not so much redundant as positively reactionary. They found themselves defending Stormont - the direct instrument of sectarian privilege and repression! This was done on the grounds that a local parliament was to be the means of democratising that part of Ireland and the pursuit of issues of 'peace, justice and security'
The Officials came to grief because such difficulties crash against schematic thinking and nothing is more schematic than reformism trying to limit struggles when they have burst the limits of reforms. This meant attempting to rein in nationalist workers' anger to what would be acceptable to unionist workers who had, in their majority, rejected even civil rights for Catholics.
In general this is the opposite of the approach which Marxists take. They realise that they themselves can only reach and mobilise the vast majority of workers through the most advanced sections of the working class, not directly and simply through themselves. This is the real vanguard Marxists seek to be part of.
The problem in the North was the isolation of the most radical workers from the Protestant working class, and also from the workers in the 26 counties. itself. From this it was a natural step to looking to imperialism to sort it out. In the South the politics of reformism had very infertile ground to work in, such has been the poverty and weakness of the country. The Officials accepted the full logic of their position and in
document called "The Irish Industrial Revolution' turned 180 degrees in their attitude to imperialism.
Now imperialism had a progressive content:
What happened in the period 1958-75 was that international capitalism had created what 73 years of native capitalist rule had failed to create - a highly organised and militant industrial working class.' (IIR p. 50)
Of course imperialism did This adoption of Stalinism did not happen at once and it was only in 1973 that the Officials passed a resolution at their Ard Fheis defining Irish freedom as being like that 'presently being built in the Socialist countries.' not create a militant working class, that depends on the workers themselves and the history of imperialist development associated with the Celtic Tiger has resulted in a passive working class totally emasculated by social partnership. For the Officials however the primary role of this analysis was to remove British imperialism from the centre of concerns.
The grounds for any independent working class politics had thus been totally removed.
The southern State's constant pursuit of multinational investment had just bankruptcy as any sort of vehicle for socialism.
So why did the Officials embrace Stalinism?
The first reason is that for most radicalising workers or activists the Soviet Union, whatever shortcomings were acknowledged and generally none were, the Soviet Union represented the future, the future as socialism. To think otherwise was to exist in a much less comforting international world-view.
The second reason for the attraction of Stalinism was ideological. The Stalinist theory of stages, in which it was necessary for countries dominated by imperialism to go through a democratic stage of revolution before a later socialist stage, had particular attractions to a movement whose raison d'être was the completion of a democratic revolution.
For Irish republicans this meant reunification of the country and creation of a national democracy.
The third reason is that the undemocratic practices of republicanism, in part generated by the conspiratorial methods required by an illegal armed group, did not have to undergo any significant change as the movement adopted what it called "democratic centralism".
This adoption of Stalinism did not happen at once and it was only in 1973 that the Officials passed a resolution David Finkel Sometimes, one ordinary individual's action really does make a difference. Standing in front of the Chinese army tank at Tananmen Square in Beijing, or the Israeli monster bulldozer knocking down Palestinian homes in Rafah, Gaza. Climbing over the shipyard wall in Gdansk, Poland, or defying a small-town sheriff in the Jim Crow U.S. South to register African American voters.
Cindy Sheehan has made a difference in a way she never anticipated or wanted. Her son Casey was one of the nearly 1,900 U.S. military personnel killed (so far) in George W. Bush's Iraq war.
When Sheehan was part of a group of dead soldiers' relatives who met Bush, she was repelled by his scripted and obviously faked show of sympathy. Subsequently she sought a one-on-one meeting to ask Bush what her son had died for, and when refused she set up a one- woman encampment outside the president's crawtord, Texas vacation ranch.
Then it happened: Cindy Sheehan's vigil tapped a powerful vein of revulsion, an anger only dimly suggested in polling data showing steady declines of popular confidence in the management of the war.
As the corporate mass media have certainly done nothing to encourage a genuine national debate over Iraq, the moral revolt against Bush's lies has been mostly under the radar screen.
The organized antiwar movement has been tragically unable to channel the rage. The decision of many antiwar figures to throw their energies into the futile (and pro-war) 2004 John Kerry presidential campaign was a severe setback. So was the hardened division in the movement between two rival coalitions.
United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which seeks to align the movement with Democratic Party liberals, refuses to endorse demands that would threaten such an alliance, notably support for the struggle of the Palestinian people. International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) is known for sectarian manipulations in its attempts to secure hegemony over the "anti-imperialist" sectors of the movement.
In the recent period, more important than the infighting national coalitions have been grassroots initiatives: community and school campaigns to counter military recruitment, small speaking tours of military resisters, a tour of Iraqi trade unionists organized by U.S. Labor Against War (USLAW) to build worker-to-worker linkages.
As the national movement began to revive, the two national coalitions literally called separate, competing marches and rallies for September 24 in Washington, DC. Such a debacle would have been a crime against the people of Iraq, the USA and the world. In July and early August, a widely supported statement circulating in the movement demanding that the two coalltions combine their efforts had some impact, but not enough.
To offer a personal perspective on this: During the last two weeks of August, this author and his family were on a twoweek driving vacation to Montana in the far north-western USA, where we saw no "major metropolitan papers" and could read only the smalltown press. News on Iraq was sporadic — yet Cindy Sheehan and her supporters at "Camp Casey" seemed to be on the first or third page of every local newspaper.
Sympathy vigils have sprung up in some 1600 localities across the country, involving by some estimates 100,000 people. It is an extraordinary: spontaneous response - and the vicious personal attacks on Sheehan by pro-war forces have only strengthened people's resolve. Upon returning to Detroit, I was delighted to learn that UFPJ and ANSWER had in fact agreed upon a unified September 24 mobilization.
It seems absolutely clear that the snowball effect of Cindy Sheehan's vigil played a major role in forcing this development. The movement owes her a tremendous debt of gratitude for bringing us together.
Cindy Sheehan is no sort of organized leftist. She has refused to share a platform with those military resisters who express overt sympathy with the Iraqi resistance (another tangled issue that has affected the antiwar movement as a whole). She is the kind of figure who, when this war ends, may elect to return to her private life or perhaps emerge as an antiwar leader for the long haul.
What she has is her courage, the strength she has gained from the outpouring of support for her confrontation with George W. Bush, her organization Gold Star Mothers Tor Peace, and what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has called "her absolute moral authority."
That's an overstatement, of course: Absolute moral authority doesn't exist. But her protest has put her in the category of a Rachel Corrie, Fannie Lou Hamer or that unknown resister in Tiananmen Square - people with a moral power and authority that they never expected or sought
• David Finkel is an editor of the U.S.-based socialist journal AGAINST THE CURRENT (www.solidarity-us.org).