No Answer to Their Own Question
Trotskyism Today1978 1978-03-01Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 37 →
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balance sheet belongs traditional methodology. With all its limits and its partially negative character, the NIl enters the heritage of the internationalist experiences of the FMR, just as in the past did its struggle at the Tenth World Congress of the USec or other minor experiences. We have now the necessity to arm ourselves with a new orientation for international activity, which shall not to repeat the mistakes of the NIl and will allow other steps forward on the road to build a revolutionary marxist tendency for the rebuilding of the Fourth International. We must remember that the FMR does not consider itself such a tendency, but an essential element in the building of such a tendency..
International Secretariat of the FA for the Fourth International November 26 1977 of Irish workers.
ECONOMIC DEMANDS
None of this implies that econ omic demands are unimportant.
Obviously they are important for the material, day to day, survival of workers; they give workers confidence and infuse them with an elementary class consciousness.
But by themselves day to struggles will never convince working class of the need to state power. Nor will attempt socialists to "lend" these stru "a political character" (e.g. dem ing economic concessions not from the employers but from state as well) bridge the gap".
•Once it is understood that production (and not distribution) is the source of exploitation and class struggle; and once it is understood that the process of production itself is mystified by social and political relations, then it becomes clear that (a) the day to day economic exper- ience of the working class is warped and deformed by the contradictory values of the process of production.
(b) That consequently it is futile to try and build on this deformed experience so as to extend it to socialist consciousness. (c) The fight to bring a genuine socialist conscious- ness to the workers must begin not with their economic experience but by attacking the social and political forces which deform that experi ce" day the seize s by ggles and- only the No answer to thei
UNNO
que! Those that have followed of the Irish liberation struggle of the International Marxist Britain will have been struck of any real perspective to reial demands of troops out and mination' to the question c struggle and social revolution a whole. But this lack of direction is not con- fined to the British IMG. It is shared by the Irish section of the 'United' Secretariat whose paper Socialist Republic last Oct- ober carried a classic of Pabloite evasion entitled National Struggle and Class Questions" As this quote shows, the USec tinguished in every country by its to start from stimulating questions end up with the most unintelligil hopelessly confused answers !
coverage the press sroup in the lack he IMG's elf deter- the class Ireland as is dis. ability only to ile and .. So political demands are the key to pushing forward the struggle for socialism, what precisely should these demands be in Ireland?
To answer this question it is first of all necessary to note that the state in Ireland, North and South, is a neo- colonial one. That is to say the fundamental barrier to political change is British imperialism. This is not to exhonorate the Irish bour- geoisie, as the Stalinists do, but simply to say that by themselves the Irish bourgeoisie would not be polit- ically strong enough to maintain a stable state apparatus. British imper- ialism helps to maintain a reasonably stable state power in Ireland by dividing the working class (through part the ing ital ition), by denying civil rights to Catholic minority (while suppor- a privileged Protestant commun- hu relvin on the obscurantism of the churches, both Catholic Protestant, and by cajoling compelling the Northern Southern governments to mai an arsenal of repressive laws institutions. In short, it national oppression is of hrough Ireland and and and tain and the that the Irish bourgeoisie and imperialism maintain a state F that prevents the working class changing society to satisfy its rITISn ower from own needs. Thus national demanas are decisive for directing the attention of the working class towards the abolition of the capitalist state and capitalist exploitation. National demands, in other words, have e central class demand: