What sort of Ireland do we want?

The following speech was made at the 2007 Anarchist Bookfair. You can listen to the speech by downloading the audio file here.

What do we want?

First of all we have to define our goal. For the ISN, our goal is to create a socialist democracy. That means, above all, democratic control over the economy.

To be more specific – in order to have a socialist democracy, the key sectors of the economy have to be under social ownership and control. We don’t have to nationalise every last corner shop, but the banks, the major industries and so on have to be taken over – leaving them in the hands of big business means abandoning the goal of economic democracy.

This doesn’t mean creating a centrally planned economy like the old Soviet Union. A real socialist democracy would be as far from that model as you can imagine. It has to base itself on direct participation by the working class in decision-making.

To prevent a system based on democratic planning from clogging up with bureaucracy, power has to be de-centralised as much as possible. The big decisions about economic production, setting the broad out-lines, should be made at national level. But there shouldn’t be any question of directing everything from the centre.

Depending on what’s most practical, decisions should be made at a regional level, or by a whole industry, or by a factory, or by a unit within a factory. At every level, power should be in the hands of elected delegates who are accountable to the people affected by those decisions.

There’s no question, a system run along these lines would be complicated, it would take a lot of work. But any system that runs a modern, industrial economy has to be complex. There’s nothing simple or straightforward about capitalism.

There’s no denying either, there would be problems, there would be draw-backs. We’re not talking about creating a perfect system, and anyone who tells you that we can make a perfect system is a charlatan. We’re talking about creating a system that’s better than capitalism, with all the problems it causes.

It should be obvious that a system like this would require new political structures. The very limited form of democracy that we have needs to be expanded radically. Political power has to be de-centralised along with economic power. Whenever possible, decisions should be made at a local level, by delegates from the communities that are affected by them.

That’s not always possible, of course – some decisions have to be made at a national level or not at all. And there has be some kind of central body that can adjudicate between different interests. It’s pure fantasy to think that all social conflicts will go away once capitalism is removed from the picture.

It’s fine to say that all the decisions should be made by worker councils and community councils – but what if councils in different parts of the country disagree with one another? You need to have a national assembly of some kind with the power to settle disputes and make policy for the whole country.

We’re talking about an assembly that would be very different from the Dail or the House of Commons. No doubt the structures involved would differ from one country to another – capitalist democracy takes on different forms in different countries, so there’s no reason to think socialist democracy would be any different.

One suggestion that I find attractive is the idea of a two-chamber system – one chamber would be directly elected, while the second chamber would be made up of delegates from the councils around the country. Whatever structure you adopt, there have to be safe-guards to prevent the formation of a political elite that’s cut off from the people it represents.

What those safe-guards would be has been clear since the time of the Paris Commune in the nineteenth century. Elected delegates should earn no more than the average working-class wage. There should be term limits to make sure you get a rotation of people at the top. And there should be structures that allow the re-call of delegates if they break their mandates.

There’s another thing that would be very important to make a system like this function. I’m talking about separation of powers. Often the radical left has neglected this idea, probably because they connect it with the practice of capitalist democracy. Usually, the separation of powers only exists in theory under capitalism. It goes to the wall when the stakes are high enough.

We’ve seen that with the record of the British state in Northern Ireland. When the military wing of the state gunned down peaceful protesters in Derry, on orders from the political wing of the state, it was up to the judges to hold them accountable. Of course, Lord Widgery did nothing of the sort. And Lord Denning had the same attitude with the Birmingham Six.

But that doesn’t mean the idea of putting checks and balances into the system is worthless – it just means that it doesn’t function properly under capitalism. In a socialist democracy, there will have to be a legal system that’s distinct from the political system, with the job of upholding a constitution that guarantees basic democratic rights. Sometimes minority rights have to be defended against the majority. That won’t change simply because capitalism is gone.

What social forces can we base ourselves on?

Well that’s an out-line of the goal we should be aiming towards. There’s plenty more that could be said about this, plenty of gaps to be filled, plenty of questions that we need to be able to answer. But that’ll do for now.

The next question is, how? To begin with, what social forces do you base yourself on? Socialists of all sorts, from social democrats to anarchists, have always argued that the key social force is the working class. That view has come under attack in the last few decades, from within the Left. There’s two broad lines of argument here – a negative one and a positive one.

According to the negative argument, there’s no point appealing to the working class, because it’s a busted flush. In countries like Ireland, the working class doesn’t have enough social weight to carry through a left-wing project of any kind, never mind a revolutionary one. Any political movement that wants majority support has to win over the middle classes, and that rules out radical policies.

There’s a grain of truth in this, and a whole heap of distortion. It’s true that there’s been a change in the make-up of the work-force right across the developed world. In most countries, the number of industrial workers has gone down, and the number of white-collar workers has gone up.

But the conclusions that people draw from this are very dubious. There’s no reason, in principle, why white-collar workers should be hostile to socialism. And there’s plenty of evidence to show that they can be won over by the Left and the workers’ movement. There’s a casual assumption that everyone who doesn’t get their hands dirty when they work is very affluent and very conservative. That assumption doesn’t have any basis in the real world.

The whole discussion we have about class is distorted by the existence of a class society. Obviously, the dominant class is able to promote ideas that help prop up its position. Convincing people that the working class is a powerless minority is a great way to convince them that there’s no alternative to the status quo.

But there’s a more subtle form of distortion, which exists because the people who take part in the discussion about class, academics and journalists for the most part, don’t represent society as a whole. The number of working-class people who can make it into those professions is still very small. So that has a big influence on what people say.

That helps explain why there was so much confusion earlier this year, when an opinion poll in Britain showed that fifty seven per cent of people consider themselves working class. It didn’t make any sense to the experts, it went against all the received wisdom. It never occurred to them that maybe people know better than the experts about their own position in society.

Let’s not forget, though, that when we start talking about the working class, there’s a linguistic problem. When socialists use the term, they usually mean anyone who earns a wage or a salary, anyone who has to sell their labour to survive. The everyday sense is a lot more restrictive.

There’s a bit in the Adrian Mole diaries when Adrian starts taking an interest in left-wing politics. He gets “The Condition of the Working Class in England” by Frederick Engels out of the library. When his dad sees it, he blows his lid and says “I’ve worked long and hard to drag this family into the middle class, and I’m not going to have my son admiring proles and revolutionaries!”

After reporting the scene, Adrian writes in his diary: “Dad is kidding himself if he thinks we’re middle class. He still puts HP sauce on his toast at breakfast-time.”

I’m sure anyone could come up with their own example. That’s an attitude that the Left has to reckon with, people have their own common-sense definition of class and you can’t just ignore that.

But it doesn’t need to be a huge problem. What matters to the Left is political identity, not cultural identity. People can have a really strong sense of themselves as being working class, but still vote Fianna Fail, or BNP for that matter.

Let’s say a group of teachers go on strike, it’s a long struggle but they win in the end, they make some gains, and they become radicalised in the process, from then on they identify with the Left and the workers’ movement, they’re open to socialist ideas. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter a damn then whether they call themselves middle class or working class.

There’s another argument though, a more positive argument, that was very popular in the 70s and 80s. What people said was, instead of relying on the working class, the Left should put its faith in the new social movements that were coming forward. Either they based themselves on a different social identity, like gender or race, or they based themselves on an issue that cut across class boundaries, like peace or ecology.

It should have been clear at the time that this was a very short-sighted view, and it certainly is now. A movement like feminism may hope to base itself on women as a whole, but it can’t help being affected by class divisions and class conflict. In most countries the feminist movement has split between activists who are happy with legal equality and activists who want more, people who want the kind of economic change that can make equal rights into a reality for working-class women.

You get the same problem with the Green movement. You can’t talk about protecting the environment without taking a stand on the way the economy is organised, so on the one hand you get the Irish Green Party telling us “Greens mean business”, and on the other hand you get eco-socialists who reject capitalism. Social movements can’t exist outside of class politics.

But there is an important point here that shouldn’t be over-looked. In the not-so-distant past, the workers’ movement was effectively the only social movement. That time is long gone. Movements like feminism and ecology have to be welcomed as equal partners.

Political organisation

So how is the working class going to change society? What kind of organisation does it need? There’s a lot of distrust these days when you start mentioning “parties”. Some people appear to think that any kind of political organisation and leadership is authoritarian by its very nature.

We disagree completely with this view. You have to ask yourself – what’s the alternative? People might say “spontaneous action by the working class”. That’s all very well, but in practice, there’s no such thing as “spontaneous action” in the pure sense of the term.

Any time there’s a strike or an occupation or a mutiny, somebody has to take the initiative and give a lead to the others – you never get a situation where several thousand workers all decide at the exact same time to go on strike. When we call something “spontaneous”, we really mean that it was initiated by people who weren’t recognised political activists.

Socialist revolution as we understand it isn’t going to happen without political organisation. A spontaneous protest movement may be able to bring down a government, but it won’t be able to lay the foundations for an alternative society. There’s too many wrong turnings that can be taken along the way.

It’s vital to have an organised political force that can give a lead to the working class. The Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci had a nice way of putting it when he said the party should be the “collective intellectual” of the working class. In other words, it should be the place where activists from all the different social movements come together, discuss their own experiences and look at what’s happened before, what previous generations have done, drawing conclusions and coming up with a political strategy based on those experiences.

Every revolution and mass movement that we’ve seen, over the last hundred years and more, has taught us one important lesson – social struggles are always uneven, they have their ebbs and flows, they don’t continue at the same level all the time. That’s only natural – going against the grain of the social order is never easy, it always brings trouble for the people who take that path, often very serious trouble.

Radical movements usually reach a peak, then they begin to retreat if they don’t make the crucial breakthrough. You need to have a political force that can concentrate the energies of all the different social struggles into a challenge for power.

Of course, that begs the question – what kind of political force? A lot of the distrust towards the whole idea of parties and leadership is very understandable, when you look at the kind of parties the Left has often produced. So for starters, one thing should be clear – it doesn’t have to be a single party that plays this role.

It’s unlikely that one organisation can represent all the currents of opinion, even among the most radical sections of the working class and the social movements. So when we talk about an “organised political force”, it could be an alliance of parties.

There also has to be pluralism within parties, there has to be room for different currents of opinion. The model of a tightly centralised, monolithic organisation has to be ditched. Members need to have the right to organise themselves into factions or platforms, putting across their own point of view.

Another thing is vital – members of a party should have the right to disagree with the majority line in public. Even with small organisations, it’s not healthy when debate is kept behind closed doors, it creates the potential for abuse by the leadership. But once you start talking about mass politics, it becomes very damaging.

If you have worker councils, or radicalised trade unions, where a big chunk of the membership belongs to a political party, it will completely deform the democratic functioning of those bodies, if the party activists go off on their own, make a decision, and then try to impose that line by presenting a united front. There has to be give and take.

That feeds into a broader question, how any organisation should see its relationship with the working class. Very often, parties have acted as if they can work out the correct programme, then go to the masses and tell them what they should do. That attitude has to go.

All we can hope to do is work out a provisional programme, a starting-point for discussion based on past experience. We have to be listening out for the demands emerging from social movements and adapt our own programme to take account of those demands. Our job is to help people find their own voice, not to speak on their behalf.

Elections

I’ve said already that one of the ISN’s main goals is to create new political structures, that allow much more room for mass participation than the form of capitalist democracy we have at present. So if that’s our goal, then why do we participate in the existing structures, as we have done already, as we will be doing again this year? Why not attempt to build a mass movement outside of electoral politics?

As I understand it, the case for abstention from parliamentary politics is based on two assumptions, both of which I find unrealistic. The first assumption is that you can create new political structures without participating in the old ones in any way.

There’s a lot of political experience that suggests this is not a viable strategy. In countries like France and Italy, the New Left of the 1960s usually followed an abstentionist path; it wasn’t the only reason why those forces were unable to mobilise enough support to carry through the kind of revolution they had in mind, but it certainly made a big contribution to that failure.

We have to recognise the fact that parliamentary systems in the developed world have put down deep roots, they’ve been in place for decades if not centuries. That doesn’t mean they’re invulnerable, not by any means, but it seems very unlikely that we can simply by-pass them.

The second assumption probably helps to under-pin the first. I’m talking about the assumption that once you get involved in electoral politics, sooner or later you will be forced to abandon radical goals and find yourself sucked into the logic of managing the system.

At a first glance, the history of the socialist movement in the twentieth century would seem to confirm this view. Not only have the social democrats been converted into pillars of the capitalist order, but the big Communist parties of western Europe have been happy to serve in governments that posed no threat to capitalism whatsoever.

But we need to look a bit more closely. It’s not very surprising that an organisation like the British Labour Party has evolved into such a conservative force. Whatever about the views of a section of its membership, Labour has never been led by people who thought seriously about replacing capitalism with socialism.

If you want to judge the record of parliamentary socialism, it’s better to look at the experience of parties that weren’t happy to rule over a capitalist society, parties that actually considered in practical terms how they might bring about a transition to socialism.

There are quite a few example of parties like that, and one thing stands out from their record – they all believed that it was possible to take control of the state through the ballot box, then use it as a tool to transform society.

We don’t have time to go through a detailed historical survey, so it’s best to look at one very striking example – the government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Allende and his allies in the Popular Unity coalition acted on the assumption that they could use the structures of the Chilean state to carry through their programme.

So you have all kinds of statements from leaders of the government, praising the Chilean army for its loyal, patriotic attitude, statements that appear hopelessly naïve when you remember what happened in September 1973. That went hand-in-hand with a belief that there was no alternative to relying on the existing state: in the last days of the government, when one of his advisers said to Allende “only the direct action of the masses will stop the coup”, apparently he responded by saying “how many masses does one need to stop a tank?”

The experience in Chile had the effect of terrorising the European Left. In Italy, the Communist Party was on the brink of taking power through the ballot box in the mid-70s. When they saw what happened in Chile, they decided to pull back and offered to form a grand coalition with the right wing – they expected a coup if there was a left-wing government elected to office.

Going down that road means abandoning any idea of transforming society. But there’s a very different lesson that can be drawn from what happened in Chile. It shows that you can’t take over the capitalist state and use it for socialist purposes – it’s not designed for that job.

You have to assume that most people in the upper ranks of the state bureaucracy, the leading civil servants, judges and army officers, will be completely hostile to the radical Left. The only way to overcome that opposition is by mobilising people outside the structures of the state, and by appealing to the people who are employed by the state over the heads of their bosses – including the soldiers.

So that points towards a very different approach to parliamentary politics. It may be possible for a radical party or a radical alliance to win at the ballot box. But that won’t give them the power to change society. Elections can be a spur to mass mobilisation, and they often have been. But without that mobilisation, it doesn’t matter how many votes you win.

That’s the attitude of the ISN when we take part in elections. We don’t claim for a moment that it’s going to be easy, we know very well what the dangers are. But it’s just not true to say that this approach to electoral politics has been tried again and again and failed every time – in fact, it’s barely been tried at all.

Our view of elections is rooted in our whole concept of socialist democracy. We don’t believe that change can be delivered from above by a parliamentary elite or a vanguard party. To quote Rosa Luxemburg: “Socialism by its very nature can’t be introduced by decree or proclamation. The whole mass of the people must take part in it.” The role of socialist organisation is to make that possible.