You Can’t Suffocate Class Struggle And Then Mourn The Consequences

Everyone in Tathony House, including me and my wife, got an eviction notice in October 2022. I spoke at an ICTU organised rally on housing in November 2022. There hasn’t been a significant march on housing since then.

One of the results of lack of class struggle on issues that matter to working class people is that anger looks for another outlet. This is where far right manipulators can step in and misdirect that anger.

The Labour Party control the major trade unions. The overpaid bureaucracy of the unions acts to cut off strikes and protests by workers except as a token show of strength to gain leverage in talks with the government.

Meanwhile Labour posture on social issues like racism and sexism to make themselves seem “radical” and relevant. But it’s a game. Those who are less inclined to or abstain from class struggle can appear radical using finger wagging moralism.

You’d think the socialist left would call out this con. But the largest organisations on the left, like People Before Profit, won’t. They’d rather employ the same method as Labour with a few token motions about work in the estates added on.

At the recent PBP AGM there were motions saying we should prioritise campaigns on maintainence in council estates. Many speakers noted that the far left has “an episodic relationship to the working class”. If that’s true then the priority is to fix that?

The Red Network has argued that getting back to serious trade union work and work in the poorest estates is the main priority for the left. In response we’ve been accused of “economism” - that is we play down social issues and only talk about class.

That’s just not true. At every single protest for Tathony House I argued that division only serves the landlords. But that point was made by someone organic to that anti-eviction struggle and as a practical concern of all tenants.

When you fight against homelessness, as we did, overcoming division is a practical part of the class struggle. It’s not external moralism and finger wagging.

If security workers went on strike - you’d argue against any attempt to divide the Irish workers from the Eastern European, or both from a worker from Pakistan. We all stand together and fight the bosses for better wages.

That’s not “economism” - that’s the essence of being a working class socialist.

It was the Russian revolutionary Lenin who first used the term “economism” to describe those who wanted workers to only talk about wages or economic issues. He wanted to connect the day to day struggles of the working class with the need for revolution.

PBP doesn’t do this. During the recent election, on the Claire Byrne show, they answered the question “will you go into government with Sinn Féin” with an enthusiastic yes!

The Red Network has always argued that we would support a Sinn Féin government case by case and externally. That way you could threaten to pull them down if they don’t serve the interests of working class people.

The class make up of PBP has changed as they’ve shifted right on the question of entering government. They cover their tracks by posturing on social issues. That way they can accuse everyone of not being as “radical” as them.

They object to our use of the term “middle class” to describe their strategies. Socialists have always defined parties and movements according to class criteria. For example - Sinn Féin is a middle class nationalist party.

That does not mean that every member of that party is middle class but that their ideas represent the middle class illusion that you can balance between workers and the bosses and build a different Ireland. You can’t, you have to pick as side.

Lenin once described the British Labour Party as a “thouroughly bourgeois party” - yet it had thousands of working class members. It was “bourgeois” because of those who led it and their political programme.

Ideally we want a working class left that’s made up of a majority of working class members who also hold working class ideas. But everytime we try to make the turn to the working class there’s a tirade of moral outrage, accusations of “economism”, we were even accused of being like an anti-immigrant split from German left party Die Linke!

Seem to me that those who panic like that when a serious turn to class politics is suggested don’t actually want to make that turn. They’re afraid their bubble of academics and students will be burst. And they defend themselves by posturing and moralising.

People are drowning in the poorest estates. Many of my family members, friends and neighbours don’t see that the rich are hoarding life boats out of sight, or they’ve given up hope of getting to them.

They just know that they are drowning. We need to fight alongside our class - not be seen to be wagging the finger of moral condemnation from the comfort of a lifeboat. We need to lift the confidence of the advanced workers, those who know the score, and teach them to lead the confused in battles against the government.

My grandfather died in a house fire in 2009. Just as the first round of austerity cut fire services. He burned longer because of Fianna Fáil. Fine Gael continued the same policies. I want revenge. I want to overthrow a system that does that to lifelong workers. That’s how we feel.

The far right offer a fake revolution - they want the same old capitalism with more deportations. They would take us back to the dark days of Church control, child abuse and cover ups.

To beat the rotten government, challenge the system they represent and marginalise the far right we have to be seen to be advocating a real revolution, real change that delivers our communities from the pain they’re suffering.