State, class and ideology in the Six Counties
Article originally published in Issue 7 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
By Eamonn Ó Maolmhuaidh
Since our inception, as part of our mission of promoting constructive discussion on contentious issues among Irish socialists, Rupture has hosted a debate on how socialists should respond to the National Question in Ireland and the prospect of a future border poll. Paul Murphy’s article in our second issue outlining RISE’s position, ‘Unifying a Divided Working Class’, was followed by responses by veteran Irish socialist Ciarán Mulholland in Issue 3, People Before Profit and the Socialist Workers’ Network’s John Molyneux in Issue 4 and Dublin trade unionist Joe Duffy in issue 5. Below we publish a further contribution to the debate by researcher and activist Éamonn Ó Maolmhuaidh, who analyses the structure, ideology and class composition of the British state in Ireland, and some of the ideological trends that dominate much mainstream (and left) discussion of its future. This is a longer version of the article that appeared in print in issue 7 of Rupture.
Introduction - the centrality of the ‘National Question’.
““The so-called ‘national question’ in Ireland (at least in the North) never was anywhere but centre-stage.””
The so-called ‘national question’ in Ireland (at least in the north) never was anywhere but centre-stage. The Good Friday Agreement itself was a temporary resolution to a decades-long insurgency conducted by a section of the working class throughout Ireland, although predominantly in the Six Counties. Indeed, to understand what is at stake in the debates over the future of partition, it is necessary to foreground the importance of the structure, ideology and class composition of the state itself in any discussion of the appropriate response of socialists to the possibilities and means of ending partition. This article attempts to do just that. Rather than engaging in polemical sloganising, the intention here is to provide an example of the form of analysis that is necessary to give a clear view of the present political conjuncture. That said, this article is in conversation with the other articles Rupture has published (much to its credit) on the question of a border poll.
Much of the article is devoted to identifying and analysing ideological trends that dominate the conversation. I have also sketched the shifting balance of class forces and tracked their ideological corollaries to give a clearer indication as to what is at stake in discussions of the future of the North. Much of my analysis is given over to the nature of the state itself and how it reflects and interacts with the class composition of society – something that is too often absent from serious left-wing analyses of politics in the North. Only by foregrounding the class nature of the state, as an ideological as much as coercive entity, can we determine a correct class-based approach to how and why partition should end.
While the state in the South does of course play a huge role in politics, it is the ideological fragility of the British state in Ireland (the ever-present unanswered questions surrounding its existence and basic legitimacy) that exposes a weakness in the nexus of imperialist and bourgeois power. Thus, national liberation movements, and the ideological formations that accompany them, have historically been a vital mode through which oppressed classes have worked for their self-emancipation.[1] [1]
Critique of democratic determinism
Part of the broader insufficiency of socialist and other attempted analyses of the question of the possible end of partition is due to the objectivist fallacy that focuses on what is called ‘demographic change’. Indeed, Paul Murphy has stated, ‘[d]emographic change within Northern Ireland is the largest single factor in changing the way the national question is posed and perceived’. [2] This is often coupled with the deus ex machina of a British exit from the European Union to create the putative conditions for the end of partition through a border poll. These objective realties are given a near-absolute determinative role in the profoundly political question of the nature of partition and how it will be ended. Therefore, before proceeding with the analysis of the class nature of the Northern state, it will be beneficial to recoup the true political meaning of the ‘demographic changes’ that have occurred in the North.
The phrase ‘demographic changes’ most commonly refers to the shifting sectarian make-up of the Six Counties. That the Catholic proportion of the population has been growing consistently over the existence of the northern State has given a sense of solace to those who considered a fight to destroy the sectarian state futile, as well as allowing some to indulge in more reactionary dreams of triumphalist majoritarianism. To some unionists, it retrospectively justifies the abandonment of their co-religionists in the rest of Ulster in 1920, while to others it merely feeds fearful settler-colonial delusions of a native deluge.
These fears (and hopes), which also function to maintain and construct political imaginaries of belonging, are essentially ideological readings of demographic change as an objective reality that determines the political terrain. Into this binary vision of objective reality has entered a third ‘demographic shift’. This third ideological reading of demographics as the primary (objective) political determinant in the North focuses on the growing ‘middle third’ who identify as neither Catholic nor Protestant.
The focus on the middle third insists on a version of demographic determinism in that (non-)identification as Catholic or Protestant still fundamentally determines the structure of the political. However, rather than insisting that the fundamental political question is one that concerns the right of a state to exist (its very legitimacy), the ideology of this form of demographic determinism insists that the nature of the political itself has changed. Indeed, the emergence of this demographic grouping (even if described in purely negative terms, as the absence of a Catholic/Protestant identity) has, according to this ideological position, fundamentally altered the nature of politics in the Northern state. Within this third version of demographic determinism, the emergent fraction is given ideological expression by appeals to “make politics work”, and for any supposedly “constitutional” questions to be indefinitely deferred. In essence, it becomes a version of “gas and water socialism” emptied of any class content. [3]
Unionism, Nationalism and the occlusion of class
““Memories of ‘rotten Prods’ who embraced republicanism or socialism (or often both) haunt the unionist ideology of demographic determinism.””
Demographic determinism (in the three ways I have outlined) is useful as a starting point of the analysis of the “common sense” prevalent in much discussion of the North. While it is important to challenge this ideological reading of objective facts through rigorous analysis, it is also important to recognise the kernel of truth contained within the various iterations of demographic determinism. Not only is this way of reading the demographic make-up of the North a symptom of ideology, in that it frames political questions as one of mere identity; it is also constitutive of concrete ideologies as such. Thus, while demographic determinism can be easily exposed as a crude error, it also contains a kernel of truth in that it is the production of a complex historical interplay between objective and subjective realities that shape the experience of the political.
Class, and political agency more broadly, is the obvious disruptor of all these ideological articulations of demographic determinism. Memories of “rotten Prods” who embraced republicanism or socialism (or often both) haunt the unionist ideology of demographic determinism. [2] But this haunting memory is necessarily repressed by the ideological insistence on correlation between religious identity and political positioning. Indeed, the repressed returns as an injunction not to be (or suspected to be) one of those “rotten Prods”, who chose class and/or nation over Queen and country.
The lamentably oft-repeated formula when referring to unionism and nationalism that each is as bad as the other simply does not hold when it comes to an objective analysis of the conditions for the emergence of a mass based Irish nationalism in the nineteenth century and its twenty-first century manifestations. [4] Nor can the content of anti-partitionism as a marker of nationalism merely be reduced to a reactionary creed poisoning the minds of potential proletarian revolutionaries. This is not to say that Irish nationalism does not very often obscure class antagonisms, but rather that its class basis is objectively different to that of unionism and its subjective articulation is likewise of a different character.[3]
The predominantly proletarian and agrarian basis of nationalism in Ulster has meant, historically at least, that the ideological imputation that Catholicism could be equated with nationalism does not operate the same level of class occlusion as its unionist correlate. [5] The relative impermeability of elite social formations in the North to Catholics has meant in practice that the demographic identification of Catholic and nationalist implies a level of social homogeneity absent in the unionist case. So, whilst both demographic determinations contain a concealed class content, the form of the occlusion is important for identifying the relationship between subjective and objective factors in each ideological formation’s relative position vis-à-vis the state.
In short, while the demographic determinism espoused by nationalism is embedded in an objectivist error, the concrete content of that ideology is determined by a classed experience of historical struggles of dispossession, discrimination, etc. Thus, even on a most cursory inspection, the objective conditions underpinning the Irish nationalist ideology and its concrete articulation means that nationalism (often unwillingly) manifests itself as class struggle. The contingent modes in which this is realised are as much about the balance of forces within nationalism and the relationships of various Catholic class fractions with the state (inclusion or antagonism), as they are about atavistic allegiances or questions of identity.
State and ideology
For the purposes of this article it would take too long to track the class content of the British state in Ireland from its settler colonial consolidation in the seventeenth century. Rather what I present here is an analysis of the class configurations that have changed the nature of the Northern Irish state in the past sixty years. This will make clearer the reasons why the GFA took the form it has done and expose the roots of the new ideology that has taken hold.
Mass mobilisation calling for reform of the Northern Irish state in the 1960s was followed by an armed insurrection waged by a section of the working class. Where the former was to fail in its avowed mission to reform the “Orange State”, the latter was central to the fundamental recalibration of the class dynamics within the Six Counties.
The broad-based movement calling for reform of the state consisted of urban and rural Catholic workers as well as the Catholic middle class (who had most to gain from the reforms being demanded), with radical and liberal opinions amongst some Protestant trade unionists and the middle class also being represented. The violent opposition from the state to undertaking the radical overhaul that was necessary to bring the North into line with even the most basic demands of a liberal democratic regime unveiled its basic irreformability. [4]
Moderate sections of the civil rights movement peeled off as a campaign for bourgeois equality was transformed into an existential battle for the survival of `the “Orange State” itself. The reasons for this need to be found in the class nature of the Northern Irish state. For, from its very foundation, Northern Ireland operated on the basis of a cross-class alliance amongst Protestants that was sanctified by Orangeism and vindicated by a comparative advantage in the economic and social spheres (especially regarding jobs and housing).
This led the state to demonstrate a form of social clientelism that could usually command the loyalty of all classes of Protestants while also abandoning the “normal” pretence of equality either before the law or anywhere else.[6] That the form this took was particularly violent can be seen in the legislative and repressive apparatuses with which the state furnished itself to deal with threats of subversion (congenital in the case of Catholics or elective for the “rotten Prods”). The former was embodied by the 1922 Special Powers Act, which was infamously coveted by Apartheid South Africa for its capacity to deny the necessity for even the most desultory adherence to basic human rights. Apartheid South African Justice (later Prime) Minister Vorster told his parliament that at he "would be willing to exchange all the [“public order”] legislation of that sort for one clause of the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act” in 1963.
The inherent violence of the state and the vertical incorporation of the working class into its fabric was ensured through the overlapping membership of the Ulster Special Constabulary (especially the “B” Specials), the Orange Order, and the Ulster Unionist Labour Association. Essentially these three groupings worked on a parastatal level to deploy violence (including anti-Catholic pogroms, reprisals and shipyard expulsions) against any perceived threats to Unionist hegemony. The Specials themselves were a reconfiguration of the Ulster Volunteer Force founded in 1912 and were regularised into the state apparatus at the formation of the Northern State, before being taken under British control as the Ulster Defence Regiment (later regularised as the Royal Irish Regiment) in the early 1970s
The incorporation of a significant section of the Protestant working and middle class into such ideological and state apparatuses had the effect of enabling the state to (usually) successfully deal with inter-class conflict amongst Protestants but only inasmuch as Catholics in general were excluded from political and economic life. Thus, the granting of reforms demanded by the civil rights movement would have meant the disintegration of the Northern State itself as manifestation of both the class power of the Protestant bourgeoisie and as the mediator of intra-Protestant class conflict. In short, granting civil rights would have destroyed not just the ideological basis of the state but its class basis (i.e. its material reality).
Conflict and class
In many working class Protestant communities in the 1970s, the apparatuses of state were joined by parastatal entities such as the UVF and UDA (the latter was not proscribed until 1992). The Protestant bourgeoisie was effectively split between its patrician and populist wings (a feature of high unionism for some decades). The split manifested itself in competing responses to the working class insurgency that was gaining force since the Battle of the Bogside in 1969. On the one hand the rump unionist government called on the British Army to quell revolts (“restore order”), while increasingly critical voices, Ian Paisley amongst others, supported a reversion to the paramilitarism that characterised the 1920s. Both tendencies (at once ideological and each rooted in a section of the bourgeoisie) would compete and coalesce over the future decades, but the totalising unity of Unionism was gone forever[5] .
A primary reason for the failure of patrician “Big House” unionism to reassert its overall hegemony amongst Protestants was the military campaign waged (predominantly) by the Provisional IRA. Before Stormont was prorogued in 1972, the IRA campaign was increasingly effective, causing huge amounts of economic damage and seriously undermining the British military presence. Northern Irish Prime Minister Brian Faulkner’s telling refusal to hand over the reins of the repressive state apparatus to the London government then led to the imposition of direct rule from Westminster.
““While the nominal ideological unity of
unionism remained, its foundational claim
to keep the Catholics under control in the
interests of all Protestants was fatally undermined.””
It was the inability of the RUC (including the “B” Specials) and parastatal actors to enforce their control through violence that fatally undermined the Stormont administration both in the eyes of the British government and of huge sections of the Protestant working and middle classes. While the nominal ideological unity of unionism remained, its foundational claim to keep the Catholics under control in the interests of all Protestants was fatally undermined. [6] Working class responses in the guise of paramilitarism both spoke to an older tradition of anti-Catholic working class militancy but also of a relative class autonomy that was nevertheless consistently hampered by the ideological dependency produced by unionism itself.
Thus, the apogee of unionist working class militancy, the Ulster Workers Council strike of 1974, resembled a fascist putsch more than general strike, having been organised (and enforced) by the UDA and far-right Ulster Vanguard. The fact of British state involvement in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings that same week only adds to this impression. It also points to a new class dynamic in the functioning of the state in reaction to a continued insurgency, with new alliances and divisions emerging between middle class Vanguard fascists, working class UDA members and the British security apparatus, while the formerly hegemonic Protestant bourgeoisie attempted to cobble together a power-sharing agreement with “moderate” Catholics (Sunningdale) that only highlighted its weakness still further, to friend and foe alike.
The class nature of the Northern State was beginning to change.[7] This change was in large part due to the economic and political damage being caused by the IRA campaign and exposure of brutal state practices that increasingly undermined its claims to legitimacy. The IRA bombing campaign, which was calculated to maximise economic damage as well as drain the British exchequer of funds, had the effect of accelerating the shrinkage of an industrial sector already in decline. This in turn weakened both the power of the traditional bourgeoisie and their clientelistic hold over the working class, exacerbating already existing class and ideological fissures with the unionist bloc.
The ideology that underpinned the PIRA campaign against the state (and the class structure underpinning it) is more complex than often acknowledged. The class content of a nationalist demographic determinism remained but it was fundamentally altered by the embrace of a specific form of agency and the abandonment of fatalism. This agency was articulated as being national in character but working class in practice, as it soon became clear that it was only the working class who could pursue armed struggle against the British state.
The reason for this is rooted both in the objective conditions for the emergence of armed militancy and the class content of anti-partitionist sentiment. The failure of the putatively unified nation to act in the national interest (meaning, contradictorily, in the interests of all classes) in 1969-1971, meant that the burden of representing the nation fell to “the only class that had never betrayed Ireland – the men of no property.” The ideological repertoire of a class-based national liberationism found a perfect echo in the ghettos of Derry and Belfast as well as amongst the (mainly Catholic) small farmers and labourers of Tyrone, south Derry, Fermanagh and south Armagh. This further found an echo throughout the country in areas of high social disadvantage and/or historic connections to anti-imperialist struggle, especially in the border counties and deprived urban centres. The rapid (if unsteady) inclusion of elements of social liberation within the republican movement in the 1970s and 80s reflected precisely the class nature of the struggle being waged.
An instinctive identification of the class enemy with the national enemy informed both the practice (with the primary focus on economic and military targets) but also the ideology of insurgent republicanism. In 1973 alone, the IRA bombed the London Stock Exchange, Harrods department store and the Bank of England. The reality is that republicanism represented the most active and advanced section of the Irish working class in practice if not in principle. The malleability of nationalism as a vehicle for class politics permitted a level of adaptability to changing subjective and objective conditions that reflected the class composition of the republican movement. In effect, the class character of republicanism is constrained by history and ideology, but nationalism is not.[7]
The rate of industrial decline in the North during the 1970s was much greater than that experienced in Britain at that time and was far behind the growth being experienced in the South. This rapid economic decline that was seen to further escalate an already volatile situation was met by the state with a huge increase in employment in service sectors, not least in the civil service and the security apparatus. While the latter was predominantly occupied by Protestants, often replacing the scarcer jobs in industry, the former were often occupied by Catholics.[8]
Working class Catholics (as well as the few established middle class Catholics) were availing of free higher education and benefiting from the gradual introduction of anti-discriminatory legislation for which the civil rights movement had campaigned. This further altered the class nature of the Six County state, creating a new Catholic middle class that was both wedded to the gains that had been made in terms of ethno-religious equality, but also uneasy about the insurgent methods that had contributed greatly to their achievement. Thus, the fundamental unreformability of the “Orange State” coupled with the uncontainable demands for liberation by working class Catholics conspired to produce a new class that would both undermine the radical potential of republicanism and help recreate Northern Ireland in its own image.
The Long Good Friday
The Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and the ways in which it recalibrated the Northern State should be seen in light of the decomposition and recomposition of the class forces discussed above. The reform of the RUC, the consociational executive, the release of political prisoners, the continued activity of British secret police and open organisation of loyalist paramilitaries, the use of “internment by remand”, the creeping privatisation of the health service, the failure to legally recognise the Irish language – all of these features of the current Northern Irish state are manifestations of the balance of class forces and their ideological corollaries. This can be understood effectively only through an analysis of the class composition and correlative ideological formations that are predominant in the North.
The unionist bloc has been hobbled by the lack of dynamism of its bourgeois leadership and the fact of inclusion of Catholics into the Northern Irish elite[8] , including the previously sacrosanct bastions of the civil service, judiciary, and big business. This watering down of the Protestant composition of the bourgeoisie has facilitated a reorientation to parties such as Alliance who are against workers’ rights and pledged to ‘make Stormont work’. The populist unionism of the DUP still has its base amongst big farmers and evangelical Christians as well as the Protestant working class, who rarely fail in delivering their vote wholesale to the DUP as the guarantor of blocking the amelioration of the conditions of Catholics.
Some signs of working class militancy amongst the Protestant working class is perpetually undermined by its ideological dependency on unionism as an ideology. [9] The few shoots of anti-sectarianism (such as the East Belfast movement to advance the Irish language) have been hampered by loyalist paramilitaries, who use death threats to stop Protestant children speaking Irish in their own communities.[9] There is little sight of an autonomous working class Protestant politics emerging that could be an interlocutor for the radical left.
The rise of a new Catholic middle class has been central to the form and content of the post-GFA regime. A new language of multicultural inclusivity has supplanted that of national liberation at the mainstay of Sinn Féin pronouncements.[10] Contrary to Joe Duffy’s belief that Sinn Féin are frightening middle class voters, it is the recalibration of their rhetoric that is in a dialectical relationship with the social base they both represent and seek to represent.[11] Belfast’s affluent Malone Road has had a Sinn Féin council representative since 2011, when they successfully challenged the traditionally middle class SDLP. There have also been signs of change in the voter base in the South.[12]
The slow pace of meaningful change over the past twenty four years since the GFA, including the failure to deliver a Bill of Rights and the Irish Language Act, despite repeated promises from the British government, demonstrate the relative class power of different factions within the state. Part of the story lies in the response of sections of the Catholic working class to the post-GFA dispensation.[13] While Sinn Féin have tried fairly successfully to integrate the Catholic middle class into their base, the slow erosion of the working class content of their programme has meant that class fractions capable of challenging Sinn Féin hegemony have emerged.
Sinn Féin’s hegemony was built initially on the insurgency against the British state and subsequently on the abandonment of revolutionary struggle in favour of a piecemeal approach. This shift has been seen in electoral terms small but significant inroads being made by radical left and republican challengers in the historic bastions of working class republicanism: the increasing success of People Before Profit in Belfast and Derry and the small but significant victories for independent republicans throughout the North, most especially in poor, rural areas.
That these challenges to Sinn Féin are in what were once known as their heartlands, is significant in itself [10] and speaks to a reality of the failure of the Sinn Féin strategy to ameliorate the conditions of those who once comprised its base. The left politics of Sinn Féin is a result of a class struggle within nationalism which laid the basis of its positioning as a hegemonic force; this is especially true in the South where appeals to the national liberation struggle were forced to be given concrete social content to be meaningful. The balance of class forces and the inability of Sinn Féin to resist the moderating pull of its heterogeneous social base has meant that agents have emerged who are increasingly capable of challenging Sinn Féin nationalist hegemony – namely PBP and independent republicans.
Their mobilisation of working class people has provided a new impetus and focal point for analysing the appropriate strategy for socialists to adopt when it comes to a united Ireland.
While there are certain differences of emphasis and analysis, both approaches are based on the connecting of concrete everyday struggles with the fundamental reorganisation of political and economic life throughout the country; it is about empowering the working class to become agents of their own destiny. It is, in in the words of James Connolly, the, ‘linking together of our national aspirations with the hopes of the men and women who have raised the standard of revolt against that system of capitalism and landlordism, of which the British Empire is the most aggressive type and resolute defender’.[14]
Endnotes
[1] John Molyneux makes a similar point In ‘Ending partition and the question of a border poll’, Rupture, 4 October 2021 https://rupture.ie/articles/ending-partition-and-the-question-of-a-border-poll.
[2] Paul Murphy ‘Unifying a divided working class’, Rupture, 27 January 2021, https://rupture.ie/articles/unifying-a-divided-working-class.
[3] James Connolly famously used the phrase ‘gas and water socialism’ to lambast William Walker’s ‘municipal socialism’ in his defence of a unionist labourism. See also, ’ Lenin, ‘The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907’, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1972, Moscow, Volume 13, pages 217-429. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/agrprogr/ch04s7.htm
[4] Here I agree entirely with John Molyneux’s analysis that unionism is not a mere mirror image of nationalism. ’ Molyneux, ‘Ending Partition’.
[5] This is in direct contradiction to Ciaran Mulholland’s (anti-Marxist) assertion that ‘if the fist of repression had not been wielded, and Catholic living standards had been improved this would not have easily bought allegiance to the new arrangement. This is so because the political identity of most Catholics is as nationalists.’ ‘The Frog at the Bottom of the Well: Marxists and the National Question in Ireland’, Rupture, 19 April 2021, https://rupture.ie/articles/the-frog-at-the-bottom-of-the-well-marxists-and-the-national-question-in-ireland.Syntactical Syntactical contortion aside, this formulation totally unmoors the production of ideology from its material basis and sets up ‘political identity’ as an ahistorical substance.
[6] See V.I. Lenin, ‘Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions For The Second Congress Of The Communist International’ in Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 31, pages 144-151 for a description of the fundamental characteristics of bourgeois democracy that were absent in the North. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm
[7] This obviously has repercussions for the question of whether Sinn Féin can reasonably be described as republican, but that discussion is outwith the purview of this article. It can however be said that they are a broadly social democratic and nationalist political force.
[8] One contemporary estimate has it than the first ten years of conflict caused an overall shrinkage in traditional industries in the Northern Irish economy (the basis of the class power of the traditional Protestant bourgeoisie) with an estimated 25,000 fewer manufacturing jobs and 14,000 in construction and private services in excess of any ‘normal’ change. At the same time 15,000 new jobs were created by the state, mainly in the security forces and public service. See, Bob Rowthorn, ‘Northern Ireland: an economy in crisis’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 5, No. 1 (March 1981), p.18.
[9] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/hate-campaign-forces-irish-language-pre-school-in-east-belfast-to-move-1.4633054
[10] See Kevin Bean’s New Politics of Sinn Féin (Liverpool, 2007).
[11] ‘Border Poll Debate: Prior Reforms, Not Rhetoric, Required’, 12 December 2021 https://rupture.ie/articles/border-poll. I am not arguing here that middle class Catholics are all behind reunification, only that their resistance to Sinn Féin should not be overstated.
[12] Damian Loscher, ‘Sinn Féin now the leading party of middle class Ireland’, Irish Times, 10 December 2021, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/sinn-f%C3%A9in-now-the-leading-party-of-middle-class-ireland-1.4751410.
[13] The focus on the Catholic working class here is necessary as a corrective to previous pieces such as Joe Duffy’s, which mentions the Catholic working class once, and only then as a mirror image ‘of their Protestant counterparts, and yet is replete with concerns for ‘Protestant communities’. This occlusion of (Catholic) working class experience, while to be expected of bourgeois sections of the establishment, should be militantly challenged on the left.
[14] James Connolly, ‘Socialism and Nationalism’, Shan Van Vocht, January 1897. https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1897/01/socnat.htm.