of all those workers who are now unemployed and who are threatened with being idle in the longer term.

Workers cannot afford not to work, they aren’t capitalists, and capitalism does not pay for workers unless it is profitable. It would be the height of stupidity to say that we should not return to work because this is demanded only because the bosses want to make money. Of course they do! Until we have a new society based on production for need, and not profit, we have no choice but to recognise this reality, to face up to the economy we actually live in and struggle within it to defend ourselves while also fighting to change it.

Capitalism will not be overthrown by refusing to work, or pretending we can change its laws by simply demanding that profit no longer rules.

Once again, it is workers ownership and control of production that is key to workers’ defence and a socialist alternative.

The DTUC says that ‘globally, one per cent of the population holds half the world’s wealth. We need a new system’. But why is this true?

The world’s decisive capitalist class and its corporations (with its various States) holds the vast majority of wealth creation – that is what defines them. They are smaller than even one per cent, and own or control much more than half. Their lavish riches composed of multiple residences, private islands, yachts, private planes, fancy cars, jewellery, stocks and shares, and bank accounts with millions, are only the product of their real wealth and power, which is their ownership of production and the political power that derives from it.

Derry TUC points specifically to the amount of money spent in the UK defence budget, ‘set to reach £55 billion’. But why only this? UK ‘defence’ spending is only 2.1% of GDP. What about the other 97.9% that is all produced by workers? Should it not also be directed to their needs? And how else would this be done except by controlling it, which means owning it?

The statement calls for ‘a government of the people’, investing this money in areas such as green energy, but why should the State own and control this? The Irish State already owns significant parts of the energy industry in the North of Ireland as well as in the South, and this isn’t socialism. Governments already invest significant amounts in Green energy through subsidies to wind farms and taxes on consumption but this has not brought the transformation of society any closer.

The point is not to increase this state ownership but for workers to develop their own energy production, something more and more possible with smaller and more distributed renewable power generation. The point is to increase the wealth and power of the working class, not the State that defends the existing capitalist system and subsidises the capitalist class.

Derry TUC says that ‘politics has taken power away from the people moved towards the major corporations.’ But this is misleading.

The most fundamental power has always lied with the capitalist class, its system and the laws by which it operates. The capitalist class and its state has increased its power over many years but it has always had power over the working class. Working people can defend themselves and resist, but to create their own power and to create a society in which their power prevails requires an economy owned and controlled by workers and by no one else. To fight for this requires more than bigger and better trade unions; it requires the creation of a mass democratic working class Party.

This is the lesson we must re-learn and teach every May Day.

In his inaugural address to the workers of the First International Marx extolled –

‘the still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands’

To achieve this, Marx said, ‘the great duty’ of the working classes was to ‘conquer political power’ and this required the organisation of a working class party.

The policy of that Party cannot afford to defer the tasks of the working class to the capitalist state, or to pretend that tinkering with the distribution of the fruits of labour through increasing wages etc. is a substitute for revolutionising the distribution of the ownership and control of production.

As Marx said in the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, a programme representing an earlier Workers’ Charter:

‘Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically.’

‘If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?’

Why indeed?

ICTU Congress Ennis 7th and 8th July – David Begg & ICTU should answer for his role on Central Bank Board‏

Posted on July 3, 2015 by irishmarxism

When the Irish financial system collapsed in 2008 bringing down the finances of the State with it there were plenty of people to point the finger at.

The banks who lent recklessly; the property developers who speculated wildly, the politicians for having encouraged and benefited from the bubble, the Regulator for having fallen asleep at the wheel, the Finance Ministry for having fuelled the fire with tax breaks, the auditors for having signed off on bankrupt organisations and sanctioning absurd valuations, the European Union for making us pay for the bankers, the IMF for not warning about the danger, the economists who saw nothing wrong and assured everyone of a ‘soft landing’, the press and media for eulogising the Celtic Tiger miracle economy that fed it ever growing revenue from property advertising, and of course the current Taoiseach Enda Kenny who told the people that they were to blame – “What happened in our country was that people simply went mad borrowing” he told the rich and powerful at Davos in 2012.

Have I missed anyone?

Well actually I have.

The following appeal was sent by a reader of the blog in Dublin.

“There is an opportunity to highlight the need to end the culture of collusion between full time trade union bureaucrats and Government/Troika at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions biennial conference on Tuesday and Wednesday next week. We the victims of austerity should let the bureaucrats and delegates attending know the collusion must end. They have sold out Irish workers.

It has been rumoured that David Begg former General Secretary of ICTU who sat on the Central Bank board for 13 years and never uttered a word of warning to Irish workers about what was happening will be receiving a send off as he retired last year. Mr Begg was formally representing ICTU on the CB board and crucially was chair of the Central Bank Audit committee during the crucial years of the boom and subsequent bust. He’s due to appear before the banking inquiry on 22nd July.

Activists could leaflet delegates to demand that Mr Begg compile a report answering to Irish workers and their families for his failure to alert us about what was going on and for which we’re now paying. He and ICTU had a watchdog role on the CB and owe us an explanation for their failure in fulfilling that role. Some of the responsibility for water charges, cuts, misery, poverty, homelessness and plundering of resources falls on their shoulders because of their inaction in the years leading up to the crash and bail out.

ICTU have other questions to answer –Mr Begg’s role on the Central Bank board was raised on RTE’s Liveline, following the programme ICTU complained and RTE immediately took down the podcast of the programme and issued a disclaimer the following day.

Can ICTU now reveal what their role was in this episode of censoring entirely legitimate questions and debate on Mr Begg’s role on the Central Bank Board? Perhaps Denis O’Brien has just been following in their footsteps in demanding censorship. In case anyone wants to get in contact I have a page Stop Union Sell out which I’m promoting and would be more than happy for you to post on it.”

Workers strike against austerity in the North of Ireland

Posted on March 20, 2015 by irishmarxism

Tens of thousands of workers went on strike across the North of Ireland on March 13 in protest against cuts in jobs and services implemented by the devolved administration in Stormont. The local administration is imposing the austerity agenda dictated by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition in London. The strike was particularly successful because transport workers, including on the buses and trains, took part as well as those in the civil service, health and education.

Observance of the strike was good and pickets and rallies had respectable turnouts. Workers have suffered a long period of declining living standards and are clearly willing to declare their opposition. It would be a mistake however to exaggerate the stage we are at in the development of this struggle. A glance at the numbers voting for strike action in a couple of the biggest unions involved shows the distance yet to go to build a strong and active movement.

In the trade union NIPSA, covering staff in Government departments and other bodies as well as admin and clerical staff in the health service, 52.9% or 4,201 voted for strike action in the civil service side out of a membership of around 20,600, with the health service side having an even lower turnout. Not all of the membership was called upon to strike but the vast majority of members were affected. In UNISON, with a membership mainly in the health service and some in education ,3,181 voted for strike action in a membership of around 40,000, again not all of whom would have been called upon to vote but a majority of whom would have been affected. The strike had sympathy among the wider population but this finds no expression in organisation.

Many on the left have demanded another strike and have claimed that the recent ostensible U-turn by Sinn Fein on welfare cuts is a result of the strike. However this would be to take the Sinn Fein position at face value, or rather take them at their word, and exaggerates the effect of the strike. While it focused opposition to austerity, and can lay the grounds for a deeper campaign against it, the actions of Sinn Fein are not so much a reaction to the strike but the wider feeling of opposition to cuts.

The strategy of the trade union leaders is to lobby and put pressure on local political parties so that if the next Westminster election results in a hung parliament local politicians can demand and negotiate an end to, or at least an amelioration of, austerity imposed in the Northern Ireland. It therefore takes as given the continued position of these parties and resists any project of setting up a political rival. This is on the basis that to do so would inevitably require a position to be taken on the constitutional position of the Northern State.

Such a party would inevitably have Keynesian policies of greater state activity in taxing and spending. In other words salvation would be presented as arriving from the state, so the programme of any such labour or workers’ party would very quickly run up against this challenge. No autonomous development of the party would be possible. It is now some years since a labourist project was attempted and the last one that set up the current political arrangements was an embarrassing failure.

The strike was however noteworthy because it was carried out explicitly against the policies of the local Stormont Executive, the centre piece of the peace process and the ‘new’ political settlement. It also took place against the background of another ‘crisis’ in the process, with the whole financial arrangements of the local administration thrown into doubt by a late Sinn Fein withdrawal of support for the budget because the deal to preserve it did not fully cover the cuts in welfare that were to mirror ‘reforms’ in Britain.

Sinn Fein therefore paraded its anti-austerity credentials, which the media took to be another late intervention by Gerry Adams to shore up the anti-austerity stance of the party in the South of Ireland. Sinn Fein faces a general election in the South within the year. The party is riding high in the polls on the basis of this perceived position and it would not look good if it were seen to be implementing austerity in the North while claiming to oppose it in the South. Sinn Fein therefore ‘supported’ the strike even if the strike was clearly against the budget it had just approved as a major part of the local administration.

This support was invisible in the well-attended rally in Belfast city centre on 13th and is based on the party once again talking out of both sides of its mouth. A long established practice.

This most recently saw an outing through Sinn Fein’s vocal support for the Catholic teacher training college St Mary’s, which was threatened with cuts by the local administration. The cuts were proposed by the Alliance Party Minister responsible who was simply implementing the reduced budget given to him by Sinn Fein and its Democratic Unionist Party partners. The sectarian aspect of this support was lost on no one as similar cuts were to be made to the ‘Protestant’ teacher training college at Stranmillis. In the end the two biggest sectarian parties – Sinn Fein and the DUP – got together to overrule the Alliance Party Minister.

The last minute opposition to the welfare arrangements therefore doesn’t inspire the view that Sinn Fein are a principled opponent of austerity but rather smack of an opportunist change of tack. At their Ard Fheis in Derry the weekend before they dropped their bombshell the leader of Sinn Fein in Stormont, Martin McGuinness , was proclaiming great satisfaction with the deal and congratulating the party on how well it had done in the re-negotiated financial settlement with the British Government.

At the very best their new found concern means that they hadn’t done their sums right or had been rather easily hoodwinked by the DUP; or perhaps that they had re-evaluated the calculus of staying with the welfare cuts programme as it was going to develop – thus facing the flak when it was put into practice – as against provoking another ‘crisis’ and the fall-out that would then ensue.

That this was all a bit last-minute became clear from the Sinn Fein media performances to explain its change of approach. One prominent spokesperson on local radio refused to say it was a question of money when it could hardly be anything else; then it was claimed that it would cost over £280m to put right before this became translated into a round figure of £200m when the round figure it would appear closest to would be £300m. Unionist claims that it was clear in the deal that not all the benefit cuts would be covered by mitigation measures in the budget, and would not be permanent for new claimants, seemed more convincing.

Nevertheless, the row over the extent of the funds to cover cuts in welfare matters to those welfare recipients affected who are indeed, as Sinn Fein says, some of the most vulnerable. It doesn’t in the least affect the fraudulent nature of Sinn Fein’s anti-austerity posturing.

To be continued

Workers’ cooperatives as an alternative to Capitalism – 2

Posted on December 22, 2014 by irishmarxism

Marxists believe that conditions determine consciousness. The ideas that most people have are products of their circumstances. Currently workers sell their labour power as a commodity. That is why they concentrate efforts on the price of their labour power (wages) and the terms and conditions at which it is sold.

It is why they value those services that they cannot provide for themselves individually but are unable to provide collectively because they lack the consciousness and organisation to do so. This includes such things as unemployment insurance, pensions, health care and education.

The sanctification of capitalist private property means that the former is not strictly political while the distribution of the revenue from capitalism is. Through the latter the working class is made dependent on the state for these services, including through employment in their delivery. The welfare dependency culture repeated like a mantra by the right has this much basis in fact.

What there is not therefore is the material basis for the growth of a consciousness that workers should own, manage and control the productive activities of the economy and the state. Instead the growth of the state and its acknowledged political leadership are the grounds for the view that the redistributive powers of the state are the basis for a solution. This mistaken view takes the extreme form on the Left that the state should take over production itself. Of course this has been tried. It didn’t work well.

What we have with the Keynesian alternative then is an expectation, doomed to disappointment, that the capitalist state will divide the fruits of capitalism to benefit those who have first been exploited in opposition to those who have carried out the exploitation, which must remain in place in order to continue funding the redistribution.

Marxists believe that the future socialist society is not utopian because current society contains its anticipation in various ways. Capitalism is pregnant with the future socialism; except that if the state is the embryo then the pregnancy taken to full term does not result in socialism but something else entirely.

Workers’ cooperatives are one of the crucial elements of this anticipated new society growing within the womb of the old. It reunites workers with the means of production and removes the capitalist from the workplace. It gives ownership to the workers and elevates their power, confidence and consciousness. It can prepare the workers involved and other workers for the task of making the whole economy the property of the working class, which is socialism.

Workers ownership can provide the basis for workers to provide the services that are currently provided by the state and which leaves them at the mercy of the state and the politicians who preside on top of it. Such services include education, health, welfare and pensions. Workers self-provision of this would result in their own priorities being imposed on their provision.

However to posit this as the alternative immediately demonstrates a major difficulty. While it is possible to envisage workers cooperatives supplanting individual capitalist production it is much more difficult to envisage this in regard to the services now provided by the State. What this once again demonstrates is the role of the state as defender of the capitalist system – through exclusion of the working class from direct control within society and protection of the accumulation needs of capitalism.

Workers’ self-provision of what are now services provided by the state would necessarily lead not to demanding more taxation by the state but less, so that workers would have more control of their earnings and would have more to pool together and employ to their collective benefit. In short workers would take more and more responsibility for their own lives, even when temporarily or permanently unable to work. The dependence on the capitalist state would be weakened, at least in this respect.

In Ireland workers would have the grounds for recognising that there is an alternative economic development model to reliance on US multinationals. They would have an example of a model of development that didn’t rely on the state. They would have a living alternative to the threats that they need the capitalist banks.

Instead of workers relying on the state to provide for them by taxing the rich or investing in infrastructure to promote private capitalist investment they would have an alternative in which it is their own activity which is the alternative to capitalist crisis.

Is this the viewpoint of a reformist and utopian scenario? I think not.

Firstly thousands of cooperatives already exist; they are not purely idealistic mental constructions. What’s more they can be, and many are, very successful; providing hundreds of thousands of jobs. Living proof that workers can do without capitalists to tell them what to do. Workers can take control, can make decisions and can be successful.

The spread of workers’ cooperatives in entirely possible, their growth and development is not precluded by any necessarily limiting factor in capitalist development, at least to the point where capitalist accumulation appears threatened by it.

The trade union movement and the political organisations of the working class can play an important role in their development. Workers’ cooperatives are therefore not an alternative to the existing workers movement but are something that can be complementary to its development, freeing it more and more from dependence on private capital and the state.

In fact workers’ cooperatives will inevitably demonstrate through their development the antipathy of the state to workers ownership and the power that workers as a class will develop as a result of its development. The state will inevitably be used by the class it serves, the capitalist class, to undermine competition from workers cooperatives and support private capitalist accumulation. Such a development will clarify the lines of battle between the workers’ movement and the capitalist system.

Workers’ cooperatives are not an alternative to class struggle but a means of carrying it out. The creation of workers’ cooperatives in Argentina following its capitalist crises is evidence of this – how much better to promote workers’ cooperatives before such cataclysmic crises rather than in their midst or aftermath.

When workers say – “where is your socialist alternative after over a 150 years of your movement?”, we might have a living movement to point to rather than a simple promise for the future.

And such a movement will be an international one because just as capitalist development has become international there is every reason why workers’ cooperative production should also be international. Every bit of such development will strengthen the international bonds between workers and undermine nationalist solutions that are currently growing.

In other words workers’ cooperatives provide the living link between resistance against the injustice of the current system and the creation of a real alternative. Instead of simple rejection of cuts and lack of democracy workers’ cooperatives not only posit employment and democracy within the cooperative but the transition to a new society. Workers’ cooperatives thus provide the material basis for linking the struggle against capitalism to the creation of socialism.

Workers’ cooperatives are not a magic bullet answer to the current crisis on the Left. There is no simple or singular programmatic answer to a crisis that exists at the level of working class consciousness and organisation. But for the Left a programmatic answer is currently by far and away the most important contribution that it can provide to workers.

Traditionally the revolutionary left has rejected workers’ cooperatives because they have been seen as an alternative to revolution – a militant class struggle against capitalists and the state culminating in an insurrection, the smashing of the capitalist state and creation of a new one. I don’t think anyone can credibly claim that the patient work of class organisation involved in union organising, party building and creation of workers’ cooperatives would get in the way of a burgeoning revolutionary movement. Anyway, when was the last revolution in an advanced capitalist state, one in which the working class is the vast majority of society?

It can be legitimately claimed that workers in existing cooperatives lack socialist consciousness so how can they provide the material basis for socialism? This objection however must also take on board the reality that decades of union organisation has also not turned the majority of trade unionists into socialists. However no one advocates abandoning the organisation of trade unions.

Finally an objection is made that workers’ cooperatives will simply teach workers to exploit themselves within a market economy based on competition. They will simply become their own capitalists.

However, at the extreme, the ownership of all production by the working class would not only remove the capitalist class but would also remove the need for all allocation by the market, or by socially necessary labour time, to use the strictly Marxist definition. In other words workers’ cooperatives would cooperate with each other. Such competition as would exist would not play the same role as capitalist competition just as the continued existence of money tokens would not make it a capitalist system.

So for example, a factory making shoes that became unfashionable would not close down and throw its workers into unemployment but would see them transfer to either production of shoes that were in demand or to some entirely different branch of production. Other workers would support this because they would all know that what they produce might equally go out of fashion, become technologically obsolete or have its workforce reduced by automation. In the same way the receipt of money as salaries and wages would not mean that this money would exist as capital, able to purchase labour power in the pursuit of profit.

The current value of workers’ cooperatives is not just as living practical examples of socialism but that they allow theoretical and political clarification of just exactly what socialism is. They shine a light on the difference between workers power and all the solutions that rely on the state – from Keynesianism to nationalism.

This is the second part of the post. The first part appeared here.

Two films: ‘Pride’ and ‘Tony Benn: Will and Testament’

Posted on October 5, 2014 by irishmarxism

When Margaret Thatcher died my daughter asked me if I could recommend any books that would explain who she was and why she raised such strong views on her death. I struggled to think of one that would convey the political issues and the raw emotion that she generated. Even the youngest who are semi-interested in politics know that in some way that Thatcher helped shape politics today, not only in Britain but much more widely, and that at the very least she symbolises changes we are still living through.

In the last week I have watched two films that provide some way of appreciating Thatcher while also immersing one in the feelings generated at the time. The first – ‘Pride’ – tells the story of a lesbian and gay group in London, which raised more money for miners in a South Wales valley than any other group, during the miners’ titanic strike in 1984-85 against Thatcher. It’s rarely sentimental, the performances are wonderful and if you don’t walk out of it feeling proud that this is the side you are on then there’s no hope for you.

If you’re older then you’ll remember the struggle with pride and not a little bit of sadness. If you were in any way involved in solidarity in this side of the Irish sea then you’ll now appreciate the importance of the struggle and perhaps realise you didn’t quite understand its importance then. You’ll also appreciate the need for unity and solidarity of the oppressed and that only when we fight together do we make real the unity that underlies our oppression and our liberation.

Of course what you take out of any artistic creation partly depends on your own experience and you will only learn from a political film what your political understanding will allow. Some things will stand out more than others – for me the performances of the actors, including Ben Schnetzer who plays Mark Ashton, the spokesperson for the gay and lesbian solidarity group and originally from the North of Ireland – brave and tender; or Paddy Considine as the miners spokesperson Dai Donovan, who welcomes against opposition within his own ranks the support of the gay and lesbian group with understanding and appreciation for the bravery of the miners’ new supporters and the value of their own struggle.

Uplifting and inspiring as it is the significance of the miners’ struggle was illustrated for me by the miner’s banner that proclaimed their adherence to international workers unity and the struggle for socialism. Of all the reference points that they had, as Welsh, as miners, workers and brothers they stated on their banner that what would always define them was international unity and socialism. Through the strike they demonstrated in their solidarity with gay and lesbian activists from London a unity that went beyond nationality and sexual orientation to recognition of their shared and common interest in fighting oppression.

And a miner’s banner also featured in another film – ‘Tony Benn Will and Testament’ – a documentary covering his life and political activity, including the miners’ strike and his inclusion on a new Miners’ banner.

It showed Benn narrate his personal and political life and his acceptance of his death that must have followed shortly after the film. It shows his journey through politics and his affirmation that he moved to the left through joining government and not, as everyone else does, to the right.

He explained his determination to become an MP and change the world because of an encounter with one of the Americans involved in dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, eventually becoming the minister responsible for the civil nuclear programme in Britain. In this role he explained how he was completely kept in the dark about the fact that the plutonium waste used in this civil power generation was sent to supply the US nuclear weapons programme. More widely he explains that he came to realise that while in Government he didn’t have any real control and that the Labour Party became simple managers of the system when it achieved office.

The film covers many of the class struggles in Britain over the latter half of the twentieth century, from the campaign against nuclear weapons, to the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders sit-in, the ‘winter of discontent’ provoked by attacks on workers by the labour Government, the miners’ strike and the anti-Iraq war movement in our current century.

His bid for the Labour Party deputy leadership in 1981 against Denis Healy, which he very narrowly lost by barely 1%, does not get the attention it deserves but it does turn the spotlight on Neil Kinnock – the so-called left who abstained in the vote. He later became leader and was leader during the miners’ strike, which he more or less also betrayed, later being rewarded with a place in the House of Lords. A fighting leadership of the British labour movement could have made the difference between defeat and victory. Watching the film I found myself getting angrier with him than with Thatcher, but isn’t that always the way with traitors?

He brings to attention the possibility, since the 1970s, of using North Sea oil to modernise Britain but identifies the failure to do so in the pro-big business policies of Thatcher. Some on the left today see the possibility of modernising Scotland based on what’s left of North Sea oil. However they base this not on any lesson drawn from recent decades but on nationalist division. The political leader they in effect followed, Alex Salmond, proclaimed that his SNP “didn’t mind the economic side so much” of Margaret Thatcher, while claiming that “the SNP has a strong social conscience, which is very Scottish in itself.” So that puts the rest of us in our place.

I remember listening to Tony Benn speak and someone asked him about the idea that socialism could be brought about through parliament and whether the capitalist class and its system would allow such a transition without mounting a violent coup to prevent it. Ah, he said, the Chile question, referring to exactly such an attempt to introduce reform in Chile at the beginning of the 1970s, which led to the least politically interfering military in South America mounting a coup, deposing the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and murdering thousands and thousands of workers and socialists.

Unfortunately having identified the question he didn’t give an answer to it and this might seem to be the major point to highlight in a Marxist review of a film of his political testament. And so it is. But by his own experience and through his own words he demonstrates these lessons and the film is valuable for showing them.

After recounting how he wanted to become an MP the film a few minutes later shows him speaking in the House of Commons – to row upon row of empty green benches. Having had the experience of Governmental office noted above he later announced, in a line provided by his wife, that he was leaving Parliament to spend more time in politics. We then see him on the campaign trail at meetings and demonstrations until his death this year.

So whatever his reformist words his practice in this way became the opposite of the fetishism and ‘cretinism’ of parliamentary activity for which Marxists would criticise reformist politics.

Unfortunately today , it is the so-called Marxist left who argue that the big question is the ‘crisis of working class representation’ and pursue one electoralist intervention after another, like a hamster on a wheel, going nowhere, fed on the most piss-poor politics that they otherwise condemn in other times or in other places.

So it is not just the young that could learn from these two films. Very straightforward as they are in political terms, there are basic lessons to be learnt from them – the need for unity of the oppressed, workers internationalism, the futility of seeking fundamental change through capitalist parliaments or the capitalist state, and the need for class struggle.

The defeat of the miners’ strike and the experience of social-democratic politics cast a long shadow over the working class and socialist movement today. We can learn vital lessons from them and their failure. That we do not do so is partly because we cannot see the shadow, since it is overcast by an even darker one – that of Thatcherism and the rampage of what is now called neoliberalism. To come out of the shadows we need to come out of both. These two films can help us.

‘Yes’, a non-nationalist argument for Scottish independence. Part 1

Posted on August 18, 2014 by irishmarxism

The May/June issue of Radical Philosophy has an interesting looking article entitled ‘Yes’ A non-nationalist argument for Scottish Independence, written by Neil Davidson who has written books on Scottish history and until recently was a member of the Socialist Workers Party.

So what is this non-nationalist argument? Well we are well into over half of the article before this is directly addressed but it is this first part that is actually the most interesting.

But first Davidson mentions what he calls a pro-independence argument that can only be held in England. This argument is that an independent Scotland would be social-democratic or even socialist and would inspire the English Left to seriously challenge neoliberalism. If this were actually the case it would indeed be an argument for Scottish separation but it is not one that could only be held in England. Why would it not be an important consideration for socialists in Scotland? Or have the perspectives of supporters of Scottish separation unconsciously narrowed so much?

Davidson however notes that the powers already devolved have led only to “modest” although “real” reforms and that “there is nothing intrinsically progressive about Scottish statehood” although, as we shall see, the Left nationalist case is that there is something intrinsically progressive about separation.

Davidson points out contradictions within the Scottish National Party programme – opposition to nuclear weapons while supporting NATO membership and a low corporate tax (Irish-style) while promising Scandinavian-style welfare – and paints this as the starting point of the left critique of the independence movement.

While this may be true of some it is not the starting point of the Marxist critique of Scottish nationalism. The so-called contradictions of SNP policy might be better understood as the usual double-talk of capitalist politicians.

Indeed for Davidson this double talk from the SNP, or its leadership at least, extends to the demand for independence itself. He asserts that maximum devolution or ‘devo max’ is the constitutional option probably supported by most Scots, which begs the question of what is democratic in his support for separation, and is also what the SNP leaders hope to achieve and what they think they can achieve. This, he says, would also probably be acceptable to most Tories.

This is a striking admission of the manipulative nature of nationalism but what Davidson says about this aspect of the Scottish demand for independence has an even worse aspect. The leadership of the SNP cannot come out openly for devo-max “without incurring the wrath of the fundamentalist-nationalist wing of his party, for whom anything less than independence is betraying the blood of Wallace and The Bruce, and so on.”

So what we have is nationalist fundamentalism driving the call for independence, leading the SNP party as a whole and trailing behind it the majority of the Scottish radical left, united in the call for a Yes vote.

And what this article purports to do is give us a good reason to join in.

Davidson doesn’t then give us his non-nationalist reason for following this nationalist-fundamentalist demand but instead goes on to critique arguments from the No side.

He states that the ‘No’ argument- that the demand for independence is a nationalist diversion from class issues that are essentially the same on both sides of the border – “does not deserve to be taken seriously”. He does not however say why such a claim is mistaken and he does not say in what way the class issues that are primary and fundamental are not the same on both sides of the border.

He complains that supporters of Scottish independence are marked as nationalists but those supporting the status quo are not. Why are those who want to maintain the current British state not British nationalists? If they can detach their support for the British state from British nationalism why can’t supporters of Scottish independence divorce their support for an independent Scotland from Scottish nationalism?

There are two reasons. Firstly Marxists can advocate a No vote, not by supporting the British state but simply accepting that it is a better framework to advance what they really value, which is the unity of the working class across nations. On the other hand supporters of Scottish separation are compelled to defend the claim that Scottish independence, by itself, is progressive.

If there were some democratic content to the demand for independence on account of some lack of democracy arising from the union then there would be non-nationalist grounds for supporting formation of a new capitalist state, but there is none. Davidson is too knowledgeable about Scottish history to claim that this partner in Empire building is an oppressed nation. So supporters of independence are reduced to calling for creation of a new border and a new capitalist state. What is this if not nationalism?

The second reason is to do with the consequences of separation. The argument presented on this blog before is that these would be wholly negative. A new capitalist state would increase division where uncoerced union existed before. It would strengthen the forces of nationalism by giving them a stunning victory that they would be stupid not to exploit. A new state would engender competition, for example on reducing corporate taxes, and give nationalists many opportunities to demand support for ‘our’ new Scottish state and ‘our’ Scottish government. A Yes vote would strengthen nationalism. That’s why supporters of Scottish independence are accused of nationalism.

Davidson addresses other reasons why left objections to Scottish independence should be rejected, the most important of which is weakening of the British working class.

One aspect of this is the argument that the Labour Party would lose its Scottish MPs and would forever doom English workers to Tory rule. Davidson correctly rejects this argument, describing it as a “type of political-emotional blackmail” although it is in fact a popular argument on the pro-independence Scottish Left who claim that the union dooms Scotland to Tory rule, although they seem less dismayed by Tartan Tory rule from the SNP. Davidson correctly argues that the future electoral prospects of the Labour Party depend on the Labour Party. But if this is the problem then this Party is the site of struggle, not a separate capitalist state.

A second argument refuted is that an independent Scotland would still be dominated by capital, much of it external in origin. To this he responds “but who, apart from the most hopelessly naive ever imagined otherwise?”

This is ok as far as it goes, although reading some of the wilder left supporters of separation would give one the impression that a left wing Scotland will automatically take giant strides towards socialism free from union with England. And most people who aren’t on the left are quite ignorant of the essential socialist argument about the internationalisation of capitalism.

The argument here however, which Davidson avoids, is whether there is any effect on working class power from the economy being dominated by foreign capital: in terms of capital’s ability to shift if it doesn’t get it way or ability to put downward pressure on union rights and corporate taxes for example. In other words the question arises whether separation improves the framework and circumstances in which Scottish workers find themselves. More developed analysis of this question instead of pat answers might indicate that it would not.

Davidson then addresses what he calls “by far the most serious left argument against Scottish independence” – “that it will undermine the British trade-union movement, by preventing cross-border unity”.

This however is only one aspect of the division of the British working class that would arise from separation, for by definition there would no longer be a British working class, but an English working class and a Scottish working class. In itself this is an indication of just how important states are in defining the nature of the classes within their borders and one reason Marxists have opposed national division.

But for Davidson the disruption of unity is not an inevitable consequence of Scottish secession:

“Unity is not secured by the constitutional form of the state or by the bureaucratic structures of union organisation, but rather by the willingness to show solidarity and take joint collective action, across borders if necessary.”

Very true. But can Davidson credibly deny that it is more difficult to create and maintain working class organisation across states than within them? Is the whole history of the working class movement not that it is extremely difficult to create international workers unity because of the divisiveness of state organisation and nationalism?

Davidson notes that British unions organise in the Irish State but this rather disproves his argument since even in this case real unity, of objectives, of purpose and of action, is largely absent and much, much weaker than the unity within the purely British movement. Irish workers face a different state with different policies, different economic and political conditions arising from different state organisation, and all this makes unity across Britain and Ireland much more problematic and difficult.

Can Davidson not see that the unity of English and Scottish workers is much greater than any unity of British and Irish workers? As I have argued before, even within the one working class, within the Irish working class, the creation of two separate states North and South has deepened the division among Irish workers and is an enormous barrier to their unity.

Davidson gives the example of the Grangemouth dispute, the lessons of which I have looked at before, in order to argue that the existence of a UK-wide union did not prevent a debacle. Quite true, but the issue is whether a Scotland-only union would have helped or whether, had the Grangemouth workforce belonged to a population which had decided it was better off without England and Wales, this would have stimulated solidarity action from English and Welsh workers.

Davidson also gives the example of coordinated strikes against austerity across European countries on November 12 2012. The first point to make is that international strikes are rare. The second is that the development of the European Union and particularly the creation of the Euro have played a large role in creating the grounds for international action by the working class. National separation undermines these grounds.

Finally the left No argument which Davidson addresses is that “if Scottish independence is so unthreatening to capital, so divisive of the working class, why are most sections of the British – and, indeed, the European and US – ruling classes so opposed to it?”

Well, there is no indication that they are opposed to it because it will spur the development of a social-democratic or socialist Scotland that will inspire England as well. That Davidson points out that the neoliberal ‘Economist’ magazine used to support Scottish independence demonstrates that it is quite possible to present an argument for an independent capitalist Scotland. Indeed so much is this the case that this is the overwhelming argument being put forward by the Yes campaign.

That socialists should make up their minds by looking at what their enemies are saying is always stupid. It is attractive only to those who don’t care to think for themselves and prevents any sort of critical thought. Its exact stupidity is demonstrated here by the fact that the ‘Economist’ magazine changed its mind. When the ‘Economist’ supported ‘Yes’ were socialists therefore to say ‘No’? And after the ‘Economist’ changed its mind and decided ‘No’ was the answer were socialists to then say Yes? Davidson is far too intelligent to go along with this but it is difficult to see what other point he is making here.

He says that he suspects the reason for the change of mind is “fear of the consequences for the British state, and consequences for capital invested in Britain” and this turns out to be his reason for supporting separation, as we shall see.

It is also fairly clear that opposition by most of big business, the EU bureaucracy and USA is because capitalism is increasingly international and needs international political mechanisms to assist its operation. The international development of capitalism has been a feature almost from its beginning and was praised for its progressive potential by Marx and Engels in the ‘Communist Manifesto’, most remarkably because it gives rise to the class that will put in place an alternative – the working class.

To now seek national forms of economic and political organisation is backward, not only to the capitalist class but also to the working class. The capitalist class in the referendum have made it clear that certain steps backward will not be taken such as leaving the European Union, setting up a new Scottish currency. So Scotland will continue membership of NATO and financial regulation from London as well as an all-British energy market.

The working class is not obliged to support or go along with any of this but it is not in its interests to seek arrangements that will make it harder to organise internationally, while the capitalist class minimises the steps backward it has to take.

Socialism will be built on the international development of the forces of production, communication and society generally. It will not be constructed on national roads to anywhere or anything.

In the next post I will look at what Davidson thinks the non-nationalist argument for Scottish Independence actually is.

Racism and anti-racism in Belfast

Posted on June 7, 2014 by irishmarxism

“Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell. Enoch Powell was a prophet, he called it that blood would flow on the streets and it has happened.”

When a Protestant minister in North Belfast’s Metropolitan Tabernacle Church declared that Islam was “satanic” and “heathen” and compared “cells” of Muslims in Britain to the IRA the First Minister of Northern Ireland, Peter Robinson, who is known to have attended the church, was widely called upon to speak out.

Oh dear.

When he did, he said that Pastor McConnell had been demonised, that it was the duty of any preacher to denounce what he described as “false prophesy” and said he would not trust Muslims either, particularly with regard to those who had been involved in violence, or those who are “fully devoted to Sharia law, I wouldn’t trust them for spiritual guidance”; however he would trust Muslims to “go down to the shops” for him or to deal with a number of “day-to -day issues”.

Cue lots of people with their heads in their hands, especially those considering the Northern Ireland administration sponsored trips to the Middle East to promote trade and investment.

A newly elected unionist councillor for Belfast had that week been found to have tweeted a year earlier that “I’m so sick of the poor Catholic b*stards they make me sick I wish they would just go down to Ireland . .” but she was young and sectarianism is hardly news in the North of Ireland unless someone in the media decides to make it news.

But racist attacks, especially by loyalist paramilitaries, have already been in the news and have increased by 43 per cent over the year, twenty seven per cent of them in North Belfast. Having been called upon to comment in order to denounce racism, Robinson was then called upon to apologise for his own offensive and insulting remarks.

Anna Lo, the Hong Kong born local politician, had just received some racist harassment herself and called upon him to resign if he did not publicly apologise, vowing to leave Northern Ireland because of local racism and sectarianism and stating that she would not stand for election again. One Democratic Unionist Party councillor then called her a “racist” and was dropped by that party as its candidate for mayor of Newtownabbey, which is adjacent to North Belfast. Other ministers and unionist politicians backed McConnell and claimed Christianity was being persecuted.

Two Muslim men where then beaten in their homes in the north of the city and stated that their attack was connected to Robinson’s statement – he had “lit the fire”.

Some in the press and other unionist leaders attempted to minimise the impact of the insult by claiming he was just clumsy. Michael Nesbitt, leader of the Unionist Party, claimed that “we say things we don’t really mean or express them in ways that perhaps we could have thought through better.”

Robinson then made a private apology to some prominent local Muslims, except it wasn’t an apology. He didn’t admit to being wrong, did not withdraw the remarks and did not say he was unconditionally ‘sorry’. What apparently he did say was that “If” anyone thought he had said anything derogatory “he would be hurt” and he would apologise, but he didn’t because he didn’t think so. He had been ‘misinterpreted’.

So he might be the injured party in this episode and it was everybody else’s fault for not understanding him.

But still the calls for a public apology raged and eventually Peter Robinson did publicly apologise – except the apology wasn’t public. It was one of those occasions when the media reports something and you look to see when and how it happened but you can’t actually find any evidence of it having happened, and when you look closer it appears that it hasn’t actually happened. Yet most assume it has because it has been reported and before you now it it has happened because, well, that is how it has been reported.

In such cases this can only occur because everyone with any power to get across a media message has decided it’s in their interests to go along with the concealment. For the unionist parties the interest involved is obvious. Any gain in stature among its racist, sectarian and lumpen base has been achieved, while the reality of selling local business to Saudi Arabia etc. cannot be ignored so the controversy has to be closed down.

The British Government especially would be happy for the story to die no matter how this might happen and they showed no intention of doing anything that might shine a light on the bigoted character of their local political settlement, sold to the world as a model to be admired and to emulate.

But what about the nationalists, including Sinn Fein? The second dog that did not bark was the failure of these parties to call upon Robinson to resign, as – to her credit – Anna Lo did. Had such remarks been made in Britain by a leading member of the Conservative Government their feet would not have touched the ground as they headed for political exile and extinction. But not here.

What we got here was a bland resolution sponsored by Sinn Fein in the Northern Ireland Assembly opposing “racism, discrimination and intolerance of any kind, wherever it occurs” but for God’s sake don’t mention that the First Minister has promoted all three.

What such resolutions reveal is not the willingness of Irish nationalism to oppose racism and bigotry but its willingness to avoid doing so, to avoid identifying and condemning it in reality, to replace lofty, banal and meaningless condemnations of racism in general for dealing with it in concrete reality.

Sinn Fein is setting itself up to be in Government North and South in 1916, 100 years from the Easter Rising that saw the beginnings of an attempt, that failed, to achieve Irish independence. To do so it must ensure that there is an administration around in the North for it to be a part of. Since this requires unionist participation no provocation or act, irrespective of how outrageous it is, will be allowed to threaten the political structure in the North no matter how rotten, dysfunctional and bereft of credibility it may prove itself to be.

In this way a political settlement based on sectarianism demonstrates its bigoted logic by ensuring that the most offensive statements can be made without fear. In this way, but not only in this way, Irish nationalism becomes complicit in feeding the bigotry on which the Northern state rests, even while it self-righteously insists on its own non-sectarian character and its supporters continue to be the main victims of the bigotry.

What the Government parties are called upon to do, unionist and nationalist, is to deliver another document on “building a united, shared and reconciled community “, another piece of paper reviewing Stormont’s ‘Unite Against Hate’ campaign and together parrot inane promises from within ”its clear commitment within the Programme for Government.”

So if nationalism cannot provide an opposition to racist bigotry who can?

In a demonstration of thousands called quickly over social media a trade union spokesmen could only say that it was organised “in response to a worrying increase in the number of racist attacks in recent weeks, a situation which has been exacerbated by inflammatory comments by some religious and political leaders.”

Once again the identity of these racists couldn’t be stated. Throwing a punch in mid-air takes the place of landing a blow on the real bigots who are allowed to continue to disclaim responsibility through the connivance of the media, political opponents and cowardice of others.

What political leaders are the racists? How can you oppose something when you cannot even name it? How are their excuses and non-apologies to be challenged? How is the collusion of others to be highlighted and exposed? How is their hypocrisy to be demonstrated? And what is your alternative?

The trade unions bemoaned “the absence of the promised Racial Equality Strategy and the lack of coherent political leadership from the Northern Ireland Executive” as if pieces of paper are a solution and coherent racism would be better.

This hasn’t worked before and it’s not going to work now.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Amnesty International and the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic minorities called a second demonstration today and got a good turn-out given the bad weather. Again however there was no call for Robinson to resign despite his remarks and his non-public public apology that retracted nothing of the substance of what he had said.

Some People Before Profit placards called for his resignation and some chants from the Socialist Party contingent called for him to go but the latter’s leaflet didn’t mention it and instead claimed his apology was a great victory for anti-racists despite it being obvious that these forces played a relatively minor role.

Such repulsive episodes highlight the rotten character of politics in the North of Ireland because they involve relatively new targets but the solution that is always proposed is that local politicians be something that they are not and do something opposite to what they have just done. That they oppose bigotry and sectarianism even while the sectarian basis of the political settlement is supported because it is part of the peace process. ‘Peace’ becomes the excuse for yet more and more injustice because an alternative to the present political deal cannot be conceived.

Debating what such an alternative could be would be a start to addressing this obstacle.

Arguments against workers’ cooperatives: the Myth of Mondragon Part 2

Posted on January 31, 2014 by irishmarxism

In Part one of this post I looked at the argument that the most famous example of workers’ cooperative ownership involves the division of the working class within the cooperative so that technicians and especially mangers have different views and interests from manual workers. This is reflected in their relative enthusiasm for the cooperative form.

In fact there is no evidence or argument presented in the book under review that there is a fundamental difference of interest between managers and workers arising from class position within the relations of production, although some evidence that there is differing levels of enthusiasm.

I argued in response that the evidence for the view that there is weaker engagement of workers in the cooperative involves writing off the views of the higher paid workers, some of whom might be called managers, but that there is nevertheless some weak evidence of an unhealthy lack of participation by manual workers in decision making. In Marx’s support for cooperative production he noted that:

“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour.”

The evidence of the book is that some of the most political workers have organised to struggle against some of these shortcomings and have succeeded. This response of the workers is one that should be supported rather than dismiss workers ownership outright. To anticipate the whole argument – if workers should not take up experiments in running their own workplace how are they ever to be expected to – in one momentous event called revolution – ever to take over running the whole of society and creation of their own state to protect it?

The actions of these politicised workers show the role that a workers’ party could play in advancing the socialist project within cooperative production.

The argument of the book (The Myth of Mondragon) however is not only that the real workers cooperative, as opposed to the mythical one, divides workers within the cooperative but more especially has resulted in, and was meant to result in, the division of the working class in the local area and within the Basque country more generally.

The argument has already been referred to but it is made up of several components. The first is that the cooperative has imposed middle-class values on workers by making them, in effect, small property owners. In this they faithfully reflect the motives and views of the original sponsor of the cooperative in Mondragon, Catholic priest José Mariá Arizmendiarrieta, who was heavily influenced by Catholic social teaching and who sought to ameliorate class struggle through education and co-operativism. Hence the significance noted in the first post of relatively more co-operators viewing themselves as middle class than workers in a private sector firm.

This fed into the views of Basque nationalism, particularly the bourgeois PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco) but also the radical nationalism of ETA, which, like the Irish versions of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism, liked to look on the Basque people as inherently egalitarian and predisposed to small property ownership which united the nation against the outside enemy, harking back to an original society free of class contradictions that preceded foreign rule. For the radical nationalists the cooperative could simultaneously be supported by emphasising Basque unity and workers participation, so demonstrating the compatibility of nationalism and socialism while opposing any role for foreign multinationals.

The cooperative was thus a conscious political instrument to divide the working class, which was traditionally militant and socialist. This division is also exhibited in resentment by some workers in Mondragon expressed in remarks that ‘los cooperativistas’ “have it easy”.

A third element of the argument is that it is no coincidence that the cooperative was set up under the fascist regime of General Franco since both co-operativism and fascism share a desire to negate class struggle. Cooperatives were also supported by Mussolini and the Mondragon cooperative came into existence only because more militant forms of working class action were illegal and repressed.

The author of the book refers to the first criticisms of Mondragon by ETA which accused the Mondragon cooperative of dividing the local working class between co-operators and the rest because the cooperative workers did not want to engage in strikes with their fellow workers.

What is to be made of these arguments?

The argument that the cooperative workers have bought into the illusion that they are middle class is not strongly supported by the evidence in the book but if they did they would not be alone because such identification is not uncommon amongst many better off sections of the working class. That through the cooperative, through their ownership of the firm, there is some basis for such a view is reflected in the quote from Marx above, that the workers make themselves their own capitalist. However, this has not prevented workers expressing solidarity with their fellow workers or being sensitive to inequality within the workplace. Objectively their position is a transitional transcendence of capitalism but a very partial one, the more partial the more isolated it is, and cannot provide on its own guaranteed grounds for the development of socialist class consciousness.

This needs to be fought for by a working class party. The class struggle is not abolished by cooperatives but is a means to pursue it and a battle ground on which to wage it. The question is whether this battle involves growth and development of the cooperative form or not? The answer for Marx was clear:

“. . . however excellent in principle and however useful in practice, co-operative labour, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. . . To save the industrious masses, co-operative labour ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means.”

That the Mondragon cooperative was sponsored by a Catholic priest should no more be a reason for condemning it than should the Bolsheviks have condemned the demonstration led by the Russian Orthodox priest Father Gapon, which sparked the revolution in Russia in 1905.

That cooperatives have existed under fascist regimes does not demonstrate that they are essentially instruments of fascism any more than it demonstrates that fascism is the essential expression of cooperatives. In Italy Mussolini’s fascist thugs terrorised and burnt cooperatives before making them subordinate to the fascist regime. In Spain the dictatorship of Franco could allow isolated cooperatives to the extent that they did not follow the path, recommended by Max to the First International above, that they expand and combine to develop nationally and indeed internationally.

The example of fascist sponsorship or acquiescence is but the most extreme warning to workers that the potential for their independent initiative should not be compromised by seeking the sponsorship of the capitalist state, no matter how democratic its form. The revolutionary content of workers cooperatives, whatever its workers might believe at any particular point in time, is that they represent the independent actions of a class that is taking measures that undermines one pillar of existing society, which is the monopoly of the means of production in the hands of a separate class of capitalists.

The need to expand is not limited to national growth but is practical demonstration that workers ownership can only succeed internationally. So far from supporting any form of nationalism it is practical vindication of the need for workers to reject national solutions, and not just at some future point in time but now. Workers’ ownership should be extended internationally not tied to some view that workers are part of a purely national development of a specific country and its particular state, especially when this state is inevitably a capitalist one. Workers of different nationalities united by ownership of the one enterprise with different workplaces in different countries would be powerful demonstration of unity of interest and practical international solidarity.

The first criticisms of ETA reflect a common view on the Left, which appears to be endorsed by the author of the book, which is that the struggle of trade unions against employers is a better model of class struggle than the development of workers’ cooperatives. Hence the criticism that the cooperative workers often did not go on strike, even though the author quotes a local militant expressing the view that this is perfectly understandable.

Who would they be striking against? If the purpose is not to influence or pressurise their employer, which is themselves, then it would be part of a movement to demonstrate support for particular demands and the strength of feeling and organisation behind those demands. In that case this is what demonstrations and meetings are for.

In themselves trade unions do not exist to undermine capitalism but to enforce its operation by acting on one side of the supply and demand of labour power which sets its price. It enforces the laws by which capitalism regulates workers alienation from ownership of the means of production, it does not in itself threaten it. Strikes can be seen as a simple refusal to sell labour power for a period rather than an existential threat to the wages system itself.

Would Left critics criticise strikes that demanded workers ownership of their firms? Or would this be seen as a demand not actually to be realised but one only useful in so far as it leads more or less quickly to revolution? In which case what would they say if some workers, but not all, actually succeeded – fuggedaboutthat and let’s start all over again?

None of these points negate the argument that trade unions might not be helpful for cooperative workers in order to assist them in both elaborating alternative plans for their coop or to protect them against the actions of management. Particular interests of workers are not guaranteed by workers ownership but we should not believe that trade unions are somehow superior forms of workers’ organisation and representation than the organs of the cooperative.

The latter will be composed of all the workers while the trade union will usually not. Trade unions are not inherently more democratic as the current bureaucratised organisations show. Nevertheless for particular workers or in particular circumstances they may be useful in representing the interests of some workers even against the majority. These workers need not be more backward but could be more advanced and we should not necessarily believe such organisation is required because the unions are needed to represent workers in the same way Lenin claimed they were required as protection against their own bureaucratised state.

The book recalls a significant strike in the Mondragon cooperative in 1974 sparked by job regradings and the system for their evaluation. The strike only lasted one day, following a walk-out by some of the workforce, but twenty-four leaders were fired pending a vote of a general assembly of the workers. When this assembly convened the workers voted to uphold the sackings. A campaign was launched to let them return which eventually, in 1978, led to their being readmitted.

The strike and its aftermath exposed the political assumptions behind the participants on both sides with cooperative managers claiming the strikers were anti-Basque while some of the strikers went on to join a Maoist-oriented organisation. Some Left organisations then went on to develop left-wing critiques of cooperativism.

The messiness of such events gives a headache to those who like their politics simple, with workers on one side and bosses on the other. Simple trade unionism seems to provide for that although simple trade unionism does not go beyond capitalism, much of it is purely sectional and some of it is even reactionary.

Despite the authors apparent approval of this model of class struggle she notes that, contrary to her overall argument, that the “most important factor influencing the local labour movement” was the Moncloa Pact between the Left parties, including the Spanish Communist Party, the trade unions syndicates and the Spanish Government. This accepted changes to the law which reduced workers’ rights below what had been provided under the Franco dictatorship.

So trade unions are not an anti-dote to workers’ failure to make islands of socialism out of workers’ cooperatives, which can hardly be expected because they haven’t been able to do that for themselves. The answer is not to see workers cooperatives as alternatives to class struggle but as part of it. Once again the question is whether the answer lies in expansion of cooperatives or their rejection.

The answer for Marx was that they should be developed. This is elaborated on in the two posts recommended by Boffy in his comment on the first of these posts on Mondragon.

On their own a cooperative can easily be a capitalist enterprise owned by its workers in which, as Marx says, the workers become their own capitalist. What makes them a powerful weapon of transformation is their development and growth into a social and economic alternative to capitalism through cooperation between them and their living example of workers’ power.

As isolated coops they are indeed subject to the economic and political subordination of the capitalist economy and its state. If content to be providers of jobs and income only to their members there is clearly no wider ambition. However as a cooperative movement determined to grow and develop in other areas of production, both to secure its own future and share its benefits with others, and to provide other cooperative services such as education, health and other socials services, it inevitably poses itself as an alternative to capitalist production and the capitalist state’s provision of services. It becomes a political alternative because its growth, as an economic sector driven by the needs of its workers and their customers and not by profit, is a real, practical and living example of an alternative economic and social system.

The development of the cooperative sector to become such a political rival and alternative is at least partly dependent on Marxists fighting for such a perspective within cooperatives and for cooperatives to propagandise their alternative. In Marx’s remarks to the First International he praises workers’ cooperatives and calls for the workers to pursue just such a task:

(a) We acknowledge the co-operative movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is to practically show, that the present pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.

(b) Restricted, however, to the dwarfish forms into which individual wages slaves can elaborate it by their private efforts, the co-operative system will never transform capitalist society. to convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realised save by the transfer of the organised forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves.

(c) We recommend to the working men to embark in co-operative production rather than in co-operative stores. The latter touch but the surface of the present economical system, the former attacks its groundwork.

(d) We recommend to all co-operative societies to convert one part of their joint income into a fund for propagating their principles by example as well as by precept, in other words, by promoting the establishment by teaching and preaching.

Let’s see how such a perspective might address another frequent criticism of Mondragon and other cooperative enterprises. This is that the cooperative further divides the working class through its large use of temporary contract labour, as much as one third of a particular workforce in Mondragon. These workers are not members of the cooperative with all the rights of membership and obviously have much less job security. In these circumstances the workers are not their own capitalist, since they do not have membership of the cooperative, and are exploited not by themselves but by others – the Mondragon cooperative.

If it was the case that these workers were indeed needlessly kept on purely temporary contracts it would be open to the most class conscious workers within the cooperative to campaign and seek a vote on their award of cooperative membership.

On the other hand let us assume that the cooperative workforce does not accept this because it views these workers as an unfortunate but necessary buffer against periodic reductions in demand for their products, such fluctuations being an inevitable feature of capitalism. Then it would not be possible to give these workers cooperative membership because the cooperative could not guarantee their continued employment should demand for the products they make fall. This might be despite the fact that the Mondragon and other cooperatives seek to move workers around the wider cooperative group in order to protect the employment of their members.

The second class status of the workers could lead to resentment within the wider working class and support for the view that the cooperative workers are indeed a privileged layer that is separate from the rest of the workers.

What is the answer to this problem?

The answer is not obviously to give these workers the same rights as the rest of the cooperative workers for this solves no problem. If demand does suffer a drop or there is some other crisis in the cooperative, for example if some customer does not pay up because it has gone out of business, the cooperative can choose to keep all its workers on the payroll and then either weather the storm or as a result go out of business altogether.

If the latter is the foreseeable result of the event then keeping all the workers on is a mistake, not only for those workers who could otherwise save their job but for the cause of worker owned production in general. The whole cooperative would cease to exist when part of it at least could be saved. If all the workers, including temporary workers, have equal rights how is it to be decided who will lose their job?

If this problem is to be minimised the cooperative should seek to be part of a wider federation of cooperatives so that downturns in economic activity in one area can be made up by possible growth in employment in another. The larger the cooperative movement the more scope there is to diversify risk and build up reserves to protect its members during crises. Were this to happen then cooperative production would be seen by workers in the capitalist sector as a real progressive alternative to the insecurity of the capitalist sector in which workers jobs are more or less quickly sacrificed for the profits of the big wigs.

The answer then is not to reject cooperative production but to seek its growth.

In the meantime there are steps that could be taken to defend the rights and position of temporary workers. The first might be to ensure adequate union organisation and representation for them within the cooperative. The second might be for these temporary workers to form or be part of a ‘temporary workers’ cooperative themselves, which has a membership across a number of firms that might not all have to be cooperative enterprises. (Just such an idea is proposed by Boffy in the posts referred to above).

In this way the temporary workers would not have to simply rely on the actions of others but would, through their own cooperative employment agency, take some control of their employment situation including building up reserves for bad periods, providing social insurance or job seeking support, including retraining facilities. Such a cooperative could be the sponsor of a political campaign in defence of the rights of temporary contract workers.

To return to the main argument: the promotion of cooperative production is not an alternative to class struggle but a part of it. It is the solution to a problem that many of those who believe in socialist revolution believe does not exist. This problem is that the majority of the working class do not see any need for their own ownership and control of production. They not only do not see the need for it but even if they did they have no experience of it, nor any particular, in fact any, view of how it would seek to achieve its aims.

The view that running society is something that can be done more or less easily on the morrow of the revolution does not ask why workers would carry out this revolution in the first place or why they would be fit to run things after it. What is it they would seek to do differently and how could it be done?

Instead the process of revolution, as normally argued, envisages workers rebelling against attacks on their living standards and democratic rights through some sort of politicised general strike which develops into workers councils. These will then take over from the capitalist state. What is missing from this is any understanding of socialist revolution as a change in the mode of production. From one based on profit to one based on use. From one based on capitalist ownership of the means of production to one based on workers ownership.

We are asked in this scenario to believe that the whole working class will in one fit of more or less violent rebellion against repression etc, seek and know how to implement its own ownership of production but that such strivings should not be encouraged or expressed before the revolution in the growth of workers cooperatives.

There is no need for workers to learn about how to organise production within their own factories and offices. No need to learn how to manage trade and production between other workplaces and customers. No need to master how the economy works the better to make changes that benefit fellow workers and fellow consumers. No need to learn how to compile economic plans within the firm, within the wider cooperative movement and the wider economy.

No need to learn by practical experience the role of the capitalist state in protecting capitalist property against rival workers’ owned property; to learn the need to build their own structures that will defend their plans to develop production as they see fit, and no need to seek to defend their own cooperative property through the overthrow of the capitalist state.

The argument is not whether cooperative production plays a role in the move to socialism but what role that is, over what period of time such production can realistically be expected to develop and what the role is of Marxists in politically fighting for and defending the growth of workers property.

Back to part 1

	revolutionaryprogram… on Left reaction to the ‘discover…
	Paul Flannigan on Marxism and Gender Identity Id…
	Paul Flannigan on Ukraine and imperialism after…
	irishmarxism on Karl Marx’s alternative to cap…
	Paul Flannigan on Karl Marx’s alternative to cap…

Sráid Marx

An Irish Marxist Blog

Tag Archives: trade unions