‘Left’ Behind — The Road to Nowhere

The Irish ‘left’ are as far away from Gov­ern­ment as they have been at any time in the last 102 years. It might even be the case, depend­ing on how you define the ‘left’ and its’ con­stituent parts, that there isn’t one at all. I was annoyed a num­ber of years ago when Ger­ry Adams pub­licly stat­ed a ver­sion of that based on his inter­pre­ta­tion of the ‘left’. I now think that, in many ways, he was right. It’s all about inter­pre­ta­tion.

I was chal­lenged on ‘X’ this week and told I’m not ‘left’ myself any­more because I’m not a Marxist/Leninist. In order to help me catch up the chal­lenger help­ful­ly pro­vid­ed me with some ‘edu­ca­tion­al mate­r­i­al’ from com­rade Lenin him­self that is over a cen­tu­ry old (it would have to be, he died in 1924!) and point­ed out to me that my not read­ing it had led to me becom­ing an apol­o­gist for ‘NATO impe­ri­al­ism’. He came to that con­clu­sion because I was appalled at Putin’s bomb­ing of a children’s can­cer hos­pi­tal in Kyiv and I described it as the act of a fas­cist impe­ri­al­ist. To Marxist/Leninists (par­tic­u­lar­ly those who trans­late their names to Irish it seems) that puts me slap bang into the arms of the CIA. The fact that Putin him­self rejects Lenin, that Putin thinks Bol­she­vism was a failed project and that he is an out­spo­ken admir­er of Hitler and his impe­ri­al­ist meth­ods doesn’t mat­ter to these ‘left’ puri­tans though. Putin is fight­ing with the Unit­ed States and to many of the far left here that is enough, that is all that is nec­es­sary and they have any amount of bor­ing books to mis­quote and mis­rep­re­sent in sup­port of their bla­tant ‘camp­ism’.

My chal­lenger is absolute­ly cor­rect. I am not one of them.

Mov­ing slight­ly right­ward from there on the polit­i­cal spec­trum we meet some Trot­sky­ists who believe that the Irish work­ing class are class war­riors whose nat­ur­al impuls­es to rev­o­lu­tion are bur­geon­ing but are held back by bureau­crats and if they could only be freed of that bureau­crat­ic repres­sion all would change, change utter­ly. They are keen to enter Gov­ern­ment but unfor­tu­nate­ly that will have to wait until there is a world­wide Trot­sky­ist rev­o­lu­tion, which should hap­pen any day now, as to do so before­hand would be betray­al because it involves gov­ern­ing with­in the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem. The antic­i­pat­ed world­wide Trot­sky­ist rev­o­lu­tion must be due before the Gen­er­al Elec­tion, maybe on Mon­day, as they have just asked Sinn Fein for a vot­ing pact in line with that expec­ta­tion.

Speak­ing of Sinn Fein, Ger­ry Adams didn’t believe there was an Irish Left that Sinn Fein could do busi­ness with. Is he right? Does Mary Lou McDon­ald think the same? I don’t know what a Sinn Fein Gov­ern­ment would look like, nobody does, but I do know that it’s a long time since I heard them talk­ing about a Social­ist Repub­lic so it doesn’t seem it’s going to be that.

So let’s talk about Labour? O.K., you are right. Let’s not. No need. His­to­ry tells us what we need to know. No ‘left’ there either when it comes to Gov­ern­ment. At best (and from 2011–2016 they fell well short of even this) Labour ame­lio­rate the worst excess­es of the Irish right in Gov­ern­ment. I remem­ber chal­leng­ing Jack O’Connor on why Labour were like this (I think it was in 2016) and Jack told me, and he was sin­cere, that Labour and the Labour Move­ment were as ‘left’ as the Irish work­ing class on the whole were capa­ble of. He may well have been right too, on the whole. There is a cen­tu­ry of his­to­ry to sup­port that over­all analy­sis. I cer­tain­ly see his views through a dif­fer­ent lens these days and, as I say, he was sin­cere in his views.

The Social Democ­rats are find­ing their feet and have some real­ly good peo­ple on board but they are small and already the estab­lish­ment are push­ing them into Labour. We will see how that plays out. There is a well tried path.

The Green Par­ty have split and there is a prin­ci­pled rump seek­ing to align the nec­es­sary cli­mate change poli­cies with real class based ground up democ­ra­cy and reform. Mean­while the bit that is in Gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to be a mud guard for neolib­er­al growth, the very ide­o­log­i­cal fix­a­tion which is the engine of cli­mate cat­a­stro­phe in the first place. But there they are any­way con­tent to set­tle for some tokens from Fine Gael’s and Fian­na Fail’s table as the price of keep­ing them in pow­er.

At a Trade Union lev­el the Irish ‘left’ reflects the Irish labour mar­ket which in turn reflects the Irish pub­lic in polit­i­cal and social out­look. How could it be oth­er­wise? Vic­to­ries like the cur­rent Aer Lin­gus Pilots win are wel­come as work­ers victory’s and as an exam­ple of what can be achieved (and achieved under the Indus­tri­al Rela­tions Act 1990, anoth­er far left fix­a­tion) but they are hard­ly the awak­en­ing of the work­ing class much less the nec­es­sary redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth and resources down­ward which should sure­ly be the core aim of any Irish ‘left’ if we were ever to have such a thing.

In our com­mu­ni­ties the pic­ture is even more depress­ing. Where­as 2014, just 10 years ago, it was a com­mu­ni­ty awak­en­ing that stopped the pri­vati­sa­tion of water and san­i­ta­tion in its tracks (with some sig­nif­i­cant trade union logis­tics and lead­er­ship while Politi­cians also gave much back­ing) today those work­ing class com­mu­ni­ties are riv­en, dis­tract­ed by the kick down strate­gies of the far right with many blam­ing all the wrong peo­ple for all the right things. To say that the polit­i­cal and class based lead­er­ship nec­es­sary, a real ‘left’ class analy­sis, is absent in our com­mu­ni­ties at present is an under­state­ment.

So, as I say, the Irish left is as far away from Gov­ern­ment as it has been at any point since 1922. What­ev­er oppor­tu­ni­ties the fight­back against aus­ter­i­ty and water pri­vati­sa­tion gave us have been squan­dered on the altar of polit­i­cal sec­tar­i­an­ism and ide­o­log­i­cal puri­ty. It was ever thus!