Draft Young Socialist
Statement on the National Question
Document
C, prepared for the Annual Conference of the YS, January, 1972
The revolutionary
movement in each nation must make the revolution in its own area,
guided by the method of Scientific Socialism, applied
to the characteristics of society within it and without.
Today, revolution is coming on the agenda in country after country,
despite the treachery of Social Democrats, Stalinites and other petty-bourgeois
leaderships trusted by the workers. Ireland is no exception to this
development. Irish revolutionaries must not refuse to play their
part in it – both for their own sakes and for those of the
workers elsewhere. Their first duty is to analyse their situation
the better to formulate a strategy by which they can change it.
Ireland is one of the countries which has not completed the tasks
of its bourgeois revolution. This is shown in two main facts – the
power of the Churches remains unchecked, and national unity has yet
to be achieved. Any proletarian revolution has to take these into
account and include the tasks of overcoming them among its aims.
The workers' struggle for State power must, if it is to be successful,
involve the struggle to complete national unification. At this time,
the escalation of the war in Northern Ireland has made the struggle
for national unification one of crucial immediate importance.
Some so-called Marxists put forward the industrial struggle as a
counterpoise to the national issue. Such an outlook, expressed in
practice, can only result in the same type of fiasco that has beset
the Irish working class since the murder of Connolly.
Already, after two years of inconclusive fighting in Northern Ireland,
there are signs that such a disaster is likely to occur. On the one
hand, Kevin Boland has served up his political stew on the single
issue of national unity, and has been very successful in his work.
On the other hand, various individuals in the Irish working class
movement, most notably Conor Cruise O'Brien and the ICO, are putting
forward policies of pacifism. These can lead not only to complete
collapse in the national, but, through weakening and dividing the
workers politically, to their complete defeat in the industrial,
struggle.
We insist that, if the cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, so
too is the cause of Ireland the cause of labour. We declare that,
to scab from the present national struggle, even if disguising this
action as one of respecting the Ulster Protestant ‘nation’ or ‘nationality’,
is as counter-revolutionary as to scab in the industrial field. Its
basis is to be found in attempts to ‘tail after’ the
politically most backward section of the Irish working class: the
Ulster Unionist proletariat. There can be no question of recognising ‘the
democratic validity of the Northern Irish state’, nor of recognising
the right to self-determination of the Northern Protestant community
until the major factors on which its restrictive character is based
have been eliminated.
On the other hand, and if the present struggle is defeated, national
unification may not be at all time and under all circumstances, the
immediate priority for revolutionaries. Other strategies may be needed
to begin the decisive fight for workers' state power on an industrial,
purely twenty-six county, level, and to spread it, while it processes,
into the struggle, for unification.
In the meantime the formula must be: Socialist leadership of the
National Struggle. On the one hand the struggle itself must be stepped
up to weaken the bourgeois state powers – north and south.
On the other hand, it must be given increasingly socialist and
internationalist slogans: Opposition to redundancies,
the seizure of British and Unionist-owned firms and estates in the
south and of all major firms and estates
in the areas under the rule of the ‘Parliament of the Streets’,
appeals to foreign comrades to co-operate in opposition to British
rule in Ireland, as part of their own anti-capitalist struggles,
hostility to religious superstition, are some of the weapons in the
Socialist's armoury. Above all, the building of a Citizen Army (always
necessary before the workers can take power) is now an immediate
task, not only to oppose the British, the UVF, the Irish Army and
the FCA, but to supersede the petty-bourgeois IRA's.
The Irish National Revolution must be made to grow over into the
uninterrupted Socialist Revolution.
9/10/1971.
