12. A Change Of Course Is Needed!¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 12: A Change Of Course Is Needed!¶
This chapter delivers a stern Marxist critique of the Provisional IRA’s armed struggle, arguing that despite the heroism of its participants, the campaign has been a strategic failure. Tactics must be judged by results, not intentions, and the losses incurred bear no relation to what has been achieved. Drawing on Thomas ‘Ta’ Power’s prison document, the text insists that only the working class can resolve the national question, for the basic contradiction in society is between socialised production and private appropriation. It rejects a ‘stages’ approach to revolution, maintaining instead, as Connolly argued, that national and social emancipation are inseparable.
The central failing of the Provisionals is their reliance on guerrilla warfare, which is the classical mode of peasant struggle, not proletarian struggle. In a developed capitalist country like modern Ireland, where most people live in towns, it makes no sense. ‘Urban guerrillaism’ is merely individual terrorism, substituting an armed elite for the mass movement and doing nothing to raise workers’ self-consciousness. Even if successful, it would produce a regime of the elite, not workers’ democracy. In practice, it has failed: the British state is stronger, not weaker, armed with new anti-terrorist laws and an army of informers. The dialectic of terrorism achieves the opposite of its aims, as with the Birmingham pub bombings.
Connolly held that the violence required is inversely proportional to mass support; the working class already holds colossal power, but does not realise it. The task is to build its confidence, not to provide saviours. Armed struggle is not rejected outright, but must be subordinated to the mass movement and the political leadership of a workers’ party. When divorced from the masses, it becomes counterproductive, attracting adventurers and criminals. The text contrasts the Provisionals’ methods unfavourably with Connolly’s Citizen Army, and calls for a workers’ militia based in unions and communities.
The first principle is working-class unity, as demonstrated by Connolly and Larkin. Opportunities to build mass movements cutting across sectarianism—in 1911–14, the 1930s, 1968–69, and the Hunger Strikes—were thrown away for lack of correct leadership. The prior condition for success is a party based on the working class. The border can only be abolished as a by-product of socialist revolution. Petty-bourgeois volatility must be rejected for the proletariat’s instinct for class unity. A real Party of Labour, based on trade unions and addressing housing, health, and education from a class standpoint, is needed. The working class must fight for all democratic demands, but only class politics can unite it and prepare the ground for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.