The Emperor Has No Clothes
László Molnárfi
The Irish Left has entered into collective psychosis about me. To recap the events of the last few months, I have engaged in polemical exchanges with major Trotskyist left-wing organisations in Ireland, namely the Red Network, People Before Profit and the Socialist Party. These centered around a few key issues, but in short, it concerns the permissibility of agitating in right-wing circles against Israel, the class nature of the anti-immigration movement and the evaluation of the 2016 onwards “woke” cultural shift.
I had published agitational material, on the basis of sovereignty for the nation, in right-wing circles, against Israel. Further, I had argued that the IPAS system – the Irish State body for the distribution of asylum seeker accommodation – needs to be reformed, and that this would not make the Left should be anti-immigration, but merely recognize the valid concerns of working-class communities about resourcing issues, so that it may capture these populist energies. Finally, I had spoken out against identity politics and argued for class-first politics.
Instead of responding to my articles in a comradely manner, some elements of the Left have sought to make me a pariah, through spreading baseless rumours. In short, the narrative, which has been put forward in online and offline circles, is that I have become racist, fascist, a Nazi, far-right, dog-whistler and so on and so forth. They have been predicting for months on end that I will join up with the Right, and abandon the Left, despite my stating to the contrary, that I have always been a Communist and always will be. Recently, the discourse has shifted to even more dangerous territory, saying that I have “gone off my rocker”, “gone off the rails”, morphed into a “loon”, implying that I have become mentally ill and this is the reason for the publication of articles critical of the Left. None of this is true. At the same time, the Left has launched a campaign of bullying, intimidation and harassment, involving direct messages from people who I have never even met, and towards whom I have no animosity, as well as from people who I have known and worked with for a long time on various campaigns. The articles which I publish target specific issues on the Left, not people, which makes this even more ludicrous. I have been expelled from the Red Network, banned from People Before Profit, removed from various online spaces, and have not been invited to events, and a false image of my politics has been construed by this rag-tag coalition of Trotskyist leftists, in an effort to make my continued existence untenable within the socialist movement. Before I put my criticisms on paper, as should every Communist, these same groups showed only praise towards my activist record, which is solid, well-known and principled; this shows that they only care about you so long as they can use you, which is the same mechanism they apply to organic social movements, in which if they cannot control them, use them for publicity, they disregard them. They feel threatened, because new ideas pose a danger to upset established hierarchies on the Left, and in their drive towards institutional self-preservation, coupled with the lack of arguments on their side, the hivemind reaches to the weapon of defamation, personalized attacks and name-calling. They are seeking to isolate me and our supporters from the movement, and unless we fight back, they will succeed in carrying out their cancellations of oppositional ideas. There are a lot of people who agree with these ideas, but are, understandably, afraid to voice them in public.
Importantly, while these attacks are directed at me, their intention is to tarnish the Communist tendency, of which I am a mere representative, which serves a counter-narrative to the established liberal Left.
I must therefore register my public dissent at the uncomradely behaviour of these Trotskyist groups, the Red Network, People Before Profit and the Socialist Party, who seek to tarnish my name rather than engage in debate. Unless the Left allows for dissenting opinions1, it cannot leave the tactical and strategic rut it currently finds itself in. The construction of an anti-imperialist, socialist revolutionary and working-class movement cannot but be based on the principles to which Communists have held themselves to for centuries, which is that each party to the debate states their position and the subsequent clash of antagonistic tendencies is conducted out in the open for all to see.
This sort of hush-hush back-room manner of dealing with oppositional ideas is a manifestation of a generalized tendency on the Left to retreat from dialogue on sensitive topics, burying them, thus handing over the narrative to the Right on a silver platter. This is what leaves an avenue to vibes-based politics, which is based on the premise of an unchanging cozy consensus, deviations from which are looked upon as impermissible. There must be an investigation of each issue, from a scientific perspective, before a decision is reached on policy, during which there must be freedom to debate. I therefore encourage people to whisper not about the form of my work but to loudly and boldly state their exact issues with the content thereof, and to build a tradition that genuinely adheres to the principles on which the Communist movement has built itself since its inception.