The British and Irish Communist Organisation, The Irish Political Review, or from here to there and back again… Part 1

I was in Connolly Books at the weekend and it is good to see it back in its original location on Essex Street. It was also good to see that there were quite a few people in it. Anyhow, while there I bought Unity, a CPI publication, which I’ll perhaps discuss at a later point, and the Irish Political Review. The latter publication is the direct lineal descendent of the British and Irish Communist Organisation newspapers including Workers’ Weekly and Northern Star, and I am indebted yet again to splinteredsunrise for bringing it to my attention. And lo, Brendan Clifford, for it is he, still writes in it.

BICO has been through so many changes that one might consider it almost akin to the Revolutionary Communist Party/Spiked fraction, except without the sharp styling…or the puckish sense of humour…or the glossy production values. But in some ideological nirvana one suspects that the two groups are at least somewhat kindred spirits, because like the RCP the IPR now peddles a line very very different to that which Mr. Clifford made his name for in the 1970s. That was a sort of undigested Maoism, that became effectively (or as we used to like to say ‘objectively’) Stalinist but with one element that had a clear effect upon Irish political life.

BICO is best known (or perhaps the term is infamous) for its development of the ‘two nations’ theory which in the unrefined version proposed that Ulster Protestants were in fact a nation and therefore had ‘national’ rights that superseded traditional claims of Irish Nationalism to the entirety of the island. There were modish additions to this, for example that partition was a logical development on the island and the interests of the working class were best served by the maintenance of the Union. Naturally as time went on this developed more bells and whistles. The working class in Ulster was the most advanced class element on the island. Any expression of belief in Irish unity was revanchist nationalism of the very worst sort. There was also a non-too subtle hint that catholicism was a big part of the problem. Needless to say PIRA was anathema.

This wasn’t un-influential since since such an analysis chimed with the thinking of others within the society. It had a superficial similarity to positions taken by Official Sinn Féin, and some of the less profound thinkers within that grouping seized upon it as a both template for their future political development and rationale for past failings. This was carried over into SFWP/WP, later DL and arguably later still merged with an already extant strain of the analysis within the Irish Labour Party. This latter strain was introduced in part by none other Conor Cruise O’Brien, who also found it made a certain sort of sense as a stick to beat Republicanism with from the 1970s onwards. Here was a means of explaining that there was effectively nothing to be done on the traditional nationalist project, that that project was essentially a lie and could never be achieved. Later parts of BICO who joined Jim Kemmy’s Democratic Socialist Party merged with the Labour Party, thereby strengthening the tendency within that party.

The attractiveness of this position was, to those who misinterpreted or misused it, that by accepting this analysis they were somehow transcending ‘nationalism’ and all its perceived flaws. Yet any serious consideration of it would note that this was an analysis rooted in nationalist thinking (well Leninist to be absolutely accurate, for yet again his theory of nationalities was taken for a canter across unfamiliar turf). Hardly much a step forward to move from reifying one nationalism to two (not to mention implicit issues which were never, and could never be addressed by the analysis, for example what was the distinction between British nationalism and Ulster nationalism, and what was the situation of those who were of the Irish Nation within Ulster, or indeed just what was this Ulster that was bandied about so liberally?). And there was a further contradiction that pointed up some of the – ahem – flaws in the analysis. BICO were steadfast in their disavowal of an independent Northern Ireland. Yet the implicit logic of their position was that an INI was the obvious outcome. What stayed their hand? Why the notion that it could lead to civil war between Catholics and Protestants within Ulster. Something here really, really didn’t add up although the weighty thinkers of at least one section of the advanced left didn’t worry too much about such things, delighted as they were to be given at least some justification for their retreat from Republicanism.

On the other hand, there was at least something to it, if only in pragmatic terms. Unionism clearly existed as a socio-political entity, whatever categorisation was ascribed to it, whether ‘national’ or otherwise. Not much point for hard headed materialists to ignore this existence or pretend that it could be wished away – as large sections of Irish Nationalism had done over the previous sixty years, since partition removed the practicalities and difficulties of direct engagement from the table.

Whether this retrospective viewpoint was really anything more than making a virtue of necessity on the part of such luminaries as O’Brien is a moot point. One certainly wonders what sort of intellectual activity led to an almost studied ignorance of another element of the problem, the equal fact that there was within the North a cohesive Irish Nationalist population as well.

And turning to my own experience for a moment this was to my mind the most obvious flaw of received ‘two-nations’ theorising within the WP in the 1980s. Simply put it made no sense to pretend that the situation wasn’t a little bit more complex than just two nations, and therefore required a little bit more than the demonisation of one group in order to feel comfortable about the existing status quo, and this from a self-described ‘revolutionary’ party.

The late John Sullivan in his excellent and entertaining “As Soon as this Pub Closes” deals with BICO in typical fashion:

Clifford’s victory [on traditional nationalism], once quotations were verified, was almost too complete. Other groups had little choice but to adopt neo-Cliffordian positions, but unwilling to serve as a pilot to the Left through the suddenly bewildering currents of Irish politics, he spurned all ecumenical offers and pressed home his attack, calculating that if Left views on Ireland were a fantasy, the same might apply to the rest of their politics. Clifford adopted the working assumption that whatever the Left said on a given issue was wrong and he applied his training by finding examples which would demonstrate truths already established by faith and doctrine. For example: if the Left favours Irish unification, opposes the Common Market and deplores racism, we should adopt the opposite view in each case. Anyone can do that: it is more difficult to argue a case, based on Marx and Lenin, supporting the Common Market, the Orange Order or Thatcher’s immigration policies. The Jesuits have lost the knack of such apologetics since they adopted liberation theology.

And he continues:

Because the conclusion to any of BICO’s arguments can always be predicted by reversing the sign on current Left orthodoxy their writings provide little sense of intellectual discovery, but even friends who do not share Clifford’s intellectual background assure us that the argument is always a pleasure to read. Clifford’s main journal is The Communist, but there are a number of offshoots and Fronts, the most unlikely of which is the Ernest Bevin Society. The logic of this is impeccable: if Bevin hammered the Left for a generation, he must be a misunderstood genius, whose thoughts should be revived. In fact, if Bevin ever had any deep political thoughts, it would take Jacques Cousteau to locate them. Some thought that Clifford would become a guru of the Labour right, but that tendency is so dominated by Nonconformity, Fabianism and pragmatism that they have found him a bit of a puzzle. The discomfort is reciprocated, as Clifford does was not like the remnants of sentimental humanitarianism they still display. The gravedigger has still not found his final political resting place.

But as we shall see over the next couple of weeks, such ideological contortions were as nothing in the long history of both BICO and those who cherry-picked its thinking… and the story of where they went next is revealing both for what it tells us about the left in Ireland, and perhaps how the left regards itself…