The failure of their 1 caly 19605 forced the
early 1960s forced the Republican Movement to rethink its entire political basis. They thought that socialism may provide the answers they were looking for. However the Stalinism that they adopted was their undoing.
The fifties and sixties saw a wave of decolonisation and some long and extremely bitter anti-colonial struggles, such as Algeria and Vietnam. All these forces found parallel development in Ireland with the growth of the working class in the South and conscious attempts to emulate international developments in the North. In the South the number of strikes and lock-outs rose dramatically between 1960 and 1970. In the North a range of groups set them- better jobs, better pay, better selves the task of creating an education - to develop agitaIrish civil rights movement. tionary activities along
Without these interna- these lines. tional and domestic factors By doing this we felt that it would be impossible to we could involve the people, explain the leftward direc- not so much in supporting tion of the rethinking that the Republican Movement took place in the republican for our political ends but in movement after the failure supporting agitation so that of the border campaign. they themselves would be
part of a revolutionary force demanding what the present system just couldn't proIn an interview in 1970, Mass movement in Belfast, 1981: Bernadette McAliskey addresses a protest rally supporting the Block hunger strikers CROSSMAGLEN & DISTRICT SUPPORT THE HUNGER STRIKES socialist programme is political, that the working class needs to become the new rulers of society, through destroying the existing state and creating a new one based on the organisations of the workers that have destroyed the old.
A fundamental problem however was how the army could fulfil a political role. This is a question that has
been adequately answered by any shade of republicanism, for the simple reason that only a political party open to democratic debate, in front of the wider working class movement, can elaborate a programme for workingclass liberation. By definition SCOTCE аншу is incapable of fulfilling such a task. Strategy
A major result of the rethink was however correct. It was recognised that the centre of any struggle in Ireland had to be the 26 counties, although the leadership did not appreciate the full reason for this. (It is the only way to win Protestant workers in the North - the leadership thought this would be through Catholic workers in the North).
Much more attention was thus given to developing the movement in the South around economic and social questions. In the North the movement was also correct to push the question of civil rights and to seek to build the nascent civil rights movement.
The problem was that the movement's strategy of slowly developing itself on these foundations rested on a reformist and stageist conception of political development, evidenced in such images as conquering Ireland mine by mine and factory by factory.
These fell apart when Irish reality refused to be shoehorned into such schematic thinking. This idea of revolution by stages was borrowed from Stalinism, a strand of thinking that dominated the Officials.
The rethinking began by arguing that the changes affecting Irish society meant that Fianna Fail was in the process of surrendering the nominal independence of the Southern State through the policy of abandoning protectionism and pursuing the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement in 1966. In this respect they foreshadowed many later analyses from various left quarters who have all argued that imperialism has no interest in partition.
The republican view was that the civil rights movement would help democratise the North into something like a normal capitalist society where the sectarian division could be eroded and marginalised and where it would then be possible to create some sort of class unity.
This mistaken perspective led to a split in the movegiving rise to the Officials on the one hand and Provisionals on the other. Many other issues lay behind the split but it is this dynamic that lies behind all of them, including alleged lack of preparedness for armed defence of Catholic areas.
The Provisionals rapidly became the more militant, but only provided evidence for the argument that being more militant does not necessarily mean being more political.
The split gravely damaged the movement by immediately dividing the opposition to imperialism and in a more long-term way by distorting the political development of both. Reformist perspective
In continuing to propound a reformist perspective in a developing quasi-revolutionary situation the Officials found themselves defending politics that were