Ethno-symbolism and the Marxist theory of nations

This emphasis on the ‘non-functional’ aspects of nationalism, and its cultural or ‘particularist’ aspect is evident among perhaps the dominant theoretical tradition that stands opposed to Gellner’s modernism: the ethno-symbolists. Whereas Nairn or Anderson tend still to analyse nationalism within the traditional paradigm of modernism albeit with a revised anti-materialist, or anti-functionalist lens, the progenitor of ethno-symbolism, Anthony D. Smith (1986), rather argues for the roots of modern national identity in its continuity with pre-modern ‘ethnic’ identity. In this purview, it is not the random chance of material upheaval that transforms a linguistic community into a national community as Gellner (1983) tended to suggest, or Marxist class-functionalism, but rather the deep ethno-cultural ties that bind together a given ‘ethnie’ or ethnic group. This position alleges that while the modernists are correct to stress the ‘socially constructed’ nature of a Switzerland, France, or Italy, that many nations and nation-states follow more clearly demarcated ethno-culturally demarcated through-lines (e.g. Japan, Cataluña, Ireland) – based on shared ‘ethnic markers’ that Smith sees as determinant: a collective language, religion, mythography, physiognomy, etcetera. For Smith (2009) then, successful nationalisms are not necessarily those which optimally respond to the functional demands of modernity, or achieve statehood as such, but those that can generate the greatest degree of in-group solidarity, particularly subordination of the ethnic mass to the nationalist project of the elite. This is why ‘non-state’ nationalisms such as the Scottish, Catalan, and Québecois have all succeeded and flourished, or why the ‘cultural nationalist’ wing of Irish nationalism was so important: the possession of a state may play a key role in ‘selecting’ for the cultural groups that get transmitted to modernity as ‘nations’, but it clearly cannot determine the whole; a purely ‘statist’ position underestimates the importance of culture, mass emotion, and symbolism – to its analytic detriment.

There are however several hard limits to ethnicism:

Firstly, as Neil Davidson (1999) among others has pointed out, Smith’s definition of ‘ethnic identity’ is plainly tautological: “ethnic groups are ethnic groups because they share ethnic characteristics”. Secondly, even if aspects of pre-modern group identity filter into ‘modern’ national identity, the latter is a qualitatively different object; thus, to project the modern concept of ‘ethnic’ group identity into the pre-modern past is plainly anachronistic and dangerously essentialist (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000; Mann, 2005; Taylor, 2008). Thirdly, the classical modernist-statist critique remains singularly powerful: in Gellner’s (1998) turn of phrase, certain nations may indeed have pre-modern ‘navels’ but there are so many examples where this is not the case – multi-cultural European republics and federations, African ‘nations’ composed of a variety of tribal or ethnic identities, post-colonial Arab nation-states that follow not cultural topography but the lines of Sykes-Picot, etcetera – that the primary of ethnic ‘closure’ as the defining feature of nationhood seems untenable. The bulk of historical evidence seems to confirm thus, in the words of Hobsbawm (1983), that essentialised national identity remains most often a post-hoc ‘invented tradition’[1].

[1] Indeed, Smith (1995) himself seems to accept this argument, suggesting that what he is really arguing for is simply that scholars pay greater attention to ethno-cultural symbolism and discourse in nationalist movements; in particular, how ethnic elites are able to mobilise the ethnic masses as part of a successful or unsuccessful nationalist politico-cultural movement; and how global cultural diversity sets some ‘hard’ limits to constructivism. Self-evidently, this would mean that ethno-symbolism would be eminently recuperable (in a subordinate mode) to a ‘soft’ Modernist-Marxist position of the sort I outline here.

 

Fantastic Youtube find

Among the bowels of YouTube, one is liable to encounter the wildest and most bizarre and enjoyable internet ephemera imaginable. The latest example in my case is this incredible channel that compiles and distributes hour-long tributes to various national communist musical traditions.

Examples include Irish, Scottish, Vietnamese, Yugoslavian, communist music. Now the descriptor itself is used in the loosest sense, and many of the songs have only a tangential connection to any orthodox communist tradition, but the sentiment behind the project is still admirable, and many of the tunes themselves slap.

My personal favourites so far are the Somalian and Angolan compilations. The former is like upbeat Arab-influenced music, with tribal percussion and shouted choruses; whereas the latter is more like a traditional Portuguese/Brazilian influenced acoustic singer-songwriter tradition. Both are genuinely beautiful and surprisingly moving (I understand the Portuguese slightly, and the Somali not at all).

Pierre Broué – The German Revolution 1917-1923

 

This is the first in a new series where I’m just trying to keep track generally of the radical (or otherwise) literature that I’ve been reading. First up, Pierre Broué’s monumental history of the post-WW1 German communist movement.

Building the KPD

This book is essentially an exhaustive summary of the post-WW1 efforts of German revolutionary socialists to build their own communist party, inspired by the Bolsheviks example, which could lead a working class revolution. Broué outlines how the embryonic KPD was born amidst horrific bloodshed, as its two most prominent founders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the radical wing of the pre-war SPD, were murdered by right-wing militias empowered by the post-war right-wing SPD government as it repressed the post-war revolutionary upsurge among workers and the armed forces in Germany.

In their absence, Paul Levi, a left-wing intellectual converted to Bolshevism personally by Lenin, and Karl Radek, a Polish Jew who had also been active on the left-wing of the pre-1914 SPD, who had participated in the October Revolution at first hand, assumed the leadership of the nascent KPD. This odd pair were to wage an initial unstinting battle against the party’s ultra-left – which had passed up an opportunity to join in the largest working class action of the post-war tumult, the general strike against the right-wing Kapp Putsch – in order to establish credibility with the wider, non-revolutionary working class. Radek and Levi despite their differences of temperament and occasionally politics, were united in their accurate recognition that the post-war revolutionary wave in Europe had receded, that capitalism had stabilised, and that the main goal for communists in western Europe from 1920 onwards was to undertake joint activity with non-communist workers in order to win them away from a renewed social democracy.

For Levi and the KPD members most rooted in the actual workplaces and unions, this meant a policy of cooperation between communist and non-communist working class activists around immediate demands, such as pay rises, the disarmament of the far-right militias, and so on.

As Broué aptly phrases it:

“The problem was to draw the necessary conclusions from the defeat of the postwar revolutionary wave. To be sure, that was due to the absence of a revolutionary party analogous to the one in Russia. But throughout those years, the Communist International had reckoned on Social Democracy being on the point of losing its influence, and on the working class having inexhaustible reserves of combativity. In reality, this was not so. Social Democracy had preserved its dominant position, and working people were demoralised. Consequently, the bourgeoisie had recovered the initiative. In order to reverse the relationship of forces, the Communists were obliged patiently to grasp all the means that enabled them to approach the masses, so as to be able to restore their will to struggle, and to raise their consciousness.”

It was mainly Levi’s doing that this policy of the ‘united front’ was imposed on the nascent KPD, and it was one that bore fruit dramatic by the splitting in half of the USPD – a left-wing split from the SPD – at their annual conference in late 1920, with the young KPD absorbing hundreds of thousands of its most radical working class members.

Yet this historic victory was thrown away almost immediately in the disastrous stupidity of the ‘March Action’, when communists – following direction from the ‘leftist’ faction of the Comintern around Zinoviev and Bela Kun – undertook a failed armed insurrection in central Germany that discredited the party and intensified state repression. Hundreds of thousands of members, many recent recruits, left the party in disgust and Levi was expelled for his forthright criticisms of the disaster. Thus, the KPD was against stripped of one of its key leading figures and his supporters, possibly the only KPD leader of the post-war period who could argue with the Russians on a somewhat level footing intellectually and politically. It was this bashfulness in the face of Russian pressure and criticism that was to fatally undermine the KPD leadership going forward, as its self-confidence was destroyed by continual rebukes from Moscow, a trend that reached its logical endpoint in the “bolshevisation” campaign that reduced the KPD to an appendage of Soviet foreign policy after 1924.

And yet, almost in spite of itself, and through applying Levi’s policy of the ‘united front’ even in his absence – as mandated by Lenin and Trotsky to the western communities at the Third Comintern Congress in 1921, against the opposition of the ‘left’ both within the KPD and the Comintern – the KPD was gradually and painstakingly able to rebuild its support over 1921-23. It was given a particular boost by the French occupation of the Ruhr, which triggered hyperinflation in the German economy that discredited the Weimar regime and capitalism in general (it also led to the first rise in popular support for fascism in Germany, particularly in Bavaria). As Broué puts it: “For postwar Germany, 1923 was the annus terribilis…The crisis in Germany opened by the occupation of the Ruhr was the deepest which any advanced capitalist country had ever experienced. Poverty became general in a state based on the most modern industrial production. Nearly the whole of the working population suffered absolute pauperisation, and the petty bourgeoisie was ruined. The only privileges which survived were those of the owners of capital and the means of production. Speculation, corruption and prostitution triumphed. All measures of social security collapsed, and with them all democratic ideologies. All so-called moral values were ridiculed. Here was, in short, a fearful balance-sheet of failure and the obverse of a century of the amazing development and brilliant achievements of capitalism.”

Yet this golden opportunity was ultimately discarded by the KPD. It withdrew from industrial activity and undertook military-technical preparation for an insurrection that never came, in October 1923 – apart from an aborted rising in Hamburg – which again lead to widespread demoralisation and isolation among the wider working class movement.

Forgotten forerunners: Levi and Radek

This well-written book can be justifiably classed alongside Trotsky’s own ‘History of the Russian Revolution’ as a classic of twentieth-century socialist history-writing. Perhaps its signal contribution is its rehabilitation of Radek and Levi, individuals denigrated by both the Stalinist and Trotskyist traditions. In reading this work, one is repeatedly struck both by the farsighted political vision of the pair (moreso Levi, as Radek could erratically change course at times) – which exceeded even that of Lenin and Trotsky, who were necessarily less aware of concrete conditions in western Europe – as well as their personal courage in battling the worst, most bureaucratic and ultra-left, tendencies in the early Third International.

One can’t help but sympathise with and admire Levi in his perennial battle with the destructive influence of these ultra-left individuals and tendencies in both the German and international communist movement. On a much grander scale, his frustrations reflect those of any contemporary socialist confronted by the lunacy and delusions of grandeur promoted by ultra-leftists on the anarcho-autonomist fringe.

His criticisms of the Comintern and particularly its Executive Committee and its subordination to Moscow, the harshness of the 21 theses proclaimed at the second comintern congress, the “mechanical” split provoked in the Italian party, the suicidal trajectory of putschist, abstentionist, and syndicalist tactics post-1919, the stupidities of the March Action and the cover-up for its responsibility, are all retrospectively justified in Broué’s telling. Whatever one thinks of Levi the individual – and Broué does show him to be a somewhat conceited and prideful figure – and whether he should have accepted the olive branch Lenin offered him in terms of a temporary suspension from the party, one can’t help but be struck by his enduring patience and political clarity. His loss and the loss of his supporters – who eventually ended up on the far left of the reformed SPD – was almost as heavy a blow as that of the tens of thousands of worker members lost in the wake of March Action.

Radek on the other hand…

An ‘absent’ German October?

Broué is even-handed throughout with the evidence and various perspectives and arguments that percolated both in the period and retrospectively.

And yet, despite, or perhaps because of, this even-handedness, Broué successfully shows that a working class revolution in German in the wake of World War 1 was feasible, given the extent of the breakdown in capitalist hegemony, and the human material that lay to hand (though in my opinion the best opportunity may have been during the ferment of 1918, had Luxemburg and Liebknecht broken organisationally and ideologically from the SPD earlier, rather than 1923).

On the question of the ‘absent October’ of 1923, Levi, and the contemporary leadership of the KPD, including individuals like Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer (who went on to play prominent roles in the Bukharinite ‘Right’ international opposition), tended to retrospectively argue (convincingly) that the ‘objective conditions’ simply weren’t ripe for revolt in the autumn of 1923: working class combativity had actually declined over 1923 as the political and economic situation stabilised, the army had never truly been infiltrated as it had been in Russia, and the Communists simply didn’t have the numbers required to emerge victorious in a confrontation with the State, particularly in the absence of left-wing SPD support. Better to keep the powder dry, and maintain the party’s apparatus for future attempts (though none were in fact forthcoming), than to risk it all on what might be another putschist adventure.

The Trotskyist tradition – from Trotsky himself and onwards to writers like Chris Harman – on the other hand tended to see the question as a straightforward one of the absence of the “subjective factor” of disciplined revolutionary leadership. Broué is more circumspect, probably justifiably, and allows the reader to arrive at his or her own conclusion based on the evidence accumulated in this exhaustive book.

Perhaps the central weakness of the KPD in 1923 was that it retreated to a mainly military-technical approach to the question of revolution. “How many arms, how many men, how much funds, how much materiel, where are the safehouses?”, etcetera. It abandoned common political action with non-revolutionary workers, removed its activists from the industrial front line, and insurrectionary plans replaced popular agitation and daily struggle. This is exemplified in this quotation supposedly from a KPD activist of the period:

“Comrades, under no circumstances should we proclaim a general strike…On the contrary, let us soften down our spontaneous movements…Let us hold back our groups in the factories and the unemployed organisations so that the government will think that the danger is over.” Instead, this activist proposed, that the bourgeoisie, thus lulled “into an illusion of complete safety,” could be removed from power “in one night, quickly and decisively”, through the overthrow of the government and storming the army barracks. As Broué puts it: “The naiveté of this plan is almost laughable.”

This conspiratorial attitude on the part of the KPD in 1923 contrasted with the Bolsheviks’ ability to achieve a majority first in the worker and soldier Soviets in 1917 through ‘patient explanation’ and their popular demands of ‘peace, land, and bread’, before undertaking the ‘war of manoeuvre’ or military insurrection with overwhelming popular support in the big cities.

Moreover, if revolution in autumn 1923 was infeasible, then the party should have returned to its policy of the united front, and tried to rebuild its credibility among the wider working class, in anticipation of another opportunity (which was to come in 1929 with the Great Depression). However this path was choked off by the bureaucratic counter-revolution in Russia, predicated on the failure of the various ‘Oppositions’ of Trotsky and Bukharin to cooperate against the greater danger of Stalinism (as argued by John Marot). And thus the stage was set for the degeneration of the Comintern, the rise of Stalinism and its disastrous Third Period policy, and the eventual triumph of Nazism.

Revolutionary socialists thus still live in the shadow of the failed German revolution, and Broué’s book remains the standard text for coming to grips with it.

Maynooth Marxist conference paper

The impossibility of a reformist Europeanism

 

 

An excellent essay by the always-excellent Cedric Duran – one of the most proficient and convincing left Euro-skeptic intellectuals – in the new Catalyst, that summarises both the deeply revanchist and fundamentally un-reformable tendencies of European centralisation/integration.

https://www.catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no4/the-workers-have-no-europe

‘Fire and Fury’ review

 

 

“It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything – not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he’s smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need to stay because I’m the only person there with a clue what he’s doing…I am in a constant state of terror and shock.”

– An internal White House email, which circulated in April of 2017, purported to represent the views of Gary Cohn, former President of Goldman Sachs and current chief economic advisor to President Donald Trump.

 

 

Michael Wolff’s ‘Fire and Fury’ – an insider account of Donald Trump’s dysfunctional first 200 days in office – has provoked something of a media circus since its publication in early January. While its vulgarity and faithful transcription of personal gossip has scandalised liberal outlets (when they haven’t mined it for headlines), while its deeply unflattering portrayal of Trump has outraged conservatives; none more than Trump himself, who took (ultimately unsuccessful) legal action to block the book’s publication.

Indeed, this is a book replete with salacious insider details and vicious backbiting – the sort of romp that any political junkie or armchair psychologist will enjoy – yet it’s Wolff’s portrait of the psychological and political dynamics at the heart of Trumpism that give it a more profound weight.

 

Springtime for Trump

Prior to tackling the dysfunctions of Trump’s incoming administration, Wolff offers a useful insider treatment of the presidential campaign that preceded it. Here he confirms something many interested observers had long argued: Trump’s campaign had no intentions of winning the election.

Drawing a parallel to the classic musical ‘The Producers’, Wolff suggests that for Trump and his family the campaign was rather a combination of a giant publicity effort, and a legal way to launder money; while for Trump’s various parasitic hangers-on and surrogates it was merely a stepping-stone to a full-time role as a dinner speaker or conservative TV pundit.

In fact, Michael Flynn, the disgraced former General and Trump military advisor (who has now been caught up as one of the principals in the congressional investigation into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia) – told friends that his taking money from Russians citizens for private talks would only be a problem if Trump won, which of course he wouldn’t.

Only Melania, Trump’s long-suffering wife – demonstrating her supposed naivety – truly thought her husband might win, making her a subject of cruel mockery for Trump’s daughter Ivanka. When the results rolled in on the night of November 8^th 2016 confirming Trump’s improbable victory, Wolff alleges Melania broke down into tears (and not tears of joy).

This dramatic reversal of fortunes for Trump on the campaign trail, from ‘inside joke’ to presidential material, was only made possible by a huge mid-campaign injection of money from the ultra right-wing Mercer billionaire family and their installation of Breitbart strategist Steve Bannon as campaign manager.

With Bannon whispering in his ear and Fox News his reliable news source, the ‘Wall Street Democrat’ and (supposed) billionaire Trump was reinvented as the champion of the forgotten American everyman: urging limits on immigration, an all-out assault on radical Islamism, an end to disastrous foreign wars, and promoting the return of manufacturing to US shores.

Trump, facing the Democratic Party’s handpicked champion in Hillary Clinton – possibly the single most uncharismatic candidate in modern political history – made hay out of Obama’s 8 years of Bush-lite policies that had failed middle America, riding a wave of populist anger all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

And that’s where the problems began.

 

Trumpism: the ego and the maniacs

 Unlike the boogeyman caricature painted by sections of the liberal media – of an ideological, ultra-nationalist, Machiavellian radical (in cahoots with Russia, of course) – Woolf paints a picture of Trump as essentially an impatient egotist with totally inconsistent politics. Or, in the words of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: “a fucking moron”.

Trump not only lacks basic literary skills, he is a notorious technophobe (his infamous tweets are in fact transcribed for him by staffers), with his sole source of new information a seemingly 24/7 feed of right-wing cable news – particularly Fox News. The single alternative, at least during Bannon’s tenure, was the odd Breitbart article.

Trump possesses then, if it’s possible, less than zero interest in policy: instead he has left the bulk of the conservative legislative agenda (after his initial flurry of executive initiatives – which were in fact Bannon initiatives) to the mainstream Republicans on Capitol Hill while he golfs. Indeed, Wolff notes that his politics appear to extend only as far as the classical real estate developer’s mantra of quid pro quo: what can this person do for me?

His fundamental political disinterest is compounded by an extreme child-like and almost pitiable desire to be liked and respected, most especially by people Trump considers true elites: a list that includes celebrities, media pundits (and moguls), certain politicians that flatter him correctly, and the billionaire class generally. In the words of former deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh: “the president fundamentally wants to be liked. He just fundamentally needs to be liked so badly that it’s always…everything is a struggle for him.”

This heady combination of impatience, a fundamentally needy ego, and the unexplainable anger of a 70-something Fox News addict, helps explain the various surreal outbursts that dogged (and have continued to dog) his administration: the apocalyptic threats to North Korea, the military ban on transgender soldiers (announced over twitter), running feuds with sports stars that have supported the Black Lives Matter movement as well as news pundits that he feels have disrespected him, and varied threats to fire senior figures in his own cabinet.

This loose cannon aspect of Trump is not to suggest he has zero political skills. In Bannon’s description, his gift is his capacity as a natural salesman, along with his impressive physical stamina, that allowed him to trumpet his populist message across America in his whirlwind campaign. His eerie ability, manifested most famously during the Republican primaries, to embarrass professional politicians and bureaucrats remains apparently undiminished, as Wolff’s amusing account of Trump’s denigration of his officials’ proposals (eventually acceded to) of yet another US troop surge in Afghanistan demonstrates.

And yet, in government – where bureaucracy and policy outweigh rhetoric and gut feeling – Trump is essential a fish out of water.

Thus the profound policy oscillations – from the far right and back to the centre – that marked Trump’s first 200 days are a product of the delicate management of the Trump psyche by various members of his inner circle. In the words of Steve Bannon, whoever last talked to Trump dictates his agenda for the next hour or so in which his attention can be held to a single task.

In this continual battle for the heart and mind of Donald Trump, three rough factions within Trumpism can be identified: the ‘moderate’ wing of Reagan Democrats in Trump’s immediate family circle; the Republican careerist bureaucrats foisted upon him by the Republican Party; and the Bannonite ultra-nationalist wing – the latter of which has now been by-and-large (apart from anonymous speechwriter and lacky Stephen Miller) purged from the White House.

In this telling, Bannon – sensing that his window to implement radical change was limited – pushed Trump to utilise his Executive powers to implement a number of extreme measures as quickly as possible when he entered office. Thus, a militant inauguration speech was followed by ‘the Muslim ban’, Bannon’s appointment to the National Security Council, and the tearing up of the Paris Agreement on climate change (much to Ivanka’s dismay).

This unorthodox assault on the main pillars of the centrist consensus quickly triggered retaliation from the Kushner wing, which includes Ivanka, many of Trump’s New York billionaire friends, and Rupert Murdoch. This faction – though far too liberal on issues such as abortion for Republican functionaries such as Reince Preibus, Trump’s first Chief of Staff – were nonetheless generally in alignment with the mainstream Republican party in terms of aiming for a legislative continuance of the mainstream neoliberal project where Obama had left off.

Thus, what seemed to many at the time to be genius Machiavellian divide-and-conquer gambits in Trump’s early administration – meeting building union leaders one day, then Fortune 500 CEOs the next – were in fact merely an expression of two diametrically contradictory policy approaches being conducted simultaneously.

For Wolff, the gradual – and visible – ‘neoliberalisation’ of the Trump White House was achieved through the direct access of the ‘Jarvanka’ faction to Trump as well as a quid pro quo alliance erected with the Republican bureaucracy to isolate Bannon, ultimately culminating in the latter’s sacking in August 2017.

A number of factors contributed to this victory: Trump’s own essentially centrist politics and desire to be liked by elites, his egotistical resentment towards Bannon (who loudly claimed the credit for Trump’s election victory), as well as the economic and social pressure of the billionaire class and mainstream Republican Party.

 

The death of a populist

In this chronicle of Trump’s gradual ‘normalisation’, Wolff’s book is in essence a surprisingly perceptive case study in all the limits – institutional, bureaucratic, cultural, economic – imposed upon any populist project in the era of late capitalism. This narrative then, equally offers a lesson to activists of the reformist left – supporters of Jean-Luc Melenchon or Jeremy Corbyn – who, in many ways, seek a ‘Trump of the left’: a charismatic individual that can be swept into power and implement a transformative programme through the capitalist state itself.

Perversely, Trump echoes something the left should have learned with the devastating SYRIZA experience in Greece: that the golden cage of capitalist democracy is far too resilient for any major deviations from the neoliberal plan to occur through the mere democratic occupation of office. In the absence of the sort of mass disruptive working class rebellion that defined the 1940s, 50s, and especially 60s, in the US and Europe, capital’s dominance of the media – but also through its control of the investment function, bankrolling of politicians, sheer bureaucratic inertia – can always cow a populist government into eventual obeisance; even a figurehead as unpredictable, irrational, and egomaniacal as Trump.

Thus, the final ouster of Bannon has been reflected in a dramatic shift by Trump towards governing in much the same centre-right tradition as his predecessors, Bush and Obama. He has gradually relaxed executive interference in policy-making, supported a programme of neoliberal tax-cuts and healthcare reform, and returned to traditional US foreign policy positions in relation to Russia and the Middle East.

And of course, for all this moderation Trump has been rehabilitated to some extent as a ‘reasonable’ figure in establishment media and political circles.

A further profound insight offered by Wolff’s study is how it details the extent to which the late capitalist state itself has been hollowed out into a mere profit-making mechanism. This is summarised particularly in the ‘Jarvanka’ hires such as Gary Cohn and Dina Powell – ex senior Goldman Saches bankers, whose decision to join the Trump administration is an openly commercial calculation, designed to rebound into further career opportunities in the private or public sector.

Even Anthony Scaramucci, that walking symbol of every surreal aspect of Trumpism, joined for the opportunity to grift: benefitting from a tax exemption for his investment fund through his move into a government post.

 

Liberalism and Russophobia

Wolff – a maverick conservative (in the small ‘c’ sense) – thus offers a compelling portrait of both Trump the man and Trumpism the political phenomenon, in a way establishment liberal-dominated media in the US and abroad has failed entirely.

Indeed, Wolff regularly turns his scorn on this ‘liberal’ (or, ‘establishment’ might be more accurate) media – pointing out how it exists in an essentially symbiotic relationship to Trump (whom it initially signal-boosted as an intended favour to Clinton), and that their hysterical response to the more gauche right-wing aspects of Trump’s programme is bathed in hypocrisy.

A media establishment that decries Trump’s heartless cruelty remained tight-lipped while Obama deported more immigrants than any previous president, massively increased the power of the executive wing of the state (ironically used by Trump himself), and continued US occupations and extra-judicial killings abroad. A liberal media that once cast a critical eye on counter-intelligence institutions like the FBI or CIA, and the red-scare of McCarthyism, now searches frantically for a Russophobic explanation for Trump’s victory, while cheering on the intelligence ‘community’ in its confrontation with the Trump White House.

Regarding the Russia issue, Wolff convincingly argues that no one in the Trump campaign was smart enough to coordinate any sort of high-level treason.

On the other hand, almost everyone involved in Trump’s campaign – Kushner (whose father was jailed for white collar crime) included – has reason to fear government indictment that could bring to the surface various ‘dark money’ shenanigans common in financial and real estate circles. In this telling, the dramatic firing by Trump of FBI chief James Comey in May 2017 was a combination of Kushner’s panic and Trump’s own fractious ego, rather than a calculated Stalinist purge.

Certainly, the infamous ‘conversation’ conducted on Air Force One in July 2017 on the way back from the G-20 summit in Germany, in which the Trump clan and aides brainstormed a response to the allegations that Donald Trump Junior met with Russians during the election on the promise of incriminating information against Clinton, is an undoubted legal disaster and black-hole.

Wolff suggests that everyone in the meeting room on Air Force One that day is a potential incriminated witness – including Trump’s current media coordinator Hope Hicks – that could be subpoenaed and pumped for information by the Mueller investigation. Yet this sort of incompetence and banal corruption is a long way from the complex Russiagate scandal promoted by conspiracy theorists such as Louise Mensch and other lunatics on twitter – and in more sophisticated form in the pages of the Guardian and other liberals outlets.

Indeed, reading this book, one is often led to the conclusion that it is not really the substance of Trumpism that outrages (for example) the editorial board of the New York Times, so much as its form – with Trump’s vulgar nouveau-riche populism standing in stark contrast to the traditional capitalist oligarchy, of the quiet rule of the “man behind the curtain”.

Trump’s crime in this sense is not merely defiling the office with his oafishness, but rendering politics itself an object of amusement and celebrity, and rendering the governing apparatus of capitalist oligarchy the transparent sham it is. The lack of reverence that Trump generates for ‘the office’ is especially triggering for a media and political establishment that regards the accouterments of the US state with fetishistic reverence. The hysterical fandom of US liberal and political elites for the musical ‘Hamilton’ (Hillary Clinton attended a Broadway Performance, Mike Pence was booed at one) – a show that conjures a mythical past where the merchant oligarchs and slave-owners that founded the United States where in fact committed multi-cultural democrats – sums this sort of liberal state idolatry up.

This healthy scorn for the professional media class partly explains the book’s curious reception, with an unholy alliance of right and left erected against it. In particular, liberal outlets such as the Washington Post and New York Times – despite the book seeming to confirm many of their readers’ worst opinions of Trump – offered priggish, denunciatory reviews, mainly revolving around nit-picking various irrelevant details like the correct spelling of a lobbyist’s name.

This is not, of course, to say that Trump hasn’t had a real and negative impact on many of the most marginalised in America, which Wolff’s cynicism can at times obscure. His empowerment of immigration police has torn apart families and added even further stress to the already difficult lives of legal and illegal migrants – and even if Wolff is correct that alt-right spokespeople are more opportunists than true allies of Trump – his language of white grievance no doubt legitimises a wider wave of reactionary sentiment in American politics.

 

Conclusion: turbulence on left and right

In this sense, Trump may not be the last, but rather the first elected (at least in the truly Western world) expression of the post-political situation of ‘the void’ as described by the political scientist Peter Mair – that is, the huge and ever-expanding gap between the attitudes and experiences of the rulers and the ruled under late capitalism. In an era of yawning inequality, endless war, climate catastrophe, and a reignited fascist-populist right, the future in Europe and the US may witness the rise of ‘one, two’, many Trumps.

At the same time, it is likely the mainstream Republican Party now has a strong hold on the Trump project, even if Trump himself remains a wild card, as on-going tensions with his latest Chief of Staff John Kelly testify to. In his 70s, almost halfway through his first term, the next conflict within the Trump White House may well be between the various opportunists seeking to succeed him in 2020 – Wolff suggests the US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley may be the current front runner.

On the other hand, the book’s coda considers a more disturbing alternative vision for conservatism: that Bannon, or a surrogate, might again snatch the Republican nomination in 2020 and subject the world’s hegemonic power to a further – and this time ideologically committed and mentally sharp – bout of ultra-nationalist populism. Admittedly, this has not gotten off to the best start with Roy Moore’s loss in December’s Senatorial by-election in Alabama, following Bannon’s wholehearted endorsement.

The Democrats, on the other hand – predictably – have echoed the establishment line in their counter-attack to Trump, summed up by their appointing the multi-millionaire and scion of the Kennedy political dynasty Joe Kennedy the 3^{rd to} deliver their recent opposition ‘state of the nation’ speech. The party, then, seems congenitally wedded to the neoliberal consensus it pioneered in the Clinton era – manifested in the liberal Russian conspiracy theories and continued polemics against the Sanders wing of the party – as well as Hillary Clinton and her camp’s delusional lack of acceptance of responsibility for a win.

This sort of totemic attachment to the failed neoliberal project could well guarantee further losses in 2018 and 2020, unless the embryonic movements ‘from below’ in American politics – from the Sanders insurgency to Black Lives Matter – can recohere as a prominent leftist pole. Wolff’s book should encourage them: Trump for all his malice is a buffoonish fluke, not the mastermind of any grand reactionary insurgency.

Review: “The End of Outrage Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland” – Breandán Mac Suibhne

 

 

1

 

Most of my teenage summers at some point included a three-week stint at Gaeltacht college in the Gweedore parish of northwest Donegal. At the time – especially being a city-slicker from the ‘big smoke’ of Belfast – its landscape of sheep and steep hills, bogs and desolate beaches, seemed like the ultimate picture-postcard vision of uneventful Irish rural life, or “rural idiocy” as Marx characterised it less charitably.

In reading Breandán Mac Suibhne’s End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjusment in Rural Ireland I came to realise that in fact this idyllic landscape was shaped by some of the most intractable class struggles of the post-famine era, particularly when local landlords sought to clear their smaller tenants from the land in order to replace them on the hillsides with the more profitable sheep flocks of Scottish and English graziers.

The Gweedore smallholders retaliated with ferocious resistance, stealing and destroying the sheep and violently rejecting any attempts to clear them from the land. At one point in the conflict, in the summer of 1857, the bishop of the diocese arrived to harangue his parishioners, evoking the omnipotent imperial reach of the British state in order to convince them of the futility of their resistance:

“England has sent out an army to the Crimea, and she has conquered the Russians; she has sent an army to China, and she has conquered the Chinese; and do you mean to tell me, that you, a small corner of a parish in the County of Donegal, mean to stand up and say you will oppose the law of England?”

It is the connecting of these dots – of the processes that shaped the Irish countryside on a local level into its stereotypical pattern of individual plots, small homes, and enclosed fields – to capital accumulation and state formation on an imperial, trans-Atlantic, and global scale, that is the standout achievement of this excellent book.

 

2

 

Outrage takes as its focal point the remote village of Beagh, situated further south along the West Donegal coast, near the town of Ardara in the Glenties area of the county. Its central narrative tells the tale, passed down through oral seanchas, of a local schoolmaster named Patrick McGlynn who betrayed his comrades in the Molly Maguires to the authorities in the hard post-famine years of the 1850s. 

The “Mollies” as they were known to contemporaries were one of several agrarian secret societies in operation across Ireland in this period, and utilised various aspects of masonry, confessional superstition, and Jacobin-style rhetoric and violence to terrorise both landlords and larger tenants that refused to abide by the normative ‘moral economy’ of the smallholding tenantry of the period.

One example of an outrage that Mac Suibhne gives is of a “big farmer” who rented disputed land near the town of Ballyshannon with the goal of evicting his sub-tenant, and who – after several threatening letters – had his harvested wheat and oats that were bound for market destroyed. Another, more serious incident, involved a home invasion by the Mollies of a farmer, the destruction of his milk, and a ferocious beating that left the man on the verge of death.

McGlynn ‘turning informer’ was provoked by the threat of a similar outrage to be carried out by the Mollies against a ‘strong farmer’ in Beagh, James Gallagher, accused of ill-treatment of his neighbours, sub-tenants and even his own elderly father. This betrayal led to the arrest of dozens of alleged Molly Maguire members in West Donegal in 1856 and a much-publicised trial of the ‘Ardara Mollies’ the following year.

McGlynn’s story (and his eventual fate, half the world away as a colonial settler in Australia) offers a profound metaphor for the rapidly shifting terrain of social, cultural, and political relations in post-famine Ireland. This era was one of widespread turbulence and social unrest as the demise of the cottier class through starvation and emigration meant that large tracts of land lay suddenly unoccupied and could be more profitably occupied by livestock than poor smallholders, leading to growing tensions over land use.

Mac Suibhne argues that the roots of these tensions are to be located prior to the Famine however, in the “squaring” of 1838-41, a process whereby the traditional rundale system of common land-holding was replaced with individually-rented plots of land. It was at this point that the inhabitants of Beagh – and other localities across West Donegal and similar isolated regions – were drawn into a more individualistic, commercialised, system of property relations.

It is this original research and case study of the pre and post-famine transformation of one rural community over the course of the nineteenth century that offers the most interesting material for Irish Marxists. Something like the process of “squaring” which Mac Suibhne outlines as occurring in Beagh must have transpired across most of Ireland in the hundred years before the Famine, as an emerging English domestic market for corn and meat led to the ‘rationalisation’ of estates by ‘improving’ landlords and their appointed agents.

The subsequent intensified financial and productive pressures on “strong” tenants, subletting tenants (cottiers), and struggling smallholders eking out a living on a couple of acres of poor land, played a central role in the ‘Malthusian’ disaster of the Famine. The winners and losers of this era formed the eventual class factions that dominated the politics of the Irish countryside even into the 20^th century, through the IRA split and eventual Blueshirt – Fianna Fail conflict, as Mac Suibhne describes occurred in Beagh, with his grandfather being one of the protagonists.

The chapters on post-famine adjustment in particular, are excellent ‘thick’ social history, detailing how the waves of emigrants that left Donegal would go on to participate in further bloody class struggle across the Atlantic, as the leaders of a multinational working class resistance to the exactions of mine bosses in the anthracite seam regions of Pennsylvania. Gradually, these pioneers of Irish-America and the rebellious Mollies would be incorporated into the nascent US party-political system of the Gilded Age, and from multi-ethnic class radicalism they would venture into institutionalisation in the Democratic electoral machine and confessional separatism in the form of the Hibernians.

Mac Suibhne argues that the Mollies back in West Donegal experienced something similar, as a ‘split’ between the more and less conservative wings of the movement, increased repression, and growing electoral reform all led to gradual institutionalisation within the broader movement of parliamentary Nationalism. It’s in this period (1855-1900), which the author dubs the “age of infidelity”, that adjustment to the post-famine status quo necessitated the decline of the Irish language, the end of a primitive-pagan Catholicism, and the loss of a meaningful historical memory that had sustained the practice of the “outrage” and the communal solidarity it drew its moral basis from.

 

3

 

One area of critique is a question that I felt Mac Suibhne could have explored more thoroughly: whether or not this “age of infidelity” – or some other earlier stage (the squaring, or the traumas of the famine) – witnessed a transition to capitalism in Beagh, and similar localities.

That is to say, were post-famine agrarian societies such as the Mollies a product of capitalist petty producers seeking to restrain the accumulatory drives of larger capitalist producers and commercial landlords? Or were they pre or non-capitalist producers dependent on their subsistence-oriented plots, seeking to restrain the full flowering of a free market in land and produce (and labour by implication)? Mac Suibhne doesn’t explicitly offer a theorisation of the conflict in these terms.

However, the author himself notes in the final chapters how “backwards” this region of Donegal remained right into the second half of the 20^th century, which is symptomatic of the chronic problems of low productivity and efficiency in Irish agriculture that dogged subsequent independent 26-country governments that sought to reform the economy of the small-holding West. And what is true of West Donegal is equally true of the other densely-populated smallholding regions: much of Connacht, Kerry, parts of Cork, and tillage areas in the southeast.

It seems to me that if Mac Suibhne is correct, that the Mollies declined in the second half of the nineteenth century (or perhaps more accurately: were eventually incorporated into local and national networks of power) that this was less a ‘betrayal’ of their stated goals than premised on the fulfilment of much of the Mollies original redistributive agrarian programme via the vehicle of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary Nationalist politics in the form of the IPP and the Land League – in the guise of ‘tenant right’ (1870), tenant purchase (1881-1903), and formal independence (1920s).

If this thesis were correct then we could say that the smallholders of Ardara – and the Gweedore sheep rustlers – in spite of all the deprivations they undoubtedly faced, successfully resisted the fate of their counterparts across most of the rest of Europe in this period. Rather than being subsumed to what the American Marxist historian Robert Brenner has called “market dependence” – the necessity to “sell to survive”, to market the entirety of one’s produce, and compete through investment in the most modern productive techniques – the Irish smallholder stalled, stemmed, and eventually negated the process of deepening capitalisation of land in the post-famine period through an entire prolonged phase of class struggle that terminates with the Land Acts.

What was required in order to impose capitalist productive relations in these regions was the real threat or – more accurately – successful practice of large-scale eviction and agglomeration of inefficient holdings. In its absence, processes such as ‘squaring’ could only institutionalise a transition from a system of non-capitalist communal land possession to a system of individualised non-capitalist petty holdings.

This era might well have witnessed the emergence of a full-blown agrarian capitalism along the lines of the Irish midlands or the English model – but it would have required an active collusion between the larger tenants and landlords to make it so (as occurred in both of the former regions) – to throw the smallholders off the land and agglomerate their petty holdings into substantial holdings of at least 100 acres upon which up-to-date capitalist agricultural techniques could have been implemented.

Something like this process did in fact occur in a small backwards agrarian country in Europe, with free trade with Britain, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries: in Denmark. There, a peasant-based economy at the tail end of the 1700s eventually rationalised into one based on capitalist (cooperative) farms that was able to outcompete rivals such as Ireland – which declined in competitiveness and productivity with the rise of ‘peasant proprietorship’ from the first Land Act in 1870 onwards – over the critical period 1860-1900. Denmark became the breakfast foods supplier of industrial England, generating a surplus population and indigenous capital – and the social relation of market dependence between the two – that set the grounds for industrialisation and – eventually – a ‘redistributive’ Scandinavian model of capitalism.

Another variable to consider might be the non-development of factory production of clothing in West Donegal, which had been a centre of a domestic knitting industry throughout the 18^th and early 19^th century, as described by Mac Suibhne. The putting-out system that developed here did not terminate in the “satanic mill” as occurred in the shirt-making industry of Derry or the linen mills of Belfast. I would argue again that this was precisely because the smallholders in much of Ulster outside the most intensely cleared-and-planted six counties of the northeast retained non-market determined, or customary access to their land, regulated by the pike and blunderbuss – not competitive market rents successfully enforced ‘in the last instance’ by the physical force of the bailiff and state.

The 20^th century ‘underdevelopment’ detailed by Mac Suibhne can then perhaps be best understood in this account as as the enduring legacy of the Mollies: the western Irish smallholder’s continued (partial) possession of their means of production and subsistence, and their on-going refusal to be divorced from them; instead orienting their production towards self-sufficiency in the first instance. This remains compatible with Mac Suibhne’s overall thesis that the legacy of the “squaring” and the Famine was the immensely destructive decline of Gaelic-Irish culture, sub-division and rundale, as well as a growing individualism that frayed the knots of solidarity in communities like Ardara.

 

4

 

Of course, Mac Suibhne didn’t aim to produce a theoretical text on the genesis or non-genesis of agrarian capitalism in Ireland, but rather a meticulous micro-history of the changes wrought in one locale by the man-made traumas of the nineteenth century. In this, through the fluid presentation of a vast array of economic and ethnographic detail – as well as his virtuosic command of the relevant primary and secondary sources – he is wildly successful.

His study is one that greatly enriches Irish historiography of the 19th century, and offers a compelling insight into the transformation of rural communities in the contested transition to modernity in Ireland. It is a work of humane and politically committed – yet rigorous and critical – scholarship, which correctly situates the colonial context of its subject matter, without tending to the pitfalls of traditional nationalist mythography.

Anyone seeking to understand the making – or non-making – of the Irish working class (at home and abroad) could do worse than begin here.

HM London 2017 Paper

Capital’s First Colony? A Political Marxist approach to Irish “underdevelopment”

 

This paper is a preliminary attempt to sketch out some aspects of a Political Marxist analysis of Irish economic development and underdevelopment in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

It’s divided into four short sections:

The first is a brief summary of the Political Marxist definition of contrasting feudal and capitalist social property relations and ‘rules for reproduction’.

The second section then attempts to adjudicate based on prima facie evidence whether feudal or capitalist social-property rules for reproduction were being followed by exploiters and exploited in Ireland on the eve of the Famine in the 1840s.

It’s suggested that non-capitalist social-property relations prevailed across much of the country, but that a transition to capitalism had occurred in the settler-colony in the northeastern region of Ulster and had occurred or was occurring in the enclosed grazing lands of the midlands.

The third section tries to offer an explanation for these regionally distinct social-property relations from a Political Marxist perspective, in terms of divergent patterns of colonisation in the seventeenth century and the subsequent evolution of class struggles and balance of class forces.

The forth section is a brief conclusion surveying the post-famine era and whether or not it fully consolidated capitalism in Ireland, as suggested by Marx in Chapter 8 of Capital. Drawing on the work of Ellen Hazelkorn I suggest this is doubtful, thus explaining the persistence of “underdevelopment” in the south of Ireland into the 20^th century.

 

Social-property relations and rules for reproduction

For Robert Brenner, as he and later Political Marxists have systematised his approach, class societies are constituted by specific macroeconomic contexts or social-property relations – i.e. the dispersal and possession of relative economic and political resources that determines the macro-scale interaction of actors within that system and between humanity and nature.

Each system of social-property relations has its own corresponding microeconomics, or rules of reproduction i.e. the rational actions and constraints that actors must obey in order to successfully survive within that system.

The pursuit of these reproductive strategies by economic actors – whether exploiters or exploited – are thus reflected in aggregate patterns of development or non-development as the case may be in the economy.

 

Feudalism

Under feudal social-property relations, peasant possession of the means of subsistence in land, labour, and means of production means that surplus has to be extracted by extra-economic coercion after the process of production itself has been completed, i.e. the forceful taking of feudal rent.

This feudal macroeconomics corresponds to the microeconomics of its conflictual rules of reproduction: peasants quite rationally – given possession of their means of production (land, tools) – aim to produce for subsistence, rather than surpluses that could be appropriated without recompense by lords.

This means undertaking ‘safety first’ agriculture on the small plots of land in their possession, in order to insure against poor harvest and other variable factors, and only selling physical surpluses on the market.

These conservative economic practices go hand-in-hand with precapitalist family reproductive and property strategies: for example the subdivision of holdings in order to set up children independently; and the practices of early marriage and high fertility, intended to act as a safety net for when peasant grows old or infirm in the absence of a social security system.

Lords on the other hand carry out ‘political accumulation’ under feudalism. Unable to wield entrepreneurial oversight over the direct labour process, they instead use surpluses coercively extracted from their peasants to build larger, more cohesive, better-armed political groups in order to extract surpluses from other lords or peasants.

Production can be expanded, but usually only extensively rather than intensively – through the cultivation of new lands, not the application of superior techniques or technology to the current land inputs, since the peasants given their possession of the means of production are not expellable from the process of production.

The aggregate pattern of these feudal rules for reproduction follow a very classical Malthusian-Ricardian pattern: peasant population grows, there’s an ever decreasing size of holdings due to the subdivision of land, which leads to forced movement onto worse land and the reclamation of marginal land. There’s little specialisation or investment and instead an overall pattern in the economy of declining labour productivity, alongside rising food and land prices as population explodes.

This “development” then culminates in unavoidable feudal crisis as peasant over-population hits an ecological wall, which then leads to a fall in population; which in turn leads to a decline in lordly incomes, leading them to tax peasants even further to compensate for falling incomes, in turn setting off an overall downward spiral usually culminating in war or prolonged social conflict.

 

Capitalism

Capitalist social-property relations on the other hand are characterised fundamentally by the separation of the direct producers from their means of subsistence, rendering them dependent on the market for inputs. As “market dependent” producers, obliged to purchase their inputs, they are in turn required to sell their outputs, in order to secure the funds to buy their inputs – they are thus required to produce competitively in order to survive.

In other words capitalist rules for reproduction compel individual economic units to maximise their price-cost ratio and profits; they’re compelled to specialise, to accumulate/reinvest surpluses; to innovate and bring in the latest inventions; and to move from line to line in order to meet changing demand.

This economic behaviour in the aggregate witnesses the classic Smithian pattern of capitalist growth with rising productivity/output per person, especially in agriculture; and which in turn means the capacity to support an ever large proportion of population outside of agriculture.

This then leads to a rising real wage due to the declining cost of food, and an increase in discretionary spending leads to the growth of the domestic market.

In terms of settlement patterns there is increasing and sustained urbanisation.

Again, capitalist social-property relations generate their own specific forms of crisis: over-accumulation, over-production, a falling rate of profit, etc.

 

Transition

Transitions between the two regimes of social-property relationships (and from slavery to feudalism, or capitalism to socialism) can and of course do occur, but within the Political Marxist perspective they are usually premised on a crisis of the existing social-property relations and the historically specific and contingent outworking of class conflict, not the transhistorical or teleological outworking of abstract forces such as commercialisation, the growth of the productive forces, or demography.

 

2) Ireland on the eve of the Famine: prime-facie evidence of precapitalist social-property relations

So what is the prima facie evidence for non-capitalist or feudal social-property relations and rules for reproduction in Ireland on the eve of the Famine in the 1840s?

Quantitative evidence is offered by the incredible extent of sub-division, which had fuelled early marriage, and a high birth rate, indicating classical precapitalist peasant rules for reproduction.

The potato, which was grown widely, was used as a primary subsistence crop for the smallholder and labourer, and an entire leasing system was developed around it: the cottier or conacre system, whereby labourers were able to access a patch of land on which to grow their potato crop in return for labour on a farmer’s holding or on a landlord’s demesne. Access to fuel was also non market-dependent, as ancient turbary rights were strongly defended.

Irish smallholder agriculture was also characterised by its technological and technical backwardness that rendered landlords, interested observers, and celebrity travellers aghast. Some of these practices included ploughing with the plough attached to the tail of a horse, ancient Gaelic methods that had been long superseded by convertible husbandry in England and the beginnings of the mechanisation of agricultural labour. There was also the continued existence of ancient rights to the commons – the rundale system.

Another example of peasant non-capitalist reproductive strategies was the proliferation of “proto-industry” across Ireland in the period preceding the famine. For typical Smithian economic historians this is emblematic of a tenantry seeking to benefit from growing commercial pressures, however it makes much more sense if you look at the crude and unspecialised nature of the crafts – particularly part-time spinning and weaving, and the failure to make the transition to mechanisation in the 19^th century.

These crafts were not specialised petty commodity production but rather the by-employments of rural farmers squeezed to the maximum by demographic pressures and landlord exactions. This is demonstrated by the fact they were concentrated in the poorest parts of the country often, their scattering across the countryside rather than in specific rural industrialised regions as occurred in England (and in Ulster), and by their non-specialisation and general orientation towards the domestic market, as well as their collapse in the wake of the famine as holdings consolidated and extreme rural precarity declined.

Qualitative evidence is indicated by the extent to which contemporaries described the Irish tenantry as a peasantry, in contrast to the English yeomanry. Travellers and statistical observers – from Arthur Young to Poor Law Inspectors – were wont to describe the abject poverty of the Irish tenant in contrast to his English counterpart. In particular, it was suggested that their clothing and houses were of a particularly poor quality. And yet modern cliometrics has demonstrated that the Irish relatively healthy and physically robust in this period – precisely due to their non-market determined access to turf and the potato.

In terms of landlord rules for reproduction, the lack of investment by Irish landlords in their properties was a renowned and almost caricatured aspect of this social class.

While nationalists attributed this to absenteeism or lack of patriotic feeling, it makes perfect sense if these lords were confronted by a non-capitalist tenantry, that refused to be separated from its means of subsistence, and thus could not be rendered fully market dependent.

As non-capitalist lords, they took a rational extensive approach to increasing surpluses: through the reclamation of marginal lands or through the intensive squeezing of their tenants through ‘rack-rent’ and precarious leases.

This relationship was bound up with extra-economic conditions: involving a particular mixture of coercion and patronage. Penal laws still held many Catholics in forms of legal bondage, and debt bondage was added to that burden as rural precarity grew in the period leading up to the famine.

Rather than technical implements or improvements to the land, the Irish landlords’ preferred mode of surplus appropriation was “political accumulation”: gaining political office and building the coercive apparatus of the state, as well as conspicuous consumption. Meanwhile, what rents they did accumulate were removed to London, rather than invested in their estates.

In other words, the lords of the great arable estates in Ireland were much like the planters of the southern United States that Charlie Post has described – they were market dependent and rational profit seekers, however their process of production contained a ‘fixed’ and unmovable labour force, that could not be expelled in order to cut costs in response to declining market productions, or at least not without the cost of sustained and costly social conflict and violence.

Many Irish landlords were deeply indebted themselves – partly a reflection of these conditions – and simply didn’t have the funds to undertake large-scale clearance or combat agrarian tenant resistance, which was widespread in this period.

The macro-economic results of these non-capitalist rules for reproduction were, unsurprisingly, an extreme and continually increasing population, declining labour productivity, the classical Ricardian/Malthusian factor price movements described by Brenner, and a lack of profound urbanisation outside of the commercial hub of Dublin.

This all culminated of course in the classical demographic crisis of the Famine.

All of this means there is in my opinion extremely strong prima facie evidence for the existence of non-capitalist social property relations in pre-famine Ireland, despite the innovations of some landlords, and some tenants, under the pressure of British trends – particularly across the most populous south and west of the country.

 

Prime-facie evidence for existence of capitalism on eve of famine

However, there is also extensive prima facie evidence that a transition to capitalism had occurred in two specific regions in Ireland prior to famine: in industrialising Ulster – which had become the linen producing capital of the world I would argue that this indicates the majority of producers in the North had been rendered market dependent, indicated by the adoption of capitalist rules for reproduction by rural households particularly weaving households.

The other exception is the cattle-raising region of Leinster and east Munster where large grazier farmers and ranchers formed a distinct and prosperous yeomanry situation. Again, this was reflected in capitalist rules for reproduction: with impartible inheritance being practised by these large livestock farmers.

 

Contradictions

It’s my belief that these two sets of social-property relations in the Irish countryside prior to the Famine existed in dynamic tension – as indicated by the increase in evictions, the sustained pattern of agrarian violence carried out by tenant secret societies; and the gradual pushing of the smallholders onto worse and worse land with the westwards expansion of cattle-raising.

 

4) Divergent evolutions from 16^th and 17^th century colonisation

So how does a Political Marxist approach attempt to tackle this evidence of uneven development, without falling back into various teleologies or transhistorical extra-human motive forces?

I believe that the answer lies in investigating the specific social-property relations established in the 17^th century when the last of the precapitalist Gaelic system was destroyed by the English state.

I believe that across much of the west and south of the island that remained non-capitalist in character in the mid 19^th century, peasant political organisation and relative lack of lordly resources in the 16^th and 17^th century colonisation process allowed the vast majority of the peasantry to remain on the land in their traditional ways.

The conversion to “commercialised” agriculture allowed the flourishing of a money economy and private property, but it could not separate the producers from their means of production so long as they remained politically organised enough to resist landlord encroachments. The tenants were also at a land/labour advantage given the demographic crisis that occurred in the wake of the Cromwellian invasion through war and plague.

Particularly given its relative isolation, as well as the extent of lands maintained by Catholic landholders in this region, I think this adequately explains subsequent evolutions in a feudal pattern across much of the south and west of Ireland.

In the grazier lands of the midlands, east Connacht, and east Munster however, I believe that a relative transition was carried out in the wake of the Cromwellian settlement through the extinction of the previous landholders, and the cooperation between landlords, middlemen, and a tenantry holding competitive leases and producing live cattle for a booming English and European market.

Here tenants managed the vast cattle herds of the great estates in compact enclosed farms, leading to the specific rural class structure of the midlands by the mid 19^th century. However through the cottier system – where labour was exchanged for a potato wage – it kept a large proportion of landless producers on the land, thus retarding social differentiation or the growth of a domestic market for farm implements.

In Ulster on the other hand, a number of processes lead to the growth of a capitalist linen export industry and the growth of petty commodity agriculture servicing this growing class of textile workers off the land.

Firstly, the relative equality of Protestant tenants and lords ruled out direct extra-economic rents.

Secondly, the ‘Ulster Custom’ allowed for the development of a competitive market in land, and security of tenure.

Third, I think specifically in the industrial core of the Lagan Valley tenant farmer-weavers – and their Catholic competitors – were rendered market dependent in the early 18^th century when leases were adjusted from the previous “customary” sub-economic rents dating from the initial plantation to economic rents reflecting the market value of land.

As weavers continued to sub-divide their holdings, i.e. trying to reproduce themselves in non-capitalist ways, they were rendered more and more market dependent as their holdings shrunk below subsistence, and thus could serve as a source of commoditised labour power for market dependent linen merchants and bleachers.

Fifth, the Protestant farmland core of Derry, south Antrim, and North Down developed a specialisation in grains as the breadbasket for this industrialising region, and a similar pattern of competitive leaseholding set off a Smithian process of growth.

 

6) Post-famine conclusion

To conclude, what were the implications of the Famine for social-property relations in Ireland?

The Famine and its demographic catastrophe and the consolidation of holdings it triggered is often conceived as the conventional epoch for a ‘transition’ to capitalism for Ireland – Marx certainly thought so as outlined in Capital Volume 1.

However – drawing on Ellen Hazelkorn’s essays on Marx’s writings on Ireland in Capital – I believe that this is a mistake.

In particular, Marx made a number of avoidable empirical errors – for example choosing for his survey of consolidated holdings and declining smallholders a period of deep depression in the Irish agrarian economy – as well as unavoidable ones: for example he could not have foreseen the Land War and the eventual move towards peasant proprietorship in Ireland.

Instead to the extinction of the smallholder and the move towards ever larger and more consolidated enclosed farms on the English model, the post-Famine period in Ireland its own specific dynamics of class struggle in fact consolidated a non-market dependent smallholding class on the land across the west and south of Ireland, which proved almost impossible to remove by peaceful means, right into the 20^th century.

In the absence of systematic land reform, capitalist growth outside of the grazier holdings could not be instantiated – and this was the primary cause of Irish underdevelopment over this period, not to the caricatured impact of “neo-colonialism” or continued economic domination by perfidious Albion.

Interview with John O’Neill from Treason Felony

 

The following is an interview I conducted recently with John O’Neill, the author behind the excellent Treason Felony blog which covers the history of the Belfast IRA in its ‘lean years’ from the end of the War of Independence (1921) to the eruption of the Troubles in the summer of 1969.

John’s original research has uncovered a number of fascinating insights into overlooked topics in republican history including 19^th century Fenianism in North Belfast; James Connolly’s time with the British Army in Ireland; the role of Belfast IRA volunteers in 1916 and on the pro-Treaty side the Civil War; and the connections between the Belfast IRA and the Communist Party in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

From a historiographical perspective, John’s fastidious and unbiased attention to the sources also illuminates the Belfast IRA’s complex political evolution over this period, running counter to certain simplistic myths about the genesis of the Provisional IRA (a topic covered in-depth in the interview) and the onset of the Troubles in the late 1960s.

Beyond the scholarly appeal the blog is a treasure trove of fascinating anecdotes including tales of arms raids, gun battles, and daring jailbreaks, cultural arcana like the Belfast IRA’s representation in the Hollywood film The Odd Man Out, and surprising historical details like the existence of a 1940s Belfast IRA unit made up almost exclusively of Protestants (one of whom went on to be a professional golfer).

So for anyone with a familial connection to, or general political interest in Belfast republicanism, John’s blog is a must-read both for its educational insights and entertainment value.

 

Can you tell me a little bit about your personal and academic background and what inspired you to begin the research featured on Treason Felony?

I’m from the Antrim Road in North Belfast originally and currently I live in Wexford where I’m head of the life-long learning programme at IT Tallaght.

The inspiration for the blog came about due to my own family history: one of my great-uncles was Jimmy Steele[1], and several other relatives of the same generation were also republican activists. In recent years as some of those people have passed away I became worried that their history was being lost as so little of it has been recorded.

My idea originally was to write a biography of Jimmy, but I quickly realised that there is no workable history of the Belfast IRA for the relevant period (from 1920 to 1970), and thus the blog expanded naturally to tease out this wider story.

In terms of my academic background, I’m an archaeologist, which lent itself surprisingly well to this project as the Belfast IRA is what might be termed an ‘ahistorical formation’, in that you are dealing with a clandestine organisation with minimal official record keeping.

Often in archaeology you are working blind, and building a chronology bit-by-bit through the use of sources is part of that process. Tackling the shadowy records like court and police reports that make up republican documentation is a bit like that.

What do you think differentiates your research from some of the previous histories of the Belfast IRA?

Previous contributions[2] had more of a pure emphasis on oral history whereas I tried a data-focused approach, using digital resources like newspaper archives, mining through them and other secondary sources to create a bigger picture.

I feel that you need to that full chronology of events, and not just the dramatic stuff that got stuck in peoples’ heads and became significant in retrospect for various reasons – often maybe because of who was involved or whatever connotations that it took on in terms of later political divisions.

For example, people will say, “oh, nothing happened in Belfast in the 1950s” – and then you go and look at the actual record of events and there were bombs going off regularly in Belfast, there were shootings.

Belfast has never really been completely peaceful; in that whole period from the ‘20s through until the start of the Troubles, there is always a low level of activity occurring and practically every year some type of incidents took place.

Have you had much feedback from the people you cover on the blog, or their families?

I’m lucky to have had loads of help with the project from Belfast republican families and some of the elderly volunteers who are still about: I’ve been provided with recollections, documents, old newspapers or memorials kept in the back of the cupboards.

All of this contributes to pulling together a picture.

Are you still aiming to publish a book based on your research?

My goal is to eventually publish a book: I’ve thrown it out to a few publishers but I’ve not had one bite yet. That’s the next milestone I’m aiming for.

Your blog is filled with a number of fascinating stories and anecdotes with a real cinematic quality to them. One of the stories that stood out to me was the shooting of Dan Turley as a supposed informer in 1936, which has a sort of cloak-and-dagger intrigue to it. Can you talk a bit about that incident?

Well this story really is like a screenplay, or maybe a Le Carré novel. A brief summary is that Turley is a veteran Belfast IRA volunteer, stretching back to the IRB era and the War of Independence. He is then head of the Belfast IRA in the ‘20s before stepping down or being removed from that position following growing tensions between a leftwards moving Dublin GHQ staff and the core of the Belfast IRA.

So you have this ideological clash that runs all the way through the period and culminates in Turley’s eventual court martial in 1933, where he’s clearly targeted by this group around GHQ, which mainly includes people who leave with Republican Congress in 1934.

At his court-martial he is tortured, accused of being an informer and dismissed from the IRA. He is then sent into exile but returns to Belfast within months. Initially, he isn’t touched but then at the end of that period – in 1936 – he is shot dead in December of that year, possibly in an unsanctioned killing.

It’s my belief, and this is corroborated by letters he wrote after his court martial, that Turley was investigating an informer within the Belfast IRA following a number of arms finds. By implication, it’s possible that the RUC was aware of how close he was to their informer, and acted to manipulate events in order to take Turley out.

Further evidence for this theory is provided by Tarlach Ó hUid[3], who in his memoirs recalls that while being interned in the 1940s, during interrogation the RUC told him that Turley was shot even though he was innocent, and that Joe Hanna – another volunteer executed ‘in-house’ in this period – was indeed a genuine informer.

Of course these sorts of mind games are sometimes used against people in interrogation, but a further wrinkle is that the Turley family say that senior people involved at the time told them privately that they didn’t believe that Dan was an informer.

It’s ironic because people think republicans are obsessed with commemoration but the movement is continually slack in recording its own history properly. For example on the IRA memorial in Milltown there are several republican volunteers killed in ‘20-22 who aren’t recorded on it, including several people who die after prison, from TB or ill health.

Turley is another example that falls into that grey category, and if the republican movement were as obsessive or OCD about its history then you think someone would address or correct it.

Why did those tensions arise between the Belfast IRA and Dublin GHQ in the late ‘20s? Was it a product of politics or personality, or both?

Well there’s an interesting undercurrent in that a lot of the figures in Dublin with northern connections – George Gilmore, Geoffrey Coulter, George Plant – are from Protestant backgrounds and thus in my opinion don’t understand the dynamics of the labour movement in the North.

In particular, they can’t grasp the tensions between the artisan trade unions in the heavily unionised craft trades, that weren’t really open to Catholics, and the unskilled labourers that were mostly Catholic but who weren’t unionised.

There seems to be a failure to appreciate what’s going on there, and they can’t understand why the Belfast IRA doesn’t do things a particular way, and vice versa.

Mick Price, who is one of the figures who leads the breakaway to the Republican Congress (and later joins the Irish Labour Party), actually presides over the court martial of Turley, and was also central to the dispute in the mid ‘20s.

So there’s a history to it and I wonder if you trace it back are you looking at these divergent ideological strands, one emerging from the IRB and the other the ICA.

On the other hand are the tensions between left republicanism and a supposed ‘Defenderist’ tradition in the Belfast IRA – in both the ‘30s and ‘60s – sometimes exaggerated by historians?

Historians of the IRA for whatever reason often overplay the left versus right and secular versus Catholic angle.

For example, prisoners were regularly excommunicated from the Catholic Church but that doesn’t seem to have driven many away. On the other hand, Billy McMillen for example– who leads the Officials in Belfast after the split – was apparently a quite religious man.

As far as I can tell most of the Belfast IRA were conventional Catholics, fairly representative of the community they came from; they weren’t uber-Catholics, although it’s easy and convenient to portray them as such in retrospect.

The worst offender in this regard in my opinion is Peadar O’Donnell, who seems to be beyond reproach among modern republicans but whose analysis of the 1930s and the Troubles period contains serious flaws.

For example, take the famous anecdote about the James Connolly Republican Club from the Shankill coming to Bodenstown in 1934, where they bring their banners into the inner field (where banners are banned) and have them taken off them by the stewards from Tipperary.

This is conventionally portrayed as some sort of sectarian or conservative reaction but O’Donnell and Gilmore, who organised the demonstration, were well aware of the format that Bodenstown takes. And the same day conveniently they have a quite lengthy press statement to give to the Irish Press, which is printed the next day that is about the whole incident.

In retrospect when you go through the timeline, it seems entirely contrived, how could they not have informed them that this would happen, and instead allow it to transpire it as it does?

Of course if you criticise Peadar O’Donnell you are going to get looked at like you have two heads, even though examples like this feed into his persistent and simplistic line of the Belfast IRA as a bunch of uber-Catholics.

Another example of how retrospective narratives are shaped is that a left wing dynamic did in fact exist among Belfast republicans in the 1930s and ’40s – for example with the ‘Republican Club’ which is created at the time, that involves Betty Sinclair among others, and unites republicans and official communists at the time on a loose ‘anti-imperialist’ basis.

Now, this group eventually fell apart with the German invasion of Russia and the official communist movement internationally swinging behind the Allied war effort, but it is an example of one of the political initiatives undertaken by the Belfast IRA in the period.

In fact Charle McGlade[4], a figure who is often viewed as a revanchist right-winger in the histories, is among those involved in setting the initiative up and it’s documented quite well in sources like the Communist newspaper ‘The Red Hand’ at the time.

Several of those involved in this group are even imprisoned for their activity, and as literate figures go on to write memoirs and such. However a lot of these individuals, when they wrote about their own political histories, leave this period out.

As you go into the data blind and just tackle the sources as they exist rather than relying purely on recollection, you begin to find all these little bits and pieces and you wonder, ‘why did they omit this?’ In other words, what seems like quite a significant episode is glossed over.

Following that, the Belfast IRA is largely run down as a military organisation in the ‘50s and ‘60s: it puts its efforts into election campaigns, producing various newspapers, and across the North there are Sinn Fein representatives elected – and all of this is then forgotten by figures like Peadar O’Donnell.

Jimmy Steele for example was intimately involved in the organisation of the Republican Clubs and, although he’s kicked out in July of 1969 over the Mullingar speech[5], had been involved (even on a symbolic basis) on the political side.

Simply put, politics wasn’t alien to the Belfast IRA before the ’69 split.

In that context, what was the Belfast IRA’s engagement like with the Border Campaign?

In ‘56 and ’57, before Operation Harvest, all the Belfast IRA arms were dumped and stored near the border, and I think that’s part of this broader politicisation that you get in Belfast that you don’t get in other areas.

In fact, Belfast almost defaults from the border campaign, and when you speak to some of the people who were around at the time, they huffed about the border campaign and were extremely critical of its strategic goals in the way it was described to them.

I asked Billy McKee directly about the strategic thinking behind the Border Campaign, thinking that I would get some insight into the Belfast perspective on the Goulding/Cronin plan hatched by the Army Council, and he basically replied, “Anyone can write something on a bit of paper and call it a plan”.

So, most of the people who are swooped up and interned in Crumlin Road at the beginning of the campaign in Belfast didn’t even believe it should take place. They are going crazy for three or four years while locked down, interned over a campaign they didn’t support (although of course you have people being interned in the South in the same period as well).

They are cursing GHQ, and people like Jimmy Drumm[6] by this point have spent the guts of ten years interned through the ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s, without ever being sentenced. You can imagine how disenchanted many of them are with the Dublin leadership by the late ‘60s.

And since a lot of these figures were around in the ‘40s and ‘50s, later on in the ‘70s with the Officials and Goulding pushing a narrative of ‘politicising’ the republican movement, they’re a bit like hipsters, upset and saying, “Hey, we were trying that from the ‘40s”.

That’s a flippant way of putting it, but those feeling of cynicism were very real.

To me it’s just ironic how much of the narrative gets flipped: Dessie O’Hagan[7] and McMillen for example had actually left the Belfast IRA because it wasn’t militant enough in the ‘50s, while Joe McCann[8] leads a breakaway group called the ‘Irish Freedom Fighters’ in 1965/66. All of these people then end up on the Officials side, whereas the Provisionals are the ones usually portrayed as the militarists.

How how does your research colour your perception of the 1969 split?

This is another topic I spoke to Billy McKee about, and he told me that while the split in retrospect is portrayed as being very dramatic, it wasn’t perceived that way at the time.

Let’s look at the chronology: Billy McMillen and a lot of the Belfast IRA staff were arrested before the infamous Bombay Street pogrom took place in August 1969, and are then held under internment for a month under the Special Powers Act, so they’re on this detention order until late September.

In the Officials-dominated narrative this period is portrayed as one in which a Provo rump – that had been waiting in the wings to stage a hostile takeover – emerges. However, when you look at it, in fact they don’t bother to stage a takeover.

Instead, there are meetings and efforts to locate arms – arms that had been dumped in the mid-sixties. So people like Jimmy Drumm, Joe Cahill[9] and Liam Burke get together and send off search parties to find people they know in different counties and provinces to relocate and get as many weapons as possible to Belfast.

Meanwhile, the ones that stay in Belfast go around and reorganise each area. Thus far, there’s no concept of there being a split.

There’s then finally a battalion staff meeting when the internees are released in September, and, according to McKee, they went there with “proposals, not armed to shoot anybody”.

In McKee’s telling, despite some initial tensions, various proposals were agreed to; including that there would be a break from Dublin. However, apparently the next day McMillen made contact with Dublin and Goulding, and that’s when the relationships within the Belfast IRA start breaking down.

And all this happens slowly, not as a single dramatic event. In fact, some of the remaining volunteers from that period will tell you that they didn’t envision the split as a terminal thing, or that it was even overly problematic.

There was maybe a belief, perhaps naïve, that you could have a defensive and an offensive organisation, drawing on the experience of the Zionist armed organisations in the Palestinian mandate, which was a big inspiration for Irish republicans at the time (although of course sympathies have now flipped completely).

And in fact the Catholic Ex-Servicemen’s Association[10], which I’ve written about on my blog, does fill this defensive gap eventually, if a little bit later on.

So this understanding, of a Gotterdammerung of the republican movement, where it all splits really rapidly – in fact there’s not even violence in the split until 1971. And again I would bet a lot of this is personality driven – particularly if it happens in the Lower Falls or Leeson Street. So I’m still unsure if there is a true understanding or honest history of the split that is properly nuanced.

Have you looked at any of micro-history of the gun battles that take place in August 1969 and the efforts of both sides of the split to justify their roles in those retrospectively? I ask just because this topic has begun to be re-litigated in recent years, with the publication of ‘The Lost Revolution’, which is a sort of sympathetic history of the Official IRA.

To be fair, I haven’t gone into detail on the subject in terms of the specifics of who defended what areas in August ‘69. Ultimately, it’s a very complicated subject and I’m sure both groups did defend areas, and possibly there were opportunistic decisions made too, for example not to defend an area if you thought the other group might take the blame for that.

Eventually I think we will move towards an integrated understanding of what both sides of the IRA, along with the Catholic Ex-Servicemen’s Association, did or didn’t do to defend Catholic neighbourhoods in that period.

Ultimately, despite the hegemonic narratives put forward by individual groups, they’re all expressions of a wider self-defence impulse.

Incidentally, to tie things together, I believe that Dan Turley’s son was among a handful of IRA volunteers who defended the Falls on August 15th 1969, while neighbouring Broadway was being defended by Jimmy Steele and Joe Cullen, who were both in their sixties at the time and had been involved in the 1920s!

So I think anecdotes like that illustrate that to understand 1969 and the beginning of the Troubles you have to really understand the lived experience of those involved all the way through the earlier period.

Do you think your work challenges any of the mainstream historical perspectives on the role of the IRA genesis of the Troubles, particularly some of the simplistic narratives of a terrorist group emerging from the shadows to wreak havoc on a peaceful Ulster?

In terms of the typical media narratives, Kitson[11] arrives early on in the conflict with his handbook on guerrilla warfare and from that point on information policy is definitely grabbed by the neck.

Ciarán MacAirt writes about this in his book[12] on the McGurk’s bar bombing, how the British Government understood very quickly that as part of their security policy they had to control the media narrative, because they were aware they had failed to do that so far with regards to the Civil Rights movement.

That certainly conditioned a lot of writing about the conflict in that period, which in my opinion conforms to the parameters set out by security force information policy from 1970 onwards. All the way through, people like Martin Dillon and Chris Ryder or whoever, they never really stray outside these broad cartoonish caricatures that are painted out for them in an army press office somewhere in 1970.

On the other hand, immediately after the split Republican News gets restarted, so all sides are aware there is both a media war as well as a physical conflict.

On the blog you have a number of posts about the 1920-22 period, which saw a wave of vicious pogroms launched against Belfast Catholics, during the backdrop of the War of Independence and Civil War. How do you think that period will or should be commemorated as we approach its centenary?

Well, one example of horrific sectarian violence from this period that I address on the blog is the Weaver Street bombing. Weaver Street was an isolated Catholic enclave in North Belfast, a little cluster of 3 or 4 streets around North Queen Street that no longer exists following extensive redevelopment.

It was attacked when an assailant threw a bomb in the middle of a bunch of Catholic children who had been encouraged to “play on their own” (i.e. apart from Protestant children) by a Special Constable just before the attack. At least a dozen are killed or injured. There’s then no proper investigation carried out and witness statements are ignored.

So you can trace a line back, if you look at the work of Anne Cadwallader[13] or Ciarán MacAirt, who are looking at events in the ‘70s – you can clearly see all the same elements of the familiar story in terms of implied collusion and cover-up.

Now, typically there is a narrative on this that the pogroms against Catholics in Belfast were intended as punishment for the actions of the rest of the country, but I kind of think that is a reversal of the chain of causation.

In fact it’s Loyalism that actually takes the lead in gunrunning throughout this period and I believe what happens in the early ‘20s is that they make a demonstration of how unruleable they intend to be in an independent Ireland.

The violence against Belfast Catholics by Loyalists is thus a case of ‘disencourager les autres’, in the sense of asking the South: “do you really want us on your books, with the level of mindless violence we’re capable of?”

And I think that it’s a lesson that was partly internalised in Dublin, and they were okay with Catholics being killed in Belfast so long as they weren’t being killed in Dublin.

So, while there is a caricature of ‘betrayal’ and the like, there is also a true element to that – which is often mentioned in the oral histories, a feeling of betrayal which heavily infused the cynicism of Belfast Catholics thereon towards the Free State and political movements in the South.

Interestingly, that period is going to be very difficult for the Southern establishment to get to grips with, considering they struggle with 1916 which is conventional warfare with uniforms, and you’re in battalions, and you hold territory, etcetera.

That idea of hit-and-run clandestine warfare where you shoot people in their beds, they’re going to struggle with that. Though that could be beneficial in that they might actually be forced to confront some of the convenient fictions they have tried to embrace over the last couple of decades.

Do you think your research has any relevance to the on-going ‘dissident’ republican armed campaigns in the North?

Well this sounds trite but unless you understand the past you will be doomed to repeat it.

If you look at what dissidents come out and say about republicanism and violence, it shows a deep lack of appreciation of the rhythms and pulses and how IRA campaigns occurred in a certain contexts, and how there are very low levels of violence in between.

It’s not this idea that you just carry out attacks on an on-going basis with no clear strategic or tactical background to it. So there’s an audience there that probably needs to hear those sorts of things.

Is there a broader social value to be learned from the history of Belfast republicanism in the period you cover?

The broader value I think should be self-explanatory, in terms of conflict resolution and everything else. If you want to understand what happened in the recent conflict surely you would want to have a good idea of where the Belfast IRA are coming from in 1970, which currently doesn’t really exist. It’s not being written by those involved obviously, because ‘silence is golden’.

If you’re looking at it from the point-of-view of victims, one of the things that is robbed – and this is a deliberate element of information policy – is that it takes events out of context as part of a policy of criminalisation. So this sort of history is an avenue to help victims at least understand where their loss occurred within that, and that’s on all sides.

I also think in terms of the republican movement it restores a lot context that has been lost. If this history isn’t recorded then you don’t understand the personalities and particular decisions that drive events and influence various outcomes.

For example, as I’ve outlined, if you want to understand the split in 1969, then you have to understand the personalities involved, because there is a long history to it and not just these macro-scale political tensions. Otherwise you don’t get that feeling of them being together and falling out at events in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and how all these little incidents colour things that happened later on.

The sad thing is we have really lost a lot, as the people involved have nearly all passed on.

I also think in a more general sense this history can infuses the people who live in republican neighbourhoods of Belfast today with a sense of meaning of who and where they are. Particularly in North Belfast there’s a belief that republicanism is a minority, ghettoised, phenomena of the inner city. But the people who now live on the Antrim Road, Glengormley – all the way out to Crumlin today – have all spread out of those really densely populated inner city neighbourhoods: from the Docks, North Queen Street, the ‘Bone, Ardoyne, Newington, and it’s their grandchildren that now live across most of North Belfast.

This sort of history is giving them back a sense of their own place in the city that isn’t necessarily there in the street names, and statuary, and public monuments.

Benedict Anderson describes the nation as an imagined community and there’s a sense in which Belfast republicanism (and the GAA) creates its own imagined architecture in Belfast. So, there isn’t a statue of him but the name Joe McKelvey[14] was commemorated through GAA clubs, and you have that today still with the GAA clubs like Pearses, Rossa, etcetera.

This is the way a ‘subaltern’ people graft their own landscape onto the city that can co-exist with the physical one that Unionism creates, and this is what you flesh out with the history, who were these people that pioneered these efforts. I see my research as a putting to rest of some of that, a history that hasn’t been properly written because it’s not the official story of the city.

Maybe there’s a balancing act here though, because there’s very little done on the equivalent side for Loyalism. If you look at 1920-22 for example, there has been several scholarly books written about the IRA in that period, but there’s nothing on Loyalism, which also conducts a bombing campaign in this period as well as throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s.

Nobody has studied that really, in order to give a sense of who those people were, by pulling this information that’s out there together. So in some sense I’m only really chipping away at a single huge task from one side, there’s a need for further work from ‘the other side’, so to speak.

 

Notes:

[1] Jimmy Steele (1907-70). Senior Belfast IRA member and republican activist from 1920-1970. Sided with the Provisionals in the 1969 split, died the following year in 1970.

 

[2] E.G. Ray Quinn, A Rebel Voice: A History of Belfast Republicanism 1925-1972 (1999).

 

[3] Tarlach Ó hUid (1917-90). Republican activist and Gaeilgeoir, born in London to a Protestant family, converted to Catholicism in 1937. Interned in Belfast from 1940-45, the author of two Irish-language autobiographies.

 

[4] Charle McGlade (1909-82). Belfast IRA volunteer and republican activist. Shot by the Gardaí in Dublin in 1941 and interned until the end of WW2. Sided with the Provisionals in the split.

[5] Controversial speech delivered by Jimmy Steele at a graveside commemoration in Ballyglass Cemetery in Mullingar in 1969, widely viewed as a pivotal moment in the eruption of the political and strategic tensions within the IRA that would lead to the split the following month.

[6] Jimmy Drumm (1920-2001). Veteran Belfast republican who joined the IRA in the 1930s. At one point “the most jailed republican in the six counties”, following periods of imprisonment/internment in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘70s. Sided with the Provisionals in the split, his wife Máire was Sinn Féin Vice-President when was assassinated by the UVF in 1976.

[7] Des O’Hagan (1934-2015) prominent republican activist that sided with the Officials in the split. Interned in ‘50s and in 1971, author of “Letter from Long Kesh”, an account of the abuses against those interned in ‘71.

[8] Joe McCann (1947-1972). Official IRA volunteer, involved in several gun battles with British troops at the beginning of the Troubles. Killed after being shot in the back by Paratroopers in April 1972. A Historical Enquiries Team investigation concluded in 2013 ruled that his killing was “unjustified”.

[9] Joe Cahill (1920-2004). Prominent Belfast IRA member and leading figure in the Provisionals following the split. Played key role in peace talks and the eventual permanent republican ceasefire.

 

[10] Catholic Ex-Servicemen’s Association (CEA). An organisation set up in 1971 following the introduction of Internment with the stated aim of ‘protecting’ Catholic areas. Its founding member was Phil Curran who, in common with other members, had previous military training. The CEA was paramilitary in nature but unarmed, and at its most active in 1972 it was claimed that the membership was 8,000.

 

[11] Frank Kitson (b.1926). Senior British Army Officer in Northern Ireland during the early Troubles. Developed controversial tactics of counter-insurgent warfare, criticised at the time and retrospectively as deepening tensions between Catholics and the British Army.

 

[12] The McGurk’s Bar Bombing (2012).

 

[13] Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland (2013).

 

[14] Joe McKelvey (1898-1922). IRA officer and commander of the Belfast Brigade during the War of Independence. Among the Anti-Treaty republicans captured by Free State forces following the shelling of the Four Courts in 1922. Executed in December of that year.

When you take too much

“The world began fragmenting on him. It began coming totally to pieces, breaking up into component parts, and he wasn’t even back in the twentieth century yet, he was trapped – where? – Paris in 1786? … The whole world coming to pieces molecule by molecule now and swimming like grease bubbles in a cup of coffee, disappearing into the intergalactic ooze and gasses all around – including his own body. He lost his skin, his skeleton, is pulmonary veins – sneaking out into the ooze like eels, they are, reeking phosphorus, his neural ganglia – unraveling like hot worms and wiggling down the galactic drain, his whole substance dissolving into gaseous nothingness until finally he was down to one cell. One human cell, his; that was all that was left of the entire known world, and if he lost control of that one cell, there would be nothing left. The whole world would be, like, over. He has to rebuild himself and the entire world from that one cell with a gigantic act of will – too overwhelming. Where does a man start? With California Route 1 so he can get out of here in his car? or will it turn out to be merely the filthy Rue Ventru with the Bastille mobs waiting? or start with the car? the differential? how do they make the bastards? or the beach? all those freaking grains of sand? the marsh grass? the tourist cabins? got to put every blue door back? or the ocean? or leave it dry? save making all those blind bathosphere black animals down there … or the sky? How far does it go? the Big Dipper? the Ursa Minor? the Delphinium? suppose it is really infinite concentric spheres of crystal making infinite gelatinous submarinal vibrations? the Dead? the Pranksters? Kesey, Kesey’s out for good, Kesey and the bathosphere brutes – but with a super-heroic effort he begins. But by the time he gets himself remade, it is too much. It is overwhelming. He makes his car. He makes the parking lot and the beginning of the road out. He’ll make the rest of it as he goes along. Freak it! Split! Leave the rest of the known world to its own devices, out in the gasses. He jumped into the car and gunned off; and smashed into a tree. A tree he hadn’t even put back yet. But the crash somehow pops the whole world back. There it is; back from the fat-bubbling ooze. The car is smashed, but he has survived. Survived!

 

SURVIVAL!

 

and he plunges into the lodge to seek out the maniac Kesey. That sombitch has prolly popped back, too.”