Physical force, the ongoing debate

by John McAnulty

One of the most striking aspects of the disintegration of the Provisional Republican movement was the total absence of debate that accompanied it. It's for this reason that Fourthwrite has shone out as a beacon to many republican and socialist militants. Outside the journals and books of my own organisation, Socialist Democracy, and occasional articles in the Dublin journal 'Red Banner', I can think of no other forum inside Ireland that takes seriously the task of analysing and learning from the defeat of revolutionary republicanism.

Fourthwrite is to be congratulated therefore, for putting to the centre stage a debate about the physical force tradition and for the recent articles by Liam O'Rourke and Terry Robson. We are however a long way away from reaching any useful conclusions or indeed even clarifying the agenda for debate.

To some extent it is because a number of different issues are being mixed together in the discussion. There is the issue of physical force itself. Then there is the ideology of militarism and finally there is a discussion about the class nature of republicanism. It's true that all these issues are linked to some extent but it may be helpful, at least initially, to separate them. Also, I believe, the earlier writers have based themselves too firmly on opinion and the debate would be greatly strengthened if it were linked to more tightly to evidence gathered by the actual struggle over the past 30 years and from the broad body of theory built up by socialists in the course of a whole series of struggles by the working class.

Physical force

Let us take first the issue of physical force. One of the lessons of Irish history in general and of the past 30 years in particular is that force will be an issue in Irish politics because the British and their allies will put it there, as they did when faced 30 years ago by an unarmed civil rights movement. However it should be quite clear by now, if there were ever any doubt, that any contest that mainly centres on physical force will be won by the British. A standard republican defence of physical force has been to accept that they cannot outgun the British but to argue that force can be used around limited aims such as forcing the British to the negotiating table. This is to misunderstand the role of negotiation, which simply formalises the balance of forces between contestants. If you're massively outgunned by the British then you will not be in a position to demand anything at the table – an argument conclusively proved by the outcome of the Good Friday negotiations. Another common belief was that ‘a final push’ would force the British out because they didn’t really want to be here – an argument that was also used to sell the Good Friday Agreement and the republican surrender on the grounds that the British really wanted to help the Irish before they left.

The socialist tradition argues that the major force available to the oppressed – overwhelming when in full flood – is that of the mass mobilisation of the working class itself. The socialist experience has been to tie large-scale use of force to insurrection and the seizure of power. Even the socialist advocates of guerrilla struggle, such as Che Guevara, saw it’s justification as being that the conditions for successful insurrection were not fully ripe but that by initiating small-scale actions the masses would begin to move forward and hasten the conditions for insurrection. Much has been written about the dangers of this path. Insurrection should normally be undertaken when the socialists already have the support of the majority of workers. If it fails it will be followed by full-scale repression.

Short of insurrection, the key task is to defend the class and allow it time and space to mobilise and take power for itself and, while this at certain times requires a body of armed men and women, the task of defence never reduces itself to the actions of such a body and always requires attempts to involve the mass of workers in political action. For example, today, given the level of loyalist attacks, it would seem mere common sense to have arms available for defence, but the use of arms on its own would simply lead to the intervention of the state forces. A political defence would target the British and RUC as collaborators, demand that Sinn Fein and the SDLP resign from the state structures that perpetrate the bigotry and challenge all the forces, such as the trade union movement, that have kept silent. It would also, of course, assert the right of self-defence which the Provisional leadership, through their decommissioning action, now deny as a political principle.

What we can say conclusively is that this debate about the whens and wherefores of physical force is foreign to republicanism. In fact republicans traditionally set up an armed organisation before later setting up a subordinate political structure. This sort of automatic and unthinking support for armed action, with little consideration of strategy or of the overall balance of forces, is generally seen as the ideology of militarism.

Militarism

Militarism is the belief that armed action is a special, superior, form of struggle – the ‘cutting edge’. It can be seen as a special form of belief in the ‘triumph of the will’. The most advanced elements within the oppressed can, in this view, overcome the immense disparity in strength between themselves and the imperialist forces by sheer determination, self-sacrifice and ruthlessness. The imperialist determination to fight on will be eroded and they will eventually collapse. Another way of looking at this ideology is the ‘Lone Ranger syndrome’ Masked man with silver bullets will save the day while the mass of the population are reduced to applause or background support. In its most virulent form militarism involves a total rejection of politics and argues that only the pure soldier can be trusted and given unswerving support.

All this flies in the face of the actual experience of the republicans. The struggle decayed from within, with the British gradually closing off the republican’s ability to direct their campaign at the state’s military forces and the IRA military campaign feeding itself by drawing on a wider and wider definition of what was a target, becoming more degenerate and less popular as the target base widened. The British were always able to up the ante and out-terrorise the republicans. Political collapse after political collapse was led not by politicians, but by an army council, largely innocent of any political training, suddenly facing up to the fact that they couldn’t win and turning for advice to those they instinctively saw as the traditional political leadership – Irish capitalism and the church. The collapses have faced minimal resistance because opponents within the movement lack any political training themselves – their training is in doing what they were told by the Army council. The whole peace process can be read as a series of individuals being brought forward from the army council of the IRA and using their military credit to guarantee the support of the base. Gradually that individual’s credit was used up and they had to be replaced with yet another well-known military figure, but by that time the base had bought yet another defeat in a series of defeats.

What then is the basis for the republican attachment to militarism, when the ideology has served them so badly? The answer lies in the class nature of republicanism and the contradictory uses that militarism has served.

The nature of republicanism

James Connolly made a good start to analysing republicanism when he described Sinn Fein as the physical force party. Irish republicanism is not some mythic beast whose essence is completely different from that of nationalism. It is precisely the revolutionary wing of Irish nationalism. As such it defines itself by its irreconcilable opposition to imperialism as opposed to reformist and collaborationist strategies of bourgeois nationalism and, in statement after statement, in this struggle and in previous ones, it has indicated that the touchstone for this irreconcilable opposition has been the willingness to use physical force. Numerous attempts have been made to modernise republicanism and bring it to adopt a socialist programme which would give it more in common with other national liberation struggles and clearly separate it from nationalism. All these attempts have failed. Physical force and the ideology of militarism have remained the glue that held the movement together.

The reason for this is quite simple. Physical force plays two roles for republicans. At one level it expresses a demand for the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism. At the other level it holds the volunteers together while avoiding political questions that the movement is unable and unwilling to resolve. The armed struggle comes first and labour must wait. The movement itself veers from left to right but attempts to build a party of the left from within republicanism always fail and when republicanism collapses, as it eventually does, it collapses into the arms of Fianna Fail and the SDLP.

Decommissioning is of special significance for republicans because it indicates, in their own terms, that the movement has surrendered. For some republicans this presents no problems. The battle is on to rebuild the same old movement and no attempt is made to learn any lessons. Others believe that a new, different, republicanism can be built. I believe that to be unlikely, but I see the value in working besides and discussing with those making this attempt while advancing my own belief that the construction of a revolutionary socialist party and the self-organisation of the working class are what will decisively change the situation both nationally and internationally.

FOURTHWRITE, PO BOX 31, Belfast BT127EE