Perspectives for Theirish

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Part Two of the Perspectives document adopted at a recent National Meeting The balance of forces in Ireland now is a striking confirmation of Trotsky's 1916 analysis that "the historical basis for the national revolution has disappeared even in Ireland"

Neither the Irish bourgeoisie North or South-itself dependent on finance capital from Britain and elsewhere-nor the petty bourgeois nationalist forces are capable of initiating action that could break Ireland free from the grip of imperialism.

The national liberation struggle in Trotsky's view, had by 1916 in practice become a question of "an uprising of the workers" , and it is in this direction that Trotskyists must lead the development of a programme for struggle.

Programme for action The Transitional Programme itself, as a programme for the action of the masses is designed to prepare the way for a workers' uprising. Its demands and its approach must be applied in the context of an oppressed and divided Ireland, in order to show the link between partition and the continued super-exploitation of the workers and small farmers North and South.

Agitation both sides of the border should therefore centre on the following principle demands, which affect ever worker: * The right to a job and erspectives document ador of the Workers Sociali:

living standards.

The right to a house services.

Equal rights for all. An end to discrimination on religious grounds, repressive legislation and all church restrictions on divorce, contraception and Down with colonial exploitation. Withdraw from the EEC.

Expropriate all foreign capital, the major industries and the banks. Imperialist troops out of ireland!

Down with the bosses' government, green and orange. For a workers' and farmers' government in a united Ireland.

Agitation on these demands and propaganda for them would stress from the outset that none are achievable while the British imperialist army acts as the direct arm of British rule, propping up a decaying and bankrupt bourgeoisie in the North, while enabling British and foreign industrialists to exploit Northern Ireland as a pool of cheap labour.

In preventing the unification of the economy of Ireland, and enforcing the separation between the traditionally industrial North and the largely agricultural South, imperialism effectively ensures that both states must remain economically backward areas with permanent large pools of unemployed and 'ow paid workers.

mE:League leading role that must be played by the proletariat national struggle.

We insist at each point on the need to combine transitional demands with democratic demands in the fight against imperialism.

Such a stance would become even more crucial were the imperialists to attempt the unlikely tactic of trying to defuse the struggle through the establishment of a united capitalist Ireland.

Progressive

Such a development, for all its contradictions, would represent a historically progressive change, enabling the Catholic working class movement, which has been gagged and duped for years by petty bourgeois nationalist iflusions, to recognise that the real enemy is not simply British imperialism or foreign exploiters but also their reactionary irish hangers-on.

Workers would be forced to recognise that falling living standards, mass unemployment, dwindling or non existent social services, the oppression of women and religious minorities are the fruits not of 'foreign' capitalism but of the capitalist system itself.

MATERIAL NEEDS OBJECTIVE TASKS For the call for an workers abus : • = masses in Ireland the present border.

Key to such agitation and propaganda must be the growing unemployment in the Catholic population on both sides of the border, now combined with the increasing numbers of Protestant jobless in the North. Around the demand for the right of every worker to a job, the slogan of work sharing on full pay to protect existing jobs threatened by rationalisation must be combined with the call for a planned programme of useful public works to provide new jobs.

In arguing for these policies it is necessary continuously to show the profit extracted from Ireland by foreign investment which utilises the high unemployment as a means of ensuring low wages.

'Better off'

The argument that Protestant workers are 'better off' than Catholics must be countered at every point by taking up agitation on the chronically depressed living standards of even this 'privileged' section of workers; the imposition through military rule of the 5% pay limit; and the superior conditions enjoyed by their counterparts in Britain itself At each point the

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Pru Chamberlayne reviews Social Work Under Capitalism - A Marxist Af ›proach by Paul Corrigan an d Peter Leonard (Macmillan, 1978).