Socialist Republican Network In PBP Slams Reformist Leadership

A socialist republican network has been launched in People Before Profit (PBP) staunchly in opposition to the reformist leadership of the party. PBP’s network structure allows multiple factions to compete for influence within the organization. The Socialist Workers’ Network (SWN), nominally the leadership, has been under fire for its reformist direction, and the newly-created Marxist Republican Network (MRN) pulls no punches in attacking them. The main points of criticism are centered around the ill-fated liberal ‘broad left’ bloc and ‘left government’ strategy, the lack of democratic accountability for elected representatives and the shameful anti-republican sentiments of PBP. 

“Class independence requires political clarity. PBP needs a public face that is unmistakably socialist and distinct from every other party to our right. We reject any strategy that subordinates socialist politics to maintaining a “broad left” bloc, [...] This necessarily means a break with the “left government” strategy“ the newly-launched network states, also advocating for a clear minimum-maximum programme, rather than the frenetic approach currently employed by PBP. 

Their educational curriculum echoes these points, stating that “caught between an acknowledgement of the importance of parliamentary intervention and a persistent pull toward movementism, People Before Profit can drift toward a “do everything” approach. In practice, this can foreclose the development of sustained internal debate, systematic political education, and the slow, disciplined work of party and working class institution-building”.

“Democratic accountability is the foundation of this work. Party members must remain accountable to the party membership and the programme as its democratically agreed expression. For those operating in Leinster House, Stormont and the councils, this requires clear discipline and political consistency. We stand on a common programme, continue to vote as a bloc, take a worker’s wage, and refuse any arrangement with capitalist parties, “ the statement also mentions, in reference to the rightwards drift of elected PBP representatives, who have drifted in a reformist direction with lacking membership accountability. 

However, by far the strongest critique issued to PBP is on their anti-republicanism, stating that “Irish socialists have a duty to stand firmly against the repressive and undemocratic structures of capitalist states, beginning with the capitalist states on this island. The Free State was a counter-revolutionary settlement, built to protect property, partition the working class, and subordinate Ireland to reliance on Britain. The Orange State was its mirror image in the North. The Good Friday Agreement did not resolve this. It reorganised and legitimised the northern statelet, stitching together a power sharing arrangement that copper-fastened partition and enshrined the loyalist veto in a thoroughly undemocratic settlement” and re-asserting the need to oppose NATO, the EU, the British and the European Union outright. 

The Marxist Republican Network is seeking expressions of interests which can be found at this link.

PBP, since the Red Network left, is in disarray, sources speaking to Aontacht Media revealed. This is because its left-most deviation, the Red Network, as it departs, now heightens the contradictions between the SWN network’s Left and Right deviations. The SWN, as a result, is functionally splitting into 3, the SWN Left, SWN Right, and SWN Belfast; RISE is now the de facto hegemonic bloc in PBP. This (soft) split was hastened by the fuel protests, it is claimed. 

A part of the SWN crowd want to become a proper vanguardist party; this may fail because despite an organisational change, they will retain their political memory and reflexes, therefore they will split themselves into irrelevancy, sources worry.  

Red Network, meanwhile, according to some activists, has over-corrected the semi-liberalism of PBP and this has catapulted them into an overly dogmatic Leninist, quasi-workerist, anti-republican, class-only position which overlooks the superstructure and focuses only on the base. 

This also means, however, that the decline of Trotskyism gives socialist republicans some room to breathe and crystallize their own hegemonic, left-populist, left-sovereignist political bloc, as evidenced by the Marxist Republican Network.