Workers' Liberty and the Northern Ireland referendum

The tenor of the opposing resolution accepted by Conference added to the surprise. The preamble asserts: 'The May National Committee [of the AWL] jettisoned our long-held democratic and transitional programme for Ireland.' The authors presumably scorn rotten liberal concern to accurately state the opposing view! Fortunately, there was still enough rotten liberalism around for the Bloxam-Murphy resolution to be published in the magazine (WL 54).

The preamble then berates the National Committee for not changing policy in a 'Marxist fashion'. As the National Committee view was that they hadn't changed policy, this rebuke relies on and compounds the original misrepresentation. The even wilder charge is made that the National Committee position was contrary to the principle of independent working class politics. Yet it is the Bloxam-Murphy resolution which approaches the question at issue from an independent consideration of working class interests. The preamble to the opposing resolution is more concerned with organisational advantage (maintaining a consistent tradition, education of cadres), and the resolution itself is more concerned with saying 'no' where the British state says 'yes'. Trotsky observed that if such a rule were always correct then 'every sectarian would be a master strategist'. It is hard to believe that experienced Marxists could make the blunder of confusing this rule with working class independence, but the evidence that they have is on paper in black and white. The majority resolution says, 'Voting 'yes' to this British state project was wrong in principle'. If it was wrong in principle because it was a British state proposal, then the 'principle' is automatic negation of the British state.

Would it also have been wrong in principle to have voted 'no'? The original draft of the majority resolution answered: 'Whether or not to vote 'no' was a question of tactics. Voting 'no' would not have been wrong on principle.' It becomes crystal clear that the 'principle' is indeed opposition to any British state proposal. Furthermore, the sentences quoted are the absurd consequence of this 'principle'. The conference majority must have sensed something had gone wrong, because the final section was amended. The amendment reads: 'We believe that a 'no' vote would also have been incorrect, not merely because it would have made it impossible to address the legitimate concerns of those supporting the Agreement because it brought peace, or because it would align us with Paisley and the Republican ultras. Crucially, a 'no' vote would have signified, both programmatically and practically, a vote for the status quo of polarised division between the two working class communities and a continued campaign of sectarian violence'.

Well said! But would voting 'no' have been wrong in principle, or just a tactical mistake? The amendment carefully avoids this question by just saying that it would have been 'incorrect'. No doubt this evasion helped the amended resolution to be passed, but what happened to the concern for political consistency and education of cadres? Is the tradition to now be understood as saying that, on principle, we never vote for the lesser evil, but we may sometimes, for tactical reasons, vote for the greater evil?

Of course it makes far more sense to say that 'a vote for the status quo of polarised division between the two working class communities' would be wrong on principle. But then the whole argument against a 'yes' vote collapses into advocating abstention. Occasions have arisen (the Common Market referendum, for example) where abstaining was arguably the best option, but the Northern Ireland referendum was not such a case. Faced with a choice between voting for a continued campaign of sectarian violence, or for some possibility of defusing the conflict, abstention would have been almost as wrong as voting 'no'. The principle here is not the rule of thumb of opposing the British state, but the principle of seeking the unity of the working class, which, as Gramsci observed, is a 'categorical imperative' (universal principle) of Marxism.

Thus a stance chosen for reasons of consistency of tradition and education of comrades, achieved neither of these objectives. The tradition of advocating working class unity as the highest principle has been seriously compromised, and cadres have been offered slogans ('we do not choose the lesser evil') in place of a coherent analysis. It would have been far better to concentrate on answering the question correctly and letting consistency of tradition and education of cadres follow as a consequence. This may be a 'case by case approach', but the alternative is to force every issue into consistency according to some pre-determined rule of thumb.

Hopefully, this awful lapse in political judgement by the Conference majority will be corrected. Understanding why the lapse occurred is a necessary part of making such events a rarity in the future. In this connection it is worth noting that even Lenin sometimes produced written material of poor quality. In some interesting articles on Lenin and Ireland in WL 22 and WL 23, Sean Matgamna demonstrates that 'Lenin's writings on Ireland were only casual journalism, worthless and worse if taken as paradigms for socialist politics'. Sean suggests that Lenin's writings on 'Ireland' were really homilies for Russian workers on the treachery of bourgeois liberals. Here in Australia we have a similar problem. In 1913, Lenin wrote a lightweight piece on the Australian Labor Party, which sectarians have for decades used as a justification for refusing to participate in the ALP. A similar explanation fits for Australia as well - Lenin's article was written as an answer to European advocates of peaceful reformist trade unionism. Perhaps the explanation for the superficiality of the Matgamna-Osborn resolution is that these authors were likewise overly concerned with didactic simplicity, instead of with estimating the consequences, for the Irish working class, of acceptance or rejection of the Good Friday Agreement.

Another cause of the lapse may be deduced from the preamble. It explains the 'error' of the NC as due to 'an over-reaction against the demagogic, denunciatory, 'maximalist' - essentially anarchist - politics current in some of the far left'. However, there are powerful pressures towards maximalist politics that act on all of the far left. The AWL has countered these pressures more effectively than other groups, but it is far too complacent to assume that the counter was so effective that it achieved an over correction. The pressures still exist and still need to be countered, if the demagogic, maximalist approach to Northern Ireland, approved by the Conference majority, is not to become the normal AWL approach to other issues.