The Principal Contradiction Is Irish Self-Determination

In 2019 I travelled to St Petersburg at the invitation of the Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. They had extended the invitation to a number of youth organisations to celebrate the 101st anniversary of the foundation of the Komsomol and mark the October Revolution. Other organisations such as the Greek Communist Youth (KNE), Lebanese Communist Youth along with Serbian, Latvian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and mostly Eastern/Balkan organisations attended. 

While many interesting and thought provoking conversations took place about the world, the Komsomol, the future - one conversation I had over a late night coffee with a KNE comrade was about internationalism. It came up as a wider part of the discussions on proletarian internationalism and what that meant in practice. This point is relevant to all the baby leftists coming up today but also the wider left which has so desperately failed to meaningfully intervene on issue after issue in Ireland. 

The KNE comrade, whose name I can no longer remember but I hope who is in good health told me that while international solidarity was good, useful and productive, the best thing the Irish working class can do is to seize power in Ireland so that through this power, through a proletarian state, a workers’ republic we can truly espouse internationalism and address issues around imperialism, hegemony and colonialism.  The primary priority for those based in Ireland should be the immediate material conditions of our class and our partitioned country.

We do not exercise sovereignty and are hemmed in through the treaties and structures of the EU. We do not control our own currency, borders, foreign affairs, defence or capital regulation. We effectively have a powerful home rule administration with all the fanfare of government, but a government that exercises economic self determination we are not.

Our primary conditions thus dictate that Ireland is unfree, it is colonised, it is partitioned and it is under the thumb of multiple colonial powers. There is a layer of individuals in the political and professional caste who do well out of this arrangement - but for the rest of us the exciting prospects of emigration, homelessness and social murder loom. We are not after all like Simon Harris and cannot simply walk into a job in Fine Gael at the mature and wise old age of 19. 

I would suggest that the two primary tasks of all progressively minded people in this country ought to be:

Addressing the question of Ireland’s relationship to the world and absence of self-determination;

The question of power, who has it, how it is wielded and what the role of left wing people will be in working towards our class in securing power.

James Connolly put it a lot more eloquently when he said:

The cause of Labour is the cause of Ireland,

The cause of Ireland is the cause of Labour.

But in essence he was saying the same thing and I think the Russian/Cuban/Korean/Laotian/Vietnamese/Chinese revolutions recognised this question by securing socialism in their countries and giving full expression to self-determination of their nation and people. 

Having disagreements over key questions such as the class character of the Russian state and its military-political interests is important but Irish discourse is beginning to crescendo around the hysterical splits of the Trotskyists in the last few decades. One group which had 3 or 4 members in Ireland and similarly many in Britain split over whether the Netherlands was imperialist or not. It matters - but it’s a comfortable act to split your sect over whether Holland is imperialist. It is not an act of strength, but an act of weakness to further splinter and weaken the movement instead of concentrating on the shared material interests and mutual interest. In fact I would go as far to say that it’s essentially an act of middle class voyeurism because it in no way corresponds to the very real problems our class is facing in the workplace and community.  

Concentrate on the task at hand - strive towards the empowerment and building up of our class - we can determine Ireland’s relationship to the rest of the world when self determination and the workers’ republic are on the horizon.