Contradictions in Paisley's stand

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LETTER The article in SP 61 entitled "Paisley gains from Loyalist strike" fails to explain why Paisley fared to dismally in leading the protestant workers out on strike yet did to well in leading them, a tew days ater, into the polling booths in support of essentially the same The article correctly notes that bourgeois pundits had predicted for Paisley and Baird "that the strikes demise would see their electoral rout."

This clearly did not take place, yet a bourgeois understanding of the dynamic of the struggle in Ireland is hardly rebutted by turn¡aisie! -Posing tao contradictori •rategies.

their opinions upside down.

Just because they say Paisley lost heavily in the strike it does not therefore follow in reality that he actually gained, even if this is done with retrospective wisdom, pointing to the local election results as proof of that gain.

EXPLICABLE

If we look at the class alliance that composes loyalism, the industrial failure and electoral success of Paisley becomes explicable. For Paisley, while advancing the same programme in both cases was in fact pursuing two contradictory strategies.

In the strike he clearly was challenging British imperialism and the logic of such a challenge could only lead to a declaration of an independent loyalist state cut free from Britain.

In the elections the demands for a restored Stormont, greater security and the annihilation of the IRA were also raised but this time within an electoral framework that had been set up by Britain and was indeed part of Britain.

It is by this imperial link with Britain that Protestant working class support for the loyalist union is secured. But as Paisley discovered to his cost in the abortive loyalist strike, it is a very conditional support.

RUIN The shop keepers, and all Paisley's petty-bourgeois on the other hand, have b in driven to rum by the war ind the Thair darnair i 77-H a declaration of UDI appears increasingly to them as the only way out of the present impasse.

The leadership of the Protestant working class however, grasp the British link in the present crisis the more firmly, the more slippery it becomes.

In much the same way the English bureaucrats demand of their working class that they "save" themselves from the crisis by grasping the life line of the Social Contract.

Contrary to the notions of those so-called radicals on the left who begin with the ideas of the working class rather than the reality of their material conditions, the Protestant working class by their refusal to be led by Paisley reveal that they are far from fascist.

SUICIDAL

They are prepared to defend as they see it, their interests as a class. Their idea of defence, however, is the suicidal one of rejecting the only real defence of their material conditions-an Ireland in which the working class both owns and rules.

But their willingness to fight creates the most futile conditions for a revolutionary intervention that leads them to that conclusion.

J.Q. Liverpool.

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