Left Archive: The Socialist Workers Movement: A Trotskyist Analysis – Irish Workers Group, 1992 October 10, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Left Online Document Archive, Irish Workers Group.trackback
To download the above file please use the following link: IWG SWM 1992
This is a very readable addition to the Archive from the Irish Workers Group (which later became Workers Power – for more on the IWG see here), and many thanks to Budapestkick who donated it and who has written the following overview of it.
The IWG has been examined elsewhere in the Irish Left Open History project, though it would be interesting to hear from anyone who has had contact with them. Someone who would have been active in Militant in the 80s and 90s described them as being, of the smaller Trotskyists groups who haunted the public meetings of Militant, SWP, WP etc. (the IBT and Socialist Democracy being our modern day equivalents), the best in terms of coherent arguments, generally good positions (except – in their view – on the national question) and consistency.
That they would produce a polemic like this is not surprising. The obvious tactic for a grouping as small as the IWG would be to target a larger organisation in order to win members and build a base of organisers through small numbers of recruits f, and the pamphlet mentions that they produced similar material to this directed at the WP, Militant and Labour. Of course, the fact that the IWG were a SWM split is obviously a factor, and important to bear in mind reading this.
The document includes a brief history on the origins of the far left in Ireland, which will be of interest to many here. Of particular interest is the suggestion that the Trench – Armstrong Trotskyist group were calling for a civil rights campaign in the north as early as 1944. If true, I think this predates Greaves by quite a bit.
The best section of the pamphlet by far is the dissection of the State capitalism theory and the often unusual positions it led the SWP to take, best summed up by the newspaper headline on p.46.
Elsewhere, the IWGers go into, often overwhelmingly intricate, criticisms of the SWP in relation to electoral calls, choice issues etc. The section on the SLP is quite interesting though. Is the claim that the SWM left with only 20 members an exaggeration or something close to the truth?
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
They were effectively 2 members in Ireland, one was a TCD academic who, while pleasant, wasn’t exactly going to lead a revolution. The other was a great trade union activist who was one of the best activists on far left in Dublin at the time, involved in broadly based campaigns on pro choice, anti racism etc. She was non sectarian, to the degree she married an anarchist (in Las Vegas!)
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Thanks dotski, that’s very helpful. What date would this have been, early 90s?
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While I agree with the assessment of the “trade union activist” (now a valued friend of mine) Dotski’s information on the membership of the IWG applies, if at all, to the very latter days of the IWG.
That the SWM left the SLP with only 20 members is BOTH an exaggeration and something close to the truth. Even if it underestimates the size of the SWM coming out of the SLP by half (and I’m not claiming it does) a figure of 40 – anyway active – members would reflect the size of the SWM, and of the entire far left, at the time. It is true that in the immediate aftermath of the SLP the SWM was at a low ebb; without a single active woman member in Dublin for a while, for instance. This period after the SLP was one of transition from the ‘old SWM’ to the organisation (later renamed) as it is, more or less, today.
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Yes, this was early 90s, I think around time that pamphlet was being flogged, knew them mainly through DAIC
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I remember three original members. One writes still for the mother group in Britain, Workers Power.I regarded them as the most sectarian group to appear in the Irish trotskyist milieu. They were the worst in the SLP.I don’t mind people fighting their ideoligical corner but in a constructive manner.People will note my concerns about the evolution of the ULA.
The Armstrong groups documents are mainly on
http://www.workersrepublic.org/
So people can judge for themselves.
Ciaran crossey with assistence form me wrote a history of the first Irish Trotskyist group in the journal Revolutionary History.Besdies Armstrong ir included Matt Merrigan and Paddy Trench
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Something I’ve wondered: was Paddy Trench related to
Brian Trench?
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Yes. Paddy Trench was Brian Trench’s uncle.
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He was an uncle. But he died of TB either before or soon after Brians birth, so no political connection as such.Paddy was a friend of the Sheehy-Skeffingtons.
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Actually, Jim, as I understand it, the last three members of the IWG were expelled from Workers Power along with the people in England who became Permanent Revolution. So if they are still active, it’s likely as an offshoot of Permanent Revolution rather than Workers Power.
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Thanks for that, PMB.
As the document points out, the IWG did a pamphlet on James Connolly
which recieved much acclaim from mainstream media outlets such as
“Fortnight”.
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Love the hand-written notes; ‘WTF?’ etc…
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Conor McCabe has an article on the IWG here –
http://www.irishleftreview.org/2009/10/29/irish-workers-group-1976-class-struggle/
If I remember correctly the pamphlet on Connolly (there may have been more than one) was a polemic against ‘Labour in Irish History’ which they regarded as romantacising the Irish clan system.
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This is one of the more amusing pieces of Irish left wing ephemera, primarily because of its length and detail which are very unusual in polemical material on the Irish left. it’s a critique of the Socialist Workers Movement from what can only really be described as a ultra-left, doctrinaire and sectarian position, but because it’s intelligent and well informed as well as being from a relatively stable ultra left and sectarian position it does actually make a lot of telling points, particularly when it deals with the SWM/P’s propensity for political zig zags.
My favourite bit of it is probably the photography, which brings us McCann in his James Dean phase, Allen deep in his shirts under jumpers period etc. There’s something inherently funny about pictures of well known activists in their youth.
As well as quite a good polemic against the “state capitalist” theory, its tracking of the SWM’s ever-changing views on elections is particularly amusing. There can hardly be an organisation to the left of Fianna Fail which it didn’t call for a vote for and then stop calling for a vote for at some stage. All of this came before it started to implement its own slightly bewildering series of electoral tactics, which unfortunately post date the pamphlet. This pamphlet was also where I first heard about the SWM’s dalliance with the early IRSP. It’s likely that a number of leading members still have their fingers thanks only to the good sense of the rank and file.
It was also interesting to discover the origins of the SWP’s fondness for the wholly owned “front” in the British SWP’s downturn thesis.
All of that said, and despite the many mistakes and wrong calls documented by the pamphlet, despite itself it occasionally pushes the reader to sympathise more with the objects of its scorn than with the apparently omniscient IWG. It’s hard to really fault the SWM for not being terribly enamoured of the idea of having the ISG turning up to its meetings inside the Socialist Labour Party for the central purpose of haranguing them about their “crimes”. It’s also very easy to empathise with the unfortunate SWM member they seem to have excoriated about the lamentable failure of Eamon McCann to stay pointlessly in prison indefinitely for illegal picketing.
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I think that’s a very good point, that by the end, however much one might sympathise with aspects of the critique, the sheer relentlessness of it has an effect curiously at odds with its intention.
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Meant to add that for a formation with very few members one has to hand it to them for producing a relatively high quality doc and analysis.
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Having gone through the collection of their papers and magazines in the TCD library, I have to say that I found their shorter material readable and surprisingly shrewd in a wild-eyed kind of way. Their longer material tended towards the turgid however, with the exception of this pamphlet.
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Interesting. I imagine that too is a function of a small membership and limited time. What do you think?
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You may well be right. The “serious stuff” was probably written by one or two people, while the shorter articles probably had a slightly wider talent pool to draw from. Although there was probably also a conscious effort to keep things lively when it came to things like newspaper articles.
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“This is one of the more amusing pieces of Irish left wing ephemera, primarily because of its length and detail which are very unusual in polemical material on the Irish left.”
Rivalled in length and detail only by the Socialist Party’s own polemic against the SWP. Coming shortly to the Left Archive?
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Hopefully, I’ve always thought it was one of Peter Hadden’s most incisive works particularly his discussion on the national question and dissection of state capitalism.
The examination of the SWP’s appallingly sectarian and ham fisted intervention into the Montupet strike should be a must read in how NOT to do industrial work.
Peter has now been added to the Marxist Internet Archive. You can read his pamphlet ‘The Struggle for Socialism Today’ here: http://www.marx.org/history/etol/writers/hadden/1999/soctoday/index.htm
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This pamphlet was also where I first heard about the SWM’s dalliance with the early IRSP. It’s likely that a number of leading members still have their fingers thanks only to the good sense of the rank and file.
Mentioned in the lost revolution I think.
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Quite possibly, and it’s certainly been discussed here on this site on a couple of occasions. A few contributors to the comments sections were around one or other of the organisations which were considering mergers in various combinations at the time.
But the first time I saw this pamphlet, which was a few years back, I had never known that the SWM were on the verge of joining the IRSP, still less that it had been the leadership’s bright idea, voted down by the membership. My reaction at the time could be summarised with the letters W, T and F. The politics of the SWP are not these days easily confused with those of the IRSP, to put it mildly.
It’s interesting to see this (hostile) account of the SWP’s history because one of the distinguishing features of that organisation is a lack of interest in its own history. They don’t even keep an archive of their paper. So without the IWG these sort of incidents would be lost to the history of the local far left, outside of the memories of a few veterans, hardly any of whom are in today’s SWP.
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+1
And I should add your WTF in that respect mirrored my own… Perhaps the single oddest attempted turn by any Irish further left grouping in an history of odd turns by organisations many and various from OSF, BICO, etc etc…
Mind you I’m still trying to get my hands on documents from a few inside CPI M-Ls pro SFWP deviation circa 78/79… I kid you not.
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I (vaguely) remember an 1980s issue of “Red Patriot” attacking some
former CPI-ML members for “deviations” from “correct” Maoism. Maybe
that had some connection with the “few inside CPI M-Ls pro SFWP deviation” ?
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That’s it, but a later issue was more explicit about their deviation. I think somearticles in some issues if Red Patriot during the deviationsl period were the problem. I’d dearly love to read them.
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I’ve posted most of this before, but since it has come up again and some seem completely mystified by the episode:
The SWM considered the possibilities of unity with the IRSP at a point (1975?) when the IRSP had large support and far less emphasis on militarism. This proposition was not so bizarre are some are suggesting here. Though it may be a priori bizarre to those who reject out of hand the perfectly respectable and once common marxist view that the republican tradition was a genuinely revolutionary tradition. And contained within it a real element of social revolt which for historical reasons included many working class militants. This is basic Connolly stuff.
Previous to the IRSP split, and not directly related to it, the SWM had conducted a dialogue with left members of Official Sinn Féin, which itself was a much wider and radical social force at the time than anything that could be characterised as pure nationalism, ‘terrorism’ or even simple reformism.
The fusion proposition was consideration and the actual line, decided by majority at an SWM Conference, was to reject a proposal, from within the SWM, of fusion with the IRSP.
My memory is that the SWM leadership was split fairly evenly on the fusion proposition. It was a Conference vote, so not only the leadership voted. What does stand out is that on the day, unexpectedly to me, the worker members, or some of the worker members, including the leading member Ken Quinn, met at lunch time (for lunch) in the nearby Four Seasons pub. They were all strongly against fusion with the IRSP. Perhaps I had just sat with that table. I think I might have been invited. Their opposition swung it for me (my old socialist Dad had previously advised strongly against). The vote went against the proposition that afternoon.
A very interesting epilogue to this is the emergence of the Independent Socialist Party, mainly from the IRSP. This group, led by Johnny White and Bernadette McAliskey (and Tommy McCourt?), among others, was perhaps the branching-off from Republicanism that came the nearest ever to the socialism of the revolutionary marxist left.
The SWM was without any division (except maybe from the IWG faction) for fusion with the Independent Socialist Party, and prolonged talks, joint seminars (at least one) and joint Internal Bulletins (at least one) were engaged in. These came to naught.
The documentation of all this should now be in the Mike Millotte, John Goodwillie and Jim Larragy deposits (NLI, ILHA and NLI respectively I think).
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That’s a fair critique, and there may be a degree of retrospection in the thoughts we put forward above. I certainly would agree that OSF at its height was a very different sort of organisation to that which it turned into – to its own loss in some respects. I’m certainly not one who would argue the republican movement doesn’t have a left aspect and indeed a radical left aspect at that. On the other hand and perhaps it is simply from this remove, given how overt Costello was about the efficacy of armed struggle and the limitations evident even by 1974 – and this is a genuine question – did it not seem very possible that the IRSP would simply move into a sort of semi-militarist position, at best?
By the way, that SP critique of the SWM sounds interesting too… you wouldn’t happen to have a copy?
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It’s in the Marxist Internet Archive here:
http://marxists.org/history/etol/writers/hadden/1999/soctoday/index.htm
A version which also includes the introduction is in the Committee for a Workers International archival site here: http://www.marxist.net/ireland/anti-swp/index.html
I know that you have a preference for scanned print editions, however, and I do have a print copy but not a scanner. I can arrange to get you it as soon as I get around to digging up a bunch of other stuff I was going to submit for the left archive.
I also have a copy of the SWP’s “An Open Letter to Members of the Socialist Party”, a four page reply to the pamphlet which they distributed at the Socialist Party’s conference in late 1999 or early 2000. That reply was of some interest to me at the time because I had just joined the Socialist Party, having been a member of a Socialist Worker Student Society. The conference was in Athlone and two or three prominent members of the Dublin SWP came down to distribute their document at it. I remember poking a little fun at them because I’d always been led to believe that there was an Athlone branch of the SWP.
In general, that conference gave me a quite unrealistic understanding of the level of excitement to expect at political conferences. It was the first one I’d ever been to and my main memories of it include the SWP intervention (the chair of one of the sessions announced that they were outside and encouraged everyone to go and get a copy of their letter) and an ongoing rather vitriolic argument which had nothing to do with the SWP but which did involve a bunch of long standing Socialist Party members standing at the back of the hall shouting “You’re a Stalinist!” at Dermot Connolly, the then National Secretary of the Socialist Party, as he was trying to make a speech.
Anyway, Peter Hadden’s pamphlet is very good and made quite a strong impression on me at the time, but it’s also rather marooned in time. It’s an excellent critique of the SWP as they were in the 1990s, and it’s still useful on some particular political issues, but its main argument is simply out of date. When you read it today, most of it seems to be about some other organisation called the SWP which can’t possibly be related to the group of the same name you see around today. This goes back to the point I made earlier about the SWP not being very keen on documenting or archiving their own past. There’s a good reason for that – they have gone through a quite bewildering series of changes and “turns” with no explanation or even acknowledgement of the shifts and the documents of yesterday often argue exactly the opposition of their current line. A pamphlet which criticises the more revolutionary than thou stance of the SWP in the 1990s simply has no purchase on the “flexible” SWP of today.
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Excellent, that all sounds great.
On the point about exciting conferences / ars fheiseanna, true, you arrived for one, I left the WP after one. Never saw the like again. Which us probably as well.
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Strangely enough the bitterest conference I was ever at was also mostly quite well mannered. It was the split conference of the English Socialist Alliance in, I think, December 2001. That had a walkout and a split, but there was an element of almost ritual to it, because what was going to happen had largely been made clear in advance.
The British SWP, then at perhaps their biggest, had telegraphed that they were going to vote through a new constitution for the alliance and the British Socialist Party, then at probably their smallest in organisational terms, had telegraphed that they were going to leave if that happened. So there was remarkably little in the way of roaring and shouting.
The entire experience did leave me with a permanent scepticism towards the sort of views you sometimes see put forward by well meaning independent leftists who think that “left unity” has some kind of magic effect independent of the wider context and wider involvement however.
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I don’t actually believe in left unity, perhaps for the reasons you articulate, although, that said, it’s a bit like perfection, not necessarily the worst thing in the world to try to achieve as long as one recognises that not achieving it isn’t the worst thing in the world either…
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D_D:
The episode mystifies me not because the SWM had an orientation to the IRSP when the IRSP was being set up. The SWM/P for most of the period of troubles had varying and shifting degrees of left republicanism in their own politics, and within that context such an orientation is at least understandable, even if it seems strange to anyone only familiar with the more recent and much less left republican politics of the SWP.
It mystifies because as far as I can tell, it was perfectly clear that despite some very half-hearted denials the IRSM had a dual political/military strategy from very early on. Much of the rhetoric right from the start was about the “war” and “armed struggle”, and the INLA was shooting people by early 1975. It took a few more months for some within the IRSP to realise that the party was going to be a glorified support group for the armed wing, but that’s a slightly different issue. Whatever else you can say about the SWM/P’s politics, and I’ve been known to be less than polite on the subject, they never gave the outsider the slightest indication that they were looking to get directly involved with assassination, bombings, etc.
So what mystifies me is not there being an orientation, but an actual intention to join up. Did the SWM actually believe the very flimsy official denials from Costello that the IRSP had an armed wing?
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“The conference was in Athlone and two or three prominent members of the Dublin SWP came down to distribute their document at it.”
I was at that conference as well! It really was quite rowdy wasn’t it? The only conference that’s topped it was the National Shop Stewards Network conference to debate the setting up of an anti cuts body.
I remember a fantastic line from the SWP letter saying something to the effect that the SP didn’t want an electoral agreement with the SWP because Peter Hadden wanted to remain the Pope of Marxism! Knockabout stuff.
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I would say one thing though. I knew Tony Gregory fairly well and I was always unable to quite understand his dislike for the IRSP as it became which was combined with an huge admiration for Costello. It didn’t quite compute for me. Granted he only was on board for a year, but the latter dynamic would have made one think he’d stay longer.
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WbS:
I wouldn’t have thought that Gregory would necessarily have a problem with there being an armed wing, given that he’d been in the Officials where there was one already?
Neil:
Yes, there’s a surprising amount of personal stuff in their reply, which isn’t normally their style.
Peter Hadden’s alleged desire to be “the Pope of a small sect” was put forward as the Socialist Party’s base motive and he was also described as someone who “has been singularly unsuccessful at building a socialist organisation in Belfast”. And there’s another bit where he’s described as “summoning all his stern orthodoxy”, which always made me laugh because I could sort of imagine him picking up the phone and ordering some stern orthodoxy.
It also had a pop at Tom, who wrote the introduction, for being a former Spart, with the implication that his Spartacist training was a malign influence on all around him.
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Another memory from the past… In 1973 or ’74 the SWM paper ‘The Worker’ criticised Official Sinn Fein for using the slogan ‘people before profit’. Their argument – if I remember correctly – was that socialists should win support on the basis of opposing the profit system, and not give the impression it is possible to put people before profit under capitalism. How times have changed.
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What comes around… 🙂
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The SWP’s old documents and leaflets are a rich source of hostages to fortune.
There is for instance the letter they sent to the Socialist Party, reproduced in the pamphlet discussed in the comments above, which, amongst other things, criticised the SP’s approach to electoral work and announced that revolutionaries only stand in elections to make “revolutionary propaganda”.
Then there is the “Open Letter to Members of the Socialist Party”, also mentioned above which contains the following remarks, highly entertaining for anyone familiar with the SWP’s development since:
“This leads to a dual approach. The internal party sectarians are told that revolution is the goal – but the electorate are given a softer version of politics to garner votes. The costs of this ‘don’t mention revolution in front of the children’ approach are already becoming apparent.”[…] “If your focus is electoralism, you will duck the harder arguments and move to a soft focus”.
The same document pours scorn on the Socialist Party for, according to the SWP, considering forming a broad party with “independents, sections of the old Worker’s Party and others who stood to their right”.
Then there’s the “Open Letter to Socialists” issued in the name of Richard Boyd Barrett a few years later, and again targeted at the Socialist Party, which makes some considerable play of the centrality of at the least an “explicit, minimal, socialist programme” to any left wing alliance.
It really isn’t any wonder that they don’t keep archives of this stuff. Having no memory of what they were saying last week makes it easier to argue whatever is convenient this week without the irritation of having to explain why you are contradicting yourself.
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The SWP’s old documents and leaflets are a rich source of hostages to fortune.
But not just theirs, I think.
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You are right.
Pretty much every political organisation gets predictions and perspectives amusingly wrong for instance, although that isn’t really what I was talking about above. And pretty much every organisation changes its mind about what it is arguing for from time to time, and that is what I’m talking about above.
But what makes the SWP unusual (not unique) is that it very rarely says that it has changed what it is arguing for, even less often explains why it has changed what it is arguing for and, in part because it doesn’t keep any record of what it used to say, it often gives the impression that it doesn’t actually know that it has changed what it is arguing for.
When it comes to electoral tactics in Ireland, the SWP has at various times called for a vote for just about every combination of Labour, the Officials, the Provisionals, Socialist Labour, the Communist Party, “left candidates” and “socialist candidates”. At other times it has not called for a vote for just about every combination of them. It used to oppose revolutionaries standing in elections. Then it used to say that revolutionaries only stand in elections to make revolutionary propaganda. Then it started looking for alliances with other forces while insisting on a socialist programme. Then it started looking for alliances with other forces while opposing having a socialist programme. And never once, to my knowledge, has it even mentioned its previous points of view, let along explained the change.
There’s flexibility and then there’s incoherence. There is no other force on the Irish left which has espoused or abandoned that sort of bewildering range of approaches to elections. Or even close to it. Different left groups are not simply interchangeable and do have their own peculiarities. A willful lack of interest in its own past is one of the Irish SWP’s.
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Oh, and given the carefully assembled archives in the Socialist Party office, it would probably be fair to say that a slightly pedantic interest in the minutiae of our own past is one of ours.
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“Another memory from the past… In 1973 or ’74 the SWM paper ‘The Worker’ criticised Official Sinn Fein for using the slogan ‘people before profit’.”
Love it!
Don’t remember that one, but I do remember a general opposition to the use of “people”, a la the CP, rather than “workers”. I still see something in that. But terminology does change or at least bend over time.
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I’ve never liked the slogan “people before profit”, mostly because I associated it with flakey liberals in the anti-globalisation movement. I was actually surprised to see in some old OSF election literature that they were using it long before.
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@Mark P: Tom (Crean) used to get far worse abuse from the Sparts for having left them than he did from the SWP for having been in them.
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That wasn’t Tom Crean, antarctic explorer but was it, by any chance, Tom Crean now ex-SIPTU official and great singer (sings with Jimmy Kelly)? That singing Tom Crean always struck me as more of an ex-CPI type.
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No, that wouldn’t be either of those Tom Creans. Tom who founded the Spartacists in Ireland and then later was a prominent figure in the Socialist Party might well be known to a number of people here through the Labour History Society. He’s now back in America.
Michael:
Yes, I’m familiar with the Sparts nearly pathological hatred of ex-members who join other left wing groups. There have been a few former Sparts in the Irish Socialist Party over the years and they were similarly aggressive towards more than just Tom, although as their founder he held a special place in their hearts.
I mentioned the SWP having a pop at him for being an ex-Spart because that kind of personalised crap isn’t normally their style at all.
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@Mark P: Tom was accused of being in league with Loyalist death squads because of meetings we (the SP) organized with SF, PUP (I think), and our own speakers. That kind of thing goes beyond mere abuse.
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[…] is an interesting document not least because it dovetails with the Irish Workers Group analysis of the Socialist Workers Movement which was posted up last year. And like that analysis it is highly critical of the SWP. Like many […]
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