Publications Index | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’s Internet Archive
Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 172 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 172, February 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Commenting on the ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ of Ulster unionism (December SR), Chris Harman indulges in a nationalist polemic he would deride in any context but Ireland. The result is the usual travestied history which, while it may satisfy the ‘anti-imperialist’ fury of the English left, is worse than useless as a guide to organising on the ground.
It is a truly monstrous tale. Playing the ‘Orange card’, British capital dupes industrial workers into supporting a partition which secures the interests of a ‘traditionally “ascendant” aristocracy’, only to recognise (decades down the road) that, divorced from political reason and economic logic, the ‘loyalism’ it conjured no longer responds to command.
As in all Republican (and Orange) lore, a corpse is being dragged across the pages of history. Electoral and agrarian reforms had retired the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy decades before the partition crisis.
Why the canard of landlordism? Because it sustains the inference that in the North minimally progressive – not to say socialist – politics embraced the national cause.
For 70 years the British left has accepted the Connnollyite case for an all Ireland secession. Yet Connolly (unprepared, perhaps, by British education) never really came to terms with a national society constructed (post-famine) through the progressive agency of the Church and on the basis of a vigorous class of farmer owners.
Instead, in search of a non-sectarian, non-bourgeois basis for a common identity, he followed his fellow expatriate patriot, the Englishman ‘Padraig’ Pearse, into the Gaelic mists (the same chronicles the UDA now ransacks in search of an Ulster ‘nation’).
The current case for completing ‘British withdrawal’ (Westminister’s exclusion of the North from British party politics compromised the Union long before the Anglo-Irish Agreement), is not advanced by dismissing the objection of Protestant workers as mere ‘sectarianism’ – Sinn Fein has come that far.
Nor is there hope for ‘socialist politics’ through common economic struggle, if it is imagined that this implies opposition to ‘the British state’. The two thirds of Northern Catholics who, in a recent Irish Times poll, rejected a united Ireland as their first choice political solution are as conscious as anyone of economic reality.
|
|
Manfred McDowell |
Socialist Review Index | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 7 March 2017