This is a new recruitment pamphlet written for the Irish Socialist Workers Party.
The Case for Socialism in Ireland
Contents
1.
The mess we are in
2.
Who is to blame?
3.
So who pays the price?
4.
What’s the alternative?
5.
We need a revolution
6.
A different society
7.
Would socialism work?
8.
A world to win
9.
Get involved! Get organised!
Chapter 1. The mess we are in
One thing
everyone knows and everyone is agreed on – right, left and centre – is that Ireland is in a huge mess. In December 2012 we had our sixth vicious
austerity budget in a row, inflicting massive hardship on our people, and there
is no end in sight.
Just how
bad things are is shown by the way ‘deal’ on the promissory note which
stretches out repayment of the debt to 2053, without securing the reduction of
one cent of it, is hailed by the government and much of the media as a triumph.
Imagine you met an acquaintance in the street whose response to your ‘How’s it
going?’ was, ‘Grand! I had a bit of a debt problem, but I’ve done a deal with
the loan sharks and they’ve agreed to collect it off my kids, and the
grandchildren.’ *.
Another
take on the situation is to compare what’s happened to two people. The first is,
Joe Stynes, 35, from Ballyfermot in Dublin. Joe is not some particularly
tragic case, just an ordinary working class guy struggling to survive.
When Joe
left school in 1995 he got an apprenticeship as a welder and worked making
doors, fire escapes etc in Ballyfermot while studying at the Tech in Bolton St. in the evening. In 1998, aged 21,
he went to London where he worked as a skilled welder at Canary Wharf, Heathrow
, the Millennium Dome and so on. Back in Ireland he has not been able to get a
proper job since 2008.
In 2009 his
family bought him a flight to Florida to stay with his brother there in
the hope of finding work, but he had no luck. In desperation he even
contemplated joining the French Foreign Legion, but a ripped hamstring put paid
to that. Still out of work in September 2011 he went back to college on a
preliminary engineering course and is now doing a 4 year Degree in Mechanical
Engineering at Tallaght Institute.
This means
he has to live at home with his recently widowed mother and survive on €188 a
week for the foreseeable future. Even when he graduates in 2016, Joe does not
think he’ll be able to get work in Ireland.
But then
there is Brian Goggin,60. Goggin was Chief Executive Officer of Bank of Ireland
from 2005 to 2009 at salary which varied
from €1.5 million to €3 million per year. When he retired from the bank at the
early age of 56 he claimed in a public interview that his salary in the
previous year had been cut to ‘under €2 million’. However
* And it
now looks likely, as The
Independent reports, ‘that all benefit of securing the promissory-note deal
in 2013 will be lost in order to repay senior bondholders, who were guaranteed
by the State’
he also
received a pension of €650,000 for life!. In 2008 Goggin played an important
role in persuading the government to issue the now infamous bank guarantee.
So surely
Brian, like Joe has had difficulty finding work recently? Not a bit of it. As The Independent reported in 2011
Brian Goggin - the former chief
executive who racked up billions of euros of bum property loans - has joined up
with €42bn private equity giant Apollo Management to target distressed financial
assets and other investments…Apollo, which was set up by banker Leon Black -
one of the richest men on Wall St. - has been active in buying distressed
financial companies across Europe in recent months.
In other words, a skilled worker who is able and keen to,
quite literally, help rebuild the economy is out of work, while a banker who is
already extremely wealthy and who played a big part in wrecking the country, is
paid more millions to continue his financial gambling and speculation. This is Ireland
today.
The economic crisis
During the
years of the Celtic Tiger, roughly 1995– 2008 the Irish economy grew on average
at 7% per year. Not every one benefited from the Celtic Tiger expansion – some,
the poorest in society, were left badly behind – and the benefits were very
unevenly distributed. The rich and the middle classes did much better than the
majority of working people but, overall, for most people, things got a bit better.
Then,
suddenly, in 2007/2008 it all fell apart. First property prices, which had
risen dramatically during the Tiger years, fell no less dramatically. This led
to a massive crisis in the banks. During the boom Ireland’s banks leant recklessly to
property developers who, as property prices collapsed, were unable to pay back these
loans. This left the banks with immense bad debts which were never going to be
repaid.
On September
30 2008,
the Fianna Fail/Green government announced that it would guarantee all the
deposits and debts of Ireland’s six main banks (Anglo, AIB, Bank of Ireland etc) for two
years. At a stroke the government made the bankers’ debts our debts.
It soon
turned out that the banks owed even more – an enormous amount more - than they
had let on and the bank guarantee was bankrupting the state. In November
2010 the government sought and obtained a bail-out of €85 billion from the ECB
and the IMF which would be repaid by the Irish people in the coming years on
very tough terms.
Meanwhile,
since 2008, the economy had gone into recession. So people were having to pay
back the debts incurred by the banks in a situation of severe economic decline
when there was less money in most people’s pockets
What this
economic catastrophe has meant in human terms can be summed up in four dreadful
facts.
Fact one: there
are no jobs. Unemployment has risen to 15% with over 450,000 on the live
register. The young have been particularly hard hit with youth unemployment
standing at over 30% - almost 1 in 3 17-24 year olds are out of work. Without
mass emigration it would be much worse.
Fact two: poverty is increasing. The government’s own Survey on
Income and Living Conditions records that, by 2010, 22.5% - nearly a quarter of
the Irish population – were suffering serious material deprivation. That
compares to 12% in 2008 and is the highest figure the survey has ever recorded..
By now it is much worse.The Irish League of Credit Unions revealed that
1.6 million have less than €50 a month left after essential bills and it was
reported in The Irish Times that 1 in
5 children are now going to school hungry
Fact three: emigration. Because there are no jobs, because
there is more poverty, people are leaving the country at a rate of over 3000 a
month – the highest figure since the Famine.
Fact four: suicide. The number of recorded suicides in the Republic increased by 7%
in 2011..525 suicides were registered in 2011. International research shows
that for every 1% increase in unemployment there is a 0.78% increase in the
rate of suicide
Dan Neville TD, President of the Irish Association of Suicidology, said the
figure ‘reflected the neglect of suicide prevention for decades, and the
economic recession, which impacts on the levels of depression, anxiety and
despair’.
It’s not just the economy
The
terrible state of the Irish economy is the most obvious problem we face but by
no means the only one. There are also deep seated political and social problems
Corruption
has been rampant in Irish politics for a generation or more. You have only to
list the names – Charlie Haughey, Bertie Ahern, Michael Lowry, Jackie Healy Rae
– and the businessmen they were linked to: Ben Dunne, Sean Dunne, Seanie
Fitzpatrick, Denis O’Brien and so on – to get the picture; decades of dirty
dealings in the Galway Tent, on the golf courses and elsewhere. Minister of Health,
James O’Reilly, who made a point of
locating Primary Health Care Centres in his constituency (when his constituency
failed to meet the laid down criteria) is ensuring that the tradition of stroke
politics remains alive and well.
As a result
there is tremendous, and well justified cynicism towards politicians among a
lot of working people. This is increased by the way parties in opposition say
one thing and do the exact opposite the moment they get into power.
The current
behaviour of the Eamon Gilmore and the Labour Party is the main example of
this. In opposition Labour pledged to protect working people from the cuts. In
office they have implemented massive cuts. In opposition Gilmore said ‘Its
Frankfurt’s way or Labour’s way’. In power it has been Frankfurt’s way all the way! In opposition
Gilmore explicitly promised that Labour would not be part of a government that
would cut child benefit. In power they just cut child benefit by €10 per week
(and by €18 for the third child and €20 for the fourth!). In opposition Ruari
Quinn signed a written pledge not to raise student fees and in power ….? Well
you can guess.
If Labour
is the extreme example of this political double dealing, Fine Gael and Fianna
Fail are all also guilty – not to mention the late and unlamented Greens in the last coalition government. And
the same could be said of Sinn Fein, who say they are against cuts in the South
but actually implement Tory cuts in the North.
Cynicism is
also fed by the failure of the trade union leaders to stand up for their
members or working people generally. A major cause of this failure is the fact
that many of the union leaders, like Jack O’Connor of SIPTU and David Beggs of
ICTU, are in league with Labour and therefore in league with the government, as
well as receiving very high salaries.
On February
9 these union leaders, under pressure from their rank-and-file, called mass demonstrations
for the lifting of the debt burden in towns across Ireland. The turnout of working people was
generally good but the rallies were organised in such a way – with comedians
and loud music at the end – as to demobilise the crowd and avoid giving any
commitment to ongoing resistance.
Another big
problem is the role of the Catholic Church. The grip of the Church on Irish
society has clearly loosened since the days of Archbishop McQuaid but it is
still significant. This institution which presided over and covered up decades
of brutal physical and sexual abuse of children, ranging from rape at one
extreme to absolutely routine caning, beating and humiliation at the other, and
which managed, with the collusion of the State, the appalling slavery of the Magdalene
Laundries for more than four decades (the last one didn’t close till 1996) still
has a leading role in the state, and still has massive influence in schools and
hospitals.
Thus Archbishop
Diarmuid Martin is patron of about 470 primary schools in Ireland
and 93% of all primary schools in the Archdiocese of Dublin. At the same time
the Mater Hospital
in Dublin is still run by the
Sisters of Mercy with the result that as recently as 2005 (!) the hospital
deferred trials of a lung cancer medication because female patients in the trial
would be required to practice contraception contrary to Roman Catholic
teaching.
Crucially, at the time of writing, the Church is
still using its influence to try to block legislation for the X
case, which the government has been under order from the European Court of
Human Rights to introduce for more than 20 years. Despite the tragic death
of
Savita Hallopanarvar in Galway, the
four Archbishops of Ireland were outside the Dail orchestrating a protest
against legislation on December 4, 2012, followed by a massively funded at
anti- choice rally in January. And this power at the top of Irish society is
quite out of proportion to the actual role of the Church among ordinary people.
Moreover, the economic disaster, the rotten politicians and the reactionary
Church hierarchy all feed into each other. The result is a thorough going
social crisis – a big mess.
It’s not just in the South.
Northern Ireland
has never been a ‘normal’ society. When it was established in 1921 its very
boundaries were determined by the need to create as large an area as possible
while retaining a built in Loyalist majority. It then continued for the next
fifty years as a sectarian state based on blatant discrimination against the
Nationalist minority.
The Good Friday Agreement, followed by the Peace Process, was supposed to
put an end to all this, and it is certainly a good thing that working people
are not killing each other and that some of the old discrimination has been
ended, but sectarianism has not gone away.
On the contrary sectarianism was built into the whole way the Peace Process
was organized .At Stormont, where all Members of the Legislative Assembly
(MLAs) have to declare themselves Unionist, Nationalist or Other, the First
Minister is always from the largest Unionist or Nationalist party, the Deputy
First Minister from the largest party on the “other side”. Housing remains
highly segregated and every new school, health or community centre is seen as
going to one ‘community’ or the other.
This has a poisonous effect as sectarianism trickles down towards the
street, and is intensified by the way both the DUP and Sinn Fein are involved
in inflicting austerity, cuts and misery on both Protestant and Catholic
workers. In Belfast the number of so-called
Peace Walls has doubled since the Good Friday agreement and in recent years
there has been a marked increase in sectarian physical attacks. At the same
time poverty remains disproportionately concentrated in Catholic areas.
In December 2012 and January of this year sectarianism burst into the open
with the Loyalist ‘flag riots’. It has to be said that a society in which a
section of working people are rioting over the insufficient flying of the Union
Flag by their rulers when the real owners of that flag, the British ruling
class,
are cutting them to the bone, is
a deeply distorted society.
The ongoing power of religious bigotry, based on the sectarianism, means
that Northern Ireland
shares with the Republic the distinction of being backward when it comes to a
woman’s right to choose.
In reality, both North and South we have dysfunctional states failing to
represent either the wishes or the interests of their people.
It’s not just Ireland.
A last point: this pamphlet is focused on Ireland
but it is important to remember that the economic crisis is an international
crisis. It began not in Ireland
but in the United States
and is affecting everywhere, especially countries like Greece,
Spain, Italy,
Portugal and
also the UK and
the US itself.
And everywhere it is producing suffering and conflict, while at the same time
the long term future of the world is threatened by climate change and
governments are unwilling to do anything about it. Ireland
is in a mess but it also a global mess. We will return to this later.
Chapter
2. Who is to blame?
The people most obviously responsible for the economic mess are the property
developers and bankers.
During the boom years these people, driven by insatiable greed, completely
lost the run of themselves. They forgot or ignored a basic fact of economics
and history, namely that booms don’t last forever and that bubbles always
burst. They borrowed and lent like there was no tomorrow and recklessly ran up
levels of debt that were completely unsustainable. By 2007 Irish banks had
leant and were owed something like €100 billion (??) – an astonishing figure
for a small nation of 4.5 million people.
The politicians were also in this up to their necks. While things were going
well they deliberately turned a blind eye to what the developers and bankers
were up to – they called this ‘light touch regulation’. Indeed as we noted in
the previous chapter many of the politicians were involved in shady dealings
with the bankers and developers, and benefited directly from them.
Moreover, when the Celtic Tiger first began to run out of steam in 2001-2, the
Fianna Fail government quite deliberately encouraged a reckless property boom
to try to keep the boom and their own gravy train going.
But
only blaming the bankers, the
developers and the politicians – guilty as they are – misses some important
points. First, as we have seen, they are all connected. Second they all have
close links with other key groups in Irish society – the top industrialists and
businessmen (like Tony O’Reilly and Denis O’Brien), those who control the media
(Tony O’Reilly and Denis O’Brien again), the judges, the heads of the armed
forces, the gardai, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and so on.
What we are dealing with here is not just individuals but a whole class of
people – the 1% as the Occupy Movement called them –
Ireland’s ruling class who really control what
happens in the country.
These people are united by a) being rich and powerful, b) deriving their
wealth, power and privileges from the labour of the mass of working people and
c) being committed to an economic system, capitalism, which always puts profit
before people’s needs. These are the people really responsible for the mess we
are in, and certainly not the mass of ordinary working people.
Here it is important to understand that this ruling class, precisely in
order to avoid their responsibility for the crisis, are always using the media
to suggest that other groups are to blame, particularly ‘overpaid public sector
workers’ ‘foreigners and immigrants’ and ‘welfare scroungers’. These
insinuations are nonsense.
The majority of public sector workers are not overpaid at all – 68% of them
earn less than €50,000 a year - and Ireland ranks only ninth in the EU when it
comes to spending on public services. Of course people at the top of the public
sector earn a lot – 2% get over €100,000 – but so do people at the top of
private industry, a great deal more in fact. J P McManus has an estimated
fortune of €590 million, Dermot Desmond of €1.7 billion and Denis O’Brien of
€2.7 billion (according to
The Sunday
Times list of ‘The Richest People in Ireland’.
The real division is not between public sector and private sector but between
bosses in both sectors and workers in both sectors.
Similarly foreigners and immigrants are only ordinary human beings trying to
survive in a difficult world, like Irish emigrants were in the bad old days and
are again today. They do not lay people off, close down factories and shops,
and put people on the dole. Bosses – both foreign and Irish - do that. The idea
that immigrants take our jobs makes no more sense than the idea that blue-eyed
or red haired people take the jobs off brown-eyed people or blondes. And
blaming the unemployed and those on benefits is simply blaming the victims of
the crisis, not those who caused it.
When the media and politicians target public sector workers or foreigners or
single mothers or the unemployed themselves (as Labour Minister Joan Burton did
when she called the dole ‘a life style choice’) they are just trying to divert
our anger away from the ruling class and focus it on the weak and vulnerable.
Working class people should reject this scapegoating and refuse to be divided.
Essentially it is the same story in the North where the British ruling class
and the Unionist establishment in Northern
Ireland both used sectarian bigotry to
divide and paralyse the working class. Neither Protestant nor Catholic working
people will really be able to advance their interests until they are able to
unite against their bosses, and their bosses’ government.
But if the ruling class are to blame for the dreadful crisis, so too is the
whole economic system they preside over, namely capitalism. In capitalism the
vast bulk of production of goods and services is for profit not for human need.
Ryanair does not fly planes because Michael O’Leary wants to provide holidays
for people but to make a profit. Dunnes Stores doesn’t sell food because Frank
Dunne, or Ben Dunne before him, want to feed the hungry but because they want
to make profits, as much profit as possible.
This ceaseless drive for profit means that when the system is booming the
capitalists all fall over each other to invest and produce as much as they can and
to do this they will beg, borrow and steal as much money as possible in the
hope they will make even more, as Irish bankers and developers did in the
Celtic Tiger. In the process they overreach themselves, lending more than they
can afford, borrowing more than they can pay back and producing more than they
can sell – for example houses.
Then it all goes belly-up, boom turns to bust, and because they produce only
for profit the capitalists cut and run, close down their operations, sack
workers and stop investing or, if they can, shift their investment to somewhere
more profitable*, and if they can’t pay their debts they look to the government
or the International Monetary Fund to bail them out.
And the politicians, because most of them are into capitalism and the profit
game up to their necks, are happy to oblige.
This has happened time and again in the history of capitalism – so often
that the basic mechanism of how booms turn into recessions was analysed by Karl
Marx 150 years ago – and is exactly what happened in Ireland over the last five
years.
It is also what happened in America,
with a crisis developing in housing (the so-called ‘sub-prime mortgages’) and a
credit crunch when the banks started to realize they were over extended,
followed by a full scale banking crisis when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.
This then tipped the global economy including the Eurozone, which was already
fragile, and Ireland
into recession.
Basically, capitalism as a system pushed the greedy bankers and developers
into behaving as they did and then ensured that they got away with it when the
house of cards collapsed.
* The ability of capitalists to shift investments round the globe at the
drop of a hat is often exaggerated – frequently it is a bluff to get us to
accept lower pay and worse conditions.
Chapter
3. So, who pays the price?
On this there is no doubt. We all do EXCEPT the very people who brought the
country to ruin who get off more or less scot free. If you rob from a local
shop or get caught fiddling the dole you end up in court and possibly in jail.
If you rob the country of billions you get a golden handshake and a fat
pension. John O’Donovan, a Chief Executive at the Bank of Ireland, stepped down
at the end of 2011 and was awarded €735,000, while Denis Donovan, another Bank
of Ireland executive, received a salary of €690,000 plus a €174,000 pension
contribution.
Of course, if we didn’t
pay such enormous salaries we wouldn’t be able to attract such outstanding
individuals to run our banks!
In contrast, ordinary people who bore no responsibility for creating the
crisis have been subject to relentless attacks and cutbacks.
The Fine Gael/Labour budget for 2013, set out on 5 December 2012, was a prime example of this. It was a
combination of cuts and tax hikes that both targeted the vulnerable and hit the
average working class person.
The budget cut child benefit by €10 a month for the first two children, €18
a month for the third child and €20 a month for the fourth and subsequent
children. The sheer viciousness of this cut needs noting. Child benefit is
known to be the most effective benefit for actually helping children. A flat
€10 euro cut, like a flat rate tax, obviously hits poorer families much harder
than the well off or the rich (who would barely notice it). Moreover, poorer
people, not just in Ireland
but in almost all societies, tend to have more children, so the extra cut for
third and fourth children is an extra attack on the poor. Thus a family with
four children lost €696 a year at a stroke – a real body blow to those on low
incomes.
Back-to-school allowances were also be cut by up to 33pc per child, with the
rate for primary pupils down from €150 to €100 and the rate for secondary
pupils down from €250 to €200.
Not surprisingly the group Protest Against Cuts to Child Benefit (PACUB)
said children would go cold and hungry as a result of these cuts. Spokesperson
Niamh Ui Cheallaigh, said, "It feels like the most savage attack possible
on children and families”, and the Children's Rights Alliance said. "Each
cut on its own is detrimental, but accumulatively these cuts are devastating.
In its eagerness to finance a dead banking system, the Government is killing
our future”. At the same time maternity benefit was made taxable.
Another
measure was a cut of 19% or €325 in the annual respite care allowance, making
life significantly tougher for a particularly hard pressed group. Then there
was the tripling of prescription charges from 50c to €1.50 – not a huge amount unless, of course,
you happen to be poor and need a lot of medication – combined with the raising
of the cap on medication costs from €120 to €144.a month. Also cancer patients
will be charged for chemotherapy treatment before they are treated. Patients will be charged €75 euro to use the
services of a day centre which administers chemotherapy.
At
the same time dole payments were reduced from 12 months to 9 months, student
fees were increased by €250 a year for the next three years bringing them to
€3000 by 2015 and PRSI (Pay Related Social Insurance) payments were increased
by an average €264 per PAYE worker.
The
increases in tax on beer, spirits, wine and cigarettes attracted less attention
than cuts to children, education, health etc because working class people are
meant to feel guilty about smoking and drinking but again it has to be
understood that all these tax hikes have a disproportionate effect on the poor
who are also the people most likely to smoke etc because of the stress in their
lives.
Even the right wing Economic and Social Research Institute was forced to
conclude that in addition to making life much harder for most people the
overall impact of the budget was seriously ‘regressive’, that is it affected
those at the bottom of society more than those at the top and widened the gap
between them.
But the budget for 2013 is only the latest example of something that has
been going on for five years now. In fact it is the sixth austerity budget in
that time, all of which have followed the same basic pattern.
The Fianna Fail budget of October 2008 imposed a levy of 1-2% on all incomes
and increased taxes on cigarettes, wine, petrol and cars. Then the budget in
December 2009 cut social welfare by 4%, child benefit by €16 a month and public
sector pay by 5-10%. At the same time the Universal Social Charge of €100 a year
was introduced. Brian Lenihan’s budget of December 2010 cut child benefit by a
further €10 euros, social welfare, disability allowance and jobseekers
allowance by €8, and raised student fees by €500 to €2000.
When Fianna Fail and the Greens were introducing cuts Fine Gael and Labour,
and especially Labour, attacked them fiercely. But the change of government in
January 2011 did not produce a change of policy. The budget of December 2011
involved €1 billion in new indirect taxes such VAT (which hit the poor hardest,
remember) plus massive cuts to community and voluntary groups, by 40-50% in
many cases and, of course, the introduction of the hated Household Charge – yet
another regressive flat tax .
But even this long list is only a selection of the multitude of cutbacks
inflicted on working people in way or another. There have also been hospital
closures, ward closures, reductions in health staff, cuts in pay student
nurses, cuts in the Home Help service, cuts to DEIS schools, reductions in
Special Needs Assistants in schools, cuts in pay for new teachers (€41,000 to
€32,000 since 2009) and rent increases.
The humorously named Department of Justice and Equality has cut its budget for
Traveller initiatives by 7%, for gender equality by 17%, for services to
migrants by 31%, for women’s organizations by 35%, for drugs initiatives by 7%
and for disability awareness by 72%.
And as they take all this money out of the economy, i.e. out of people’s
pockets, €30 billion over five years, this reduces people’s ability to buy
goods in the shops, which in turn leads to less goods being produced and to
fewer jobs. The economy spirals downwards and the recession deepens.
In the North, despite the different jurisdiction, the picture is remarkably
similar. Between 2008 and 2011 Sinn Fein/ DUP cut £1.7 billion from the public
sector. Then in 2011 the Tory/Lib Dem government in Westminster cut the
Northern Ireland Block Grant by £4 billion (a cut of over £2000 per head of the
population) and Sinn Fein and the DUP both agreed to pass on the cuts despite
strikes and marches by tens of thousands of workers on November 30. As in the
South this has meant hitting the most vulnerable, like small schools, those
with special needs, teaching assistants, people with disabilities and so on.
Meanwhile the rich are actually get richer. Whereas, since 2008, the lower
50% of the population have lost 10% of their income and the poorest tenth have
lost 25% of theirs, the richest tenth have increased their income by nearly
10%. Meanwhile the super rich have done even better. In March 2011 it was
reported that the richest 300 people in Ireland,
less than 0.01 % of the population, had increased their wealth by €6.7 billion
and now hold wealth totaling €57 billion between them.
These statistics of rising inequality translate on the ground into a real growth
in hardship, suffering and hopelessness for people and they interact with and
intensify the other aspects of Ireland’s
mess talked about earlier. Austerity and increased poverty pile up the pressure
on women dealing with unwanted pregnancy, especially those who don’t have the
money for a trip to England;
so they make the need for free, safe and legal abortion more urgent than ever.
Corrupt politicians who line their own pockets are bad enough at the best of
times but in today’s economic climate they are a disaster. In the boom ‘stroke
politics’ by which careerist TDs got a little extra for their constituency were
distasteful and unprincipled; now, in the era of endless cutbacks, they are
really robbing the less advantaged or less well placed of essential services.
So is there any alternative to more and more pain in this ongoing recession?
Chapter
4. What’s the alternative?
All the mainstream politicians, supported by most mainstream economists and most
of the media, insist there is no alternative to their extreme austerity agenda.
Actually this is nonsense. It is perfectly straightforward to outline a whole
range of alternative economic measures to address Ireland’s
economic crisis which would ease the burden on ordinary people instead of
intensifying it.
In December 2012, People Before Profit TD, Richard Boyd Barrett, set out an
alternative budget with the following main proposals:
1. Cancel the debt. The decision to guarantee
all the debts of the six key banks which has already cost the Irish taxpayer
€65 billion will lead, by the end of 2013, to a national debt of €197 billion.
This is unsustainable and not the people’s debt in the first place. It should
be cancelled
2. Tax the top earners. Ireland
has 108,250 people who between them earn a total of over €20 billion (average
€186,885 per person per year). Increase total income tax on this top 5% by €3
billion.
3. Tax the wealthy. Introducing a mere 2%
wealth tax on the wealthiest 5% of households would bring in about €3.2 billion
a year.
4. Tax
the speculators and money dealers. A minimal 0.01% tax on financial
transactions (dealing in shares and bonds)
- a modest proposal actually supported by the EU but opposed by the
Irish government – would net a further €750 million.
5. Tax the big corporations. At the moment
giant corporations, like Starbucks, pay almost no tax, not even the 12.5% they
are legally supposed to pay. Making the 12.5% corporation tax effective, ie
actually collecting it, would raise about €4 billion, and increasing it to 15%
(still way below most other countries) would raise another €2 billion.
6. Take full control of the banks. Use
this to stop house repossessions and relieve the 160,000 households currently
in mortgage distress, thus avoiding a major housing crisis.
7. Stop privatisation of state companies and
reclaim our natural resources. It has been estimated that the gas and oil
reserves off Ireland’s
coasts, which were shamefully given away for almost nothing by Fianna Fail and , are worth about €450 billion.
8. Use
the billions raised and saved by these measures to invest in a major programme of public works which would create jobs,
restore and improve public services and kick start the economy out of
recession.
However whenever Richard Boyd Barrett or any other representative of the
left such as Joe Higgins, Brid Smith, Paul Murphy or Kieran Allen, puts forward
these or similar ideas in the Dail, on TV or in the Council Chamber, they are
met with an immediate chorus of interruptions and howls of indignation.
‘Impossible!’ ‘Fantasy economics!’ ‘The statistics are wrong!, ‘The figures
don’t add up!’ and so on.
The aim of all this roaring and shouting, especially about the figures, is
to confuse matters and throw dust in the eyes of the public. After all how is
the average person at home to know who has the correct figures about the exact
wealth of the richest 5%, or how much a tax increase on top earners would
actually raise, especially as the wealthy employ legions of accountants to
conceal their wealth from the revenue? But this is not the point. If in reality
a 2% tax on the wealthiest 5% failed to raise the expected €3 billion, then OK,
put it up to 3%. No, the real point is that ALL the government spokespersons
and virtually all the mainstream politicians and their allied ‘economic
experts’ are opposed on principle to taxing the rich.
It is a bit like the TV performance of anti-abortion activists from the Iona
Institute or Youth Defence. They will present themselves as medical and legal
experts who have all the latest research at their finger tips and can quote recent
scientific papers and the ins and outs of the constitution at the drop of a
hat. But actually it is all beside the point because their real position is
based not on research but on religious dogma. They are opposed to abortion
rights in all circumstances whether the woman’s life or health is as risk or
not, whether she is a victim of rape or incest or not, and it has nothing to do
with caring for babies or women but is entirely a matter of their conviction that
it is God’s law.
The opponents of taxing the rich are not motivated by religion but by things
that are just as strong. There are two main reasons why they think making the
rich pay for the crisis is completely out of the question:
1. Either
they are very rich themselves or they represent parties (such as Fine Gael or
Fianna Fail), or institutions, think-tanks and so on who are funded by the very
rich eg the ESRI (Economic and Social Research Institute) which began life in
1960 with a grant of $280.000 from the Ford Foundation and by 2010 was
receiving state funding of €12.8 million .
2. They
are strongly committed to the economic system of capitalism which by its very
nature puts the interests of the rich first.
How capitalism prioritizes the rich is shown by the arguments always used
against not paying the bondholders or taxing wealth, profits or the
corporations. If ‘we’ don’t pay the bondholders (for what amount to their
gambling debts) ‘we’ won’t be able to go back to ‘the markets’ and borrow
money. If we tax wealth the wealthy they will take their money out of the
country and there will be even less jobs available. If we ask the corporations
to pay even a modest amount of taxes they won’t invest in Ireland
and that will also cost jobs.
In reality a lot of this is bluff. 15% corporation tax, for example, is still
much lower than in most other countries (35% in the USA,
over30% in Germany)
so they still wouldn’t want to leave and it’s not that easy for a corporation
simply to up sticks and move. But it is the logic of the argument we should
note. What the rich and the corporations are really saying is, ‘Never mind all
that stuff about the country and providing jobs, we’re only here for the money
– you touch that and we’re out of here,’ ‘We have the wealth and control the
production so if you don’t play by our rules we’ll wreck your economy and
inflict as much damage on people as we can’.
But those, like Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Labour Party leaders, who
believe in capitalism and accept that the rich should control most production,
are going to give in to this blackmail.
So it follows that if we are going to get any of the alternatives put
forward above or, indeed,
stop any of
the numerous attacks set out in the budget or planned for the future, we are
going to have to fight. By fighting I don’t mean picking up the gun like the
Provisionals in the 1970s, I mean mobilizing large masses of people on the
streets and in the workplaces, in demonstrations, strikes and sit-ins.
Very much the same applies to the other key aspects of the Irish crisis we
have talked about, the dominance of the Catholic Church, the unrepresentative
and corrupt nature of the politicians and the sectarian divide in the North.
Once again there certainly are alternatives.
There could and should be a complete separation of church and state – this
exists in many countries. Traditional Catholics are entitled to their religious
beliefs and practices, but they should not be entitled to use the state and the
law to impose those beliefs on the rest of us, or to control the education of
our children or the running of our hospitals. This should not be the case even
if the Church did not have such an appalling record in the matter of the
treatment of children – in the circumstances it is truly outrageous.
It would have been perfectly possible to have jailed many of the corrupt
politicians and their banker/developer friends – the Egyptians jailed their
President, Hosni Mubarak, after all. And it is not beyond the bounds of
possibility to devise systems whereby electors can hold politicians who betray
their election promises to account – not in four years time when all the damage
is done, but in the here and now. The English Chartists, the world’s first mass
workers’ movement in the 1840s, demanded annual elections precisely to achieve
this. It would also be quite simple to pay TDs only the average workers’ wage
so as to deter candidates whose aim is to line their own pockets.
Where the North is concerned the alternative to sectarian division is
perhaps harder to see because we are always encouraged to see the situation in
terms of the ‘two communities’, but it is nevertheless real. What is needed is
not just ‘tolerance’ or ‘equal respect’ for the ‘two traditions’, which can do
no more than paper over the crack, while allowing sectarianism to continue and
fester. It is the forging of a new identity (neither Protestant nor Catholic,
beyond Orange and Green) based on
class interests against the common enemy of British rule and the austerity
policies imposed by both the Unionists and Sinn Fein.
But none of these things will happen without massive pressure from below.
The cowardly Irish political establishment has always run scared of the bishops
and the Catholic Right. Even on the very limited question of legislation for
the X-case, granting a right to abortion where a woman’s life is at risk, it
took thousands on the streets twenty years ago to get just a promise of
legislation and more thousands on the streets following the death of Savita
Hallopanarvar in 2012, to get the government actually to introduce legislation.
Clearly the politicians, or the majority of them, form a cozy club that
protects its own, and they are not going to hold themselves to account if they
are left to their own devices. While in the North it is only in and through
mass resistance to the cuts and other attacks, above all in the workplaces, that
the class unity of working people can be created.
Chapter
5. We need a revolution
Some people say that the Irish don’t protest – it’s something to do with our
culture. Others say protest doesn’t work because ‘they’ don’t take any notice. Both
these arguments developed during a period when the level of protest was low
compared to say Greece
or Spain,
mainly because the trade union leaders were in league with the bosses and the
government through social partnership and the Croke
Park deal and this held back
struggle, but both of them are mistaken
The Irish people and the Irish workers have a great tradition of struggle
from 1798 to Larkin, Connolly and Bernadette Devlin. Moreover Irish migrants
have played key roles as rebels and fighters in the workers’ movement across
the world, especially in America,
Britain and Australia.
And it is true that the politicians don’t simply roll over just because
people with a good cause assemble in Parnell Square and march to the Dail but if
the protest is strong enough and determined enough to scare the politicians, to
make them fear for their seats or, even better for their system, then it
certainly does work.
A good example was in October 2008 when Fianna Fail, Brian Lenihan and Mary
Harney to be precise, tried to remove medical cards from the over 70s and up to
20,000 furious pensioners converged on Leinster House in protest. On that day
even a reluctant Enda Kenny felt obliged to pledge his support ‘backed by the Labour
Party’ - what hypocrites these people are! – and the government was forced to
back down.
Another example came in September 2012 when disability campaigners camped
out overnight at government buildings and made the government reverse its plan
to cut €10 million from home assistants.
Then there were the Vita Cortex workers who, denied their rights when
developer Jack Ronan closed them down, occupied the factory for 25 weeks until
Ronan made major concessions. Other groups of workers, such as at La Senza and
HMV, took similar action and also won their rights.
Indeed pretty much
all the rights
that working people have gained - not only in Ireland but round the world –
from the right to vote through to the welfare state, have been won through
campaigning and struggle.
But there is a problem with these victories, important as they are, and the
examples of the medical cards and the disability home assistants illustrate it
very well. Forced to retreat on one cut, our rulers simply impose another. If
it is too politically risky to cut medical cards for the pensioners cut
unemployment benefit instead. If the disability protests cause too much
embarrassment, go for home helps or child benefit.
At the end of the day the rich and their politicians do not care which of us
foots the bill for the crisis as long as it’s not them. And as long as there is
a crisis – which is here for the foreseeable future – and they feel their
profits are threatened they will carry on behaving this way. The only way to
stop them is to take from them the power to run society in their interests and
inflict pain on the rest of us.
Unfortunately this can not be done through the Dail (or the Northern Ireland
Assembly); it needs a revolution.
It is very useful for genuine representatives of working class people to
stand in elections and win seats in the Dail and on councils. Deputies like
Richard Boyd Barrett of People Before Profit and Joe Higgins of the Socialist
Party and Councilors like Brid Smith, can and do use their positions to attack and
expose the politicians and to encourage resistance by the people. And it would
have been great if a socialist like Eamonn McCann had been elected in Derry,
as he nearly was in 2011, to confront Peter Robinson and Martin McGuiness
across the floor of the Assembly.
But
even if 100 Richard Boyd Barretts and Joe Higgins or 200 Brid Smiths or 60
Eamonn McCanns were elected it would not be enough to break the power of the
super rich. This is because the power of the rich and of the ruling class as a
whole is not based in parliament but in their control of the main industries,
the banks, the state (army, judges, police, top bureaucrats), the media and
their links to the rich and powerful internationally.
Faced with a genuinely left wing government the ruling class would use all
this power to resist it, undermine it and, if necessary, overthrow it. They
would go on investment strike, close down businesses, create a financial
crisis, use the courts to rule government measures illegal, and incite the
police to refuse to enforce them.
This is what happened when the Chilean people elected a left wing
government, led by the socialist Salvador Allende, in 1970. Within three years
the Chilean military, aided by the Chilean rich and the CIA,
overthrew this government in a coup, murdered Allende and 30,000 Chileans and
established a military dictatorship under the infamous General Pinochet.
The Irish ruling class supported by the rich in Britain,
the US and
elsewhere would try to do the same here. They would not simply step down and
let their wealth and privileges be gradually taken away. Therefore, whether
there were lots of socialist TDs or not, it would still need a revolutionary
struggle to end the rule of the rich.
A revolution in Ireland
today – a real people’s revolution- does not mean a few hundred armed men and
women seizing the GPO like in 1916, heroic as that was. Nor is it a matter of a
long armed struggle in the mountains like Che Guevara in Cuba.
What it means is a mass movement of working people and their allies (the
students, the pensioners, the unemployed and so on), all together, in their
hundreds of thousands on the streets and in the workplaces and the communities
which overwhelms the power of the government and the gardai and seizes control
of the banks, major companies and workplaces and other centres of power and
communication. Crucially it would also mean working people setting up a new
government of their own that would really represent their interests.
Is revolution right and is it
possible?
Conventional wisdom, which we all inherit from our education, the church and
the media, tells us that revolution is both wrong and impossible.
It is wrong, conventional wisdom says, because it goes against the legally
and democratically elected government of the day. But actually, as recent
experience in Ireland
shows all too clearly, the present government and political system is not
really democratic at all. The wealth and power of the rich enables them both to
exert a massive influence on elections and to bend the elected government to
their will. They also control the law. In contrast revolution by the people
would be an immensely democratic act, enabling ordinary people to take control
of society for the first time.
But is it possible? Surely, revolution will never happen. Actually
revolution is very possible and history shows that revolutions happen, not
everyday, but sufficiently often to make it a very realistic prospect. The
number of revolutions that have occurred is often not realized because they
tend to get written out of history (especially if they are eventually defeated)
or get called something else (like a war or civil war).
Here are some examples: the English Revolution of 1642-51 (often known as
the English Civil War) the American Revolution of 1775-83, the French
Revolution of 1789-94, the French Revolution of 1830, the trans-European
revolutions of 1848 in France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Austria and Hungary, the
Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917,
the German Revolution of 1919 (which
overthrew the Kaiser), the Spanish Revolution of 1936 (which became the Spanish
Civil War), the Chinese Revolution of 1947, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956
(against Stalinist rule), the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Portuguese
Revolution of 1974 ( which ended 40 years of fascist dictatorship), the Iranian
Revolution of 1979, and the Rumanian Revolution of 1989 (against the dictator
Ceausescu).
Moreover, in 2011 there were two very important revolutions. In Tunisia,
the dictator of 23 years, Zinedine Ben Ali, was overthrown in just 21 days of
mass resistance, and in Egypt,
Hosni Mubarak who had ruled for 30 years, was downed in 18 days of
extraordinary mass mobilization. The significance of these revolutions is
sometimes underestimated because they ‘only’ removed dictators and didn’t
fundamentally change society – the capitalists still rule in Tunisia and Egypt
–
and this problem is one that lies
ahead for the Tunisian and Egyptian people. Nevertheless they showed what is
possible. Approximately 15 million people took to the streets across Egypt
in those 18 days and they defeated one of the most powerful police states in
the region.
Our power
Of course revolutions only happen in ‘exceptional’ circumstances, but we are
living in exceptional times – the most severe economic crisis since the 1930s
and a sustained onslaught on the living standards and conditions of the mass of
people, also unprecedented since the thirties. In this situation revolution is
not only possible but, more and more, the only way of securing any sort of
decent future for ourselves and our children.
And we have the power to do it. Remember, without the labour and
co-operation of working people – that is without OUR labour – nothing in this
society moves. Without us no train, bus or LUAS runs; no plane takes off, no airport
functions; no imports or exports pass through our ports; no lorries move goods
around the country; no factories produce products and no supermarkets or call
centres sell them. Tony O’Reilly and Denis O’Brien own most of our newspapers
but without journalists and print workers no paper is written or produced. No
school runs without teachers, cleaners and caretakers; no hospital without
nurses, porters, cleaners, receptionists.
And so on for almost everything including the capitalist state itself:
government departments and ministries need office workers and cleaners; even An
Garda Siochana, whose main function and purpose is to defend private property –
if need by force – depends on the labour of ordinary people to do this.
This gives us enormous potential power.
If we use even a significant proportion of it we can make a revolution
in Ireland.
Chapter
6. A different society
If the ordinary people of Ireland
sweep away the bankers, developers and politicians who have brought this
country to its knees and take power into our own hands who will we put in their
place and what kind of society should we establish?
It would make no sense to hand the banks and major firms over to new private
capitalist owners as this would just restart the same cycle of inequality and
exploitation that had just been broken. Even if the new rich and the new bosses
started off behaving better than the Seanie FitzPatricks, Jonny Ronans and
Denis O’Briens we can be sure their good behaviour wouldn’t last and that they
would use their wealth and economic power to undermine the new people’s
democracy that had been won by the revolution.
On the other hand banks, financial institutions, modern firms, transport and
communications systems cannot be divided between individual workers in the way
a feudal aristocrat’s vast estate could be divided up among peasants. You
cannot parcel out the LUAS or Iarnrod Earann among individual drivers, or
divide up the ownership of Bank of Ireland between 4 million citizens or even
40,000 depositors. The only way for the people to retain any control of these
and similar institutions would be to take them into public ownership and make
them the collective property of the state.
But this raises another problem. We know from the experience of Russia
and Eastern Europe, as well as various nationalized
industries in Britain
and elsewhere, that state ownership in itself is no guarantee of either
fairness and equality or even honesty and efficiency. In so-called ‘communist’ Russia
the vast bulk of industry was state owned but the state officials that ran it
were just as much a corrupt elite and just as exploitative of ordinary people
as western bosses. Therefore it will be necessary to ensure that both the state
owned industries and institutions and the state itself are democratically
controlled.
Three things are needed for this. First, there needs to be democracy at
work, with the regular election and accountability of all management
committees. At the moment nothing like this exists in capitalist companies or
industries so the idea may seem strange but if the people of Ireland
can elect TDs and their President, and the people of the USA
can elect their Congress and President, workers can elect managers.
Second, the government, political representatives and state officials need
to be elected and recallable by the people who elect them, not once every four
years but all the time. For this to happen they have to be elected by and
accountable to actual collectives or assemblies of working people who meet
regularly, not just voted in once every four years by atomized voters who never
meet or discuss.
Third, all these elected managers and representatives in industry and the
state have to receive no more than the average industrial wage so that they
remain in touch with the people they are serving and don’t become a new privileged
elite, like the bureaucrats in Russia did.
All these things will be very possible to establish because the
revolutionary mobilization of the people will have already paved the way for
them. In the process of making the revolution ordinary people will have had to
make a start at taking over the running of society. They will have held mass
demonstrations with democratic public assemblies like those organized by the
Indignados in Spain
and the Occupy movement in America
in 2011. They will have organized mass strikes and general strikes with elected
strike committees from different workplaces and got used to getting rid of
corrupt or privileged union officials. They will have occupied many of their
workplaces and in many cases started to run them. They will have organized
their communities, like in Free Derry and the Battle
of the Bogside in 1969 but on a much larger scale.
This combination of social or collective ownership and democratic control
will be something new. It doesn’t exist in any society in the world today. But
both elements are essential. Without social ownership the rich capitalists can
always subvert and manipulate any parliament. Without genuine democracy at work
and in the state, state ownership just becomes state capitalism.
It is also the essence of socialism.
It is what the socialist movement aspired to when it began early in the 19
th
century. It is what Marx and Engels meant by socialism (and communism) when
they called on the proletariat (working people) to overthrow the bourgeoisie
and take over the running of society, saying ‘the emancipation of the working
class is the act of the working class itself’.
It was what the Russian Revolution meant by socialism in its first phase
before the rise of Stalin. The slogan of the Revolution was ‘All Power to the
Soviets’ and they called their society the Soviet Union, but ‘soviet’ was just
the Russian word for ‘council’ and the early soviets were precisely the kind of
democratic assemblies we are talking about.
It is what James Connolly meant by socialism. He wrote, ‘Socialism properly
implies above all things the co-operative control by the workers of the
machinery of production; without this co-operative control the public ownership
by the State is not Socialism – it is only State capitalism’ *
And it is what the Socialist Workers Party means by socialism today.
* James Connolly, ‘State Monopoly versus
Socialism’, Workers’ Republic, 1899.
Socialism, equality and freedom
A socialist society would be an enormously fairer, more equal society than
we have at present and it would offer a much better life for the large majority
of people.
Socialism would not create perfect equality overnight but it would
drastically reduce the extremes of inequality that we have under
capitalism.
The biggest inequality we
have in today’s society, both in Ireland and the world, doesn’t come from some
people being paid more than other people, or some people working harder than
others or being cleverer than others; it comes from a very few people being
able to make vast sums by exploiting the labour of others.
Michael O’Leary, estimated wealth
€434 million, did not acquire that fortune by working 434 times as hard as your
average millionaire and 434,000 times as hard as one his air stewards who only
has €1000 in the bank, if that. He made his money by getting thousands of
Ryanair workers to work for him and paying them less, every hour of every day,
than the value of the goods and services they produce in that hour and in that
day.
A financier like Desmond Dermot, wealth €1.35 billion, seems to make his
money just by manipulating money and doing ‘clever’ deals. But in reality all
the shares he trades, the bets he handles, the profits he makes on buying and
selling companies and all the wealth he manipulates and ‘grows’, has its basic
source in the labour of working people.
Socialism, with public ownership of banks and main industries, will cut out
this kind of inequality immediately. At the same time it would make it possible
to decide democratically how much we want, as a society, to pay people. Do we
really want to pay top footballers hundreds of times as much as teachers or
consultants ten times as much as nurses?
Socialism will make society much more equal in many other ways. It will
provide free and equal education and health services for all and cut out
inheritance of great wealth so that our children get an equal start in life.
It will work seriously to eliminate all racial,
national, religious and gender inequality.- this is vital not just as a matter
of principle but also because the new society would not survive if allowed
itself to divided on any of these lines.
Socialism will create a better life for people because it will produce for
human need rather than for profit. Capitalism devotes huge resources of human
labour and energy to activities that are useless or positively harmful.
Advertising is an obvious example. Advertising is everywhere in our society but
most of it serves no purpose other trying to make a profit by persuading us to
buy one brand of beer, soap powder or car instead of another or to buy things
we either don’t need or damage us such as cigarettes.
Capitalism wastes human resources on a vast scale by making large numbers of
people unemployed. When we say, ‘there are no jobs’, it doesn’t mean there are
no tasks that need performing – the world is overflowing with tasks that need
to be done - it means that business is not finding it profitable to employ
people at the moment. Production for need not profit would make it possible to
eliminate unemployment.
At present if there is a choice between building a casino, a luxury hotel
and a hospital, the casino or the hotel are likely to win out over the hospital
not because they are what society needs but because they are profitable. Simply
by shifting the priority from profit to people socialism would improve people’s
lives dramatically.
With proper use of existing wealth and resources there would be no need for
any child in this society to grow up in poverty or any pensioner to struggle to
heat their home. Instead of having some people working 60 or more hours a week
and others not working at all the work could be shared out rationally so that
every one works, say 30 hours a week and no more.
The introduction of democracy at work will change not only what gets
produced but the nature of work itself, helping it to become a creative and
fulfilling activity rather than boring drudgery as so much of it is at present.
This will greatly enrich people’s lives. And for working people whose choices
in life are often severely limited by poverty, socialism will bring a big
increase in their real freedom of choice.
Chapter
7. Would socialism work?
‘That all sounds very good in theory but it would never work in practice!’
Just as conventional wisdom says that revolution from below will never happen,
so it also tells us that socialism couldn’t possibly work, except perhaps as a
police state.
In this chapter I want first to examine three of the most commonly expressed
arguments against the possibility of a society of equality, democracy and
freedom.
There would be no incentive
‘Without profits to be made and high salaries to be earned there would no
incentive for anyone to work hard or innovate.’
First let’s note that the rule in Ireland at the moment, and pretty much
everywhere else, seems to be that if you are rich already you need to be given
huge incentives to get you to work at all but if you are poor, unemployed or on
social welfare the ‘incentive’ you are given is not higher wages but a benefit
cut.
However, to answer the objection directly, it is not true that there would
no incentive to work in a socialist society. On the contrary the vast majority
would have
more incentive to work
than they do under capitalism because their work would directly benefit
themselves, their families and their communities instead of first enriching the
bosses (with the rest of us left hoping for some crumbs from the rich man’s
table).
When people can see a real connection between the work they do and improving
their lives through better schools and colleges, better medical services,
better housing, an improved environment, more facilities for young people,
shorter working hours and so on, there will not be a problem getting people to
work.
Besides, despite the myths spread by the likes of Joan Burton, people hate
being unemployed and not just because of the lack of money, but because it
leaves them feeling isolated, useless and unvalued by society. Even under this
system most people want to make a contribution to society and socialism would
greatly increase their opportunity to do so. It would also, as it developed,
steadily widen the range of work that would be creative, interesting and
rewarding in itself.
The question of innovation is a red herring. Capitalists, usually calling
themselves ‘entrepreneurs’, like to present themselves as innovators. In fact
most of the really important innovations and discoveries come from scientists
and, in the modern world, are a collective process, involving large teams of
researchers. What the big corporations and governments do is fund, direct and
exploit these innovations for their own purposes.
This fundamentally distorts the process. Far more resources are put into
research for military purposes, ie how to kill people more effectively, than in
to saving or improving people’s lives so we have intercontinental missiles
capable of blowing up the whole world but still no cure for AIDs. Moreover many
of the corporations deliberately hold back or suppress innovations, new drugs
etc, if they fear they will undermine their sales and profits.
Socialism, therefore, would have no problem organizing the collective
endeavours of scientists and others to produce new ideas and inventions –
indeed it would do this on a bigger scale than the present system – and also
ensuring that this research and innovation really served people’s needs.
What about human nature?
The argument about incentives is one part of a wider argument about human
nature which is, and always has been, the main argument put forward against
socialism. It runs roughly as follows.
Human nature is basically selfish and greedy and therefore only a system
based on greed – namely capitalism- will work effectively. Socialism and
equality, being contrary to human nature, would have to be imposed on people by
dictatorship and a police state, which would be even worse than what we’ve got
now. Besides there are always ambitious and power hungry people who will always
rise to the top so any attempt to change the system will only produce a new set
of rulers who will be just as bad or worse than the present lot.
This view of human nature as fundamentally bad has been preached by the
church for nearly 2000 years (as the doctrine of original sin) so it is not
surprising that it’s often regarded as just common sense. But it is not true.
People, ie babies are not born sinful or greedy or ambitious, nor are they born
virtuous, unselfish and ‘naturally’ socialist. In fact they are born with, and
develop, the capacity to be all these things.
If we think of the people we know and look at the behaviour we actually see
around us we find that the overwhelming majority of people are neither all bad
nor all good but a complicated mixture of selfishness in some respects and
generosity in others, of courage in some aspects of their life and cowardice in
others and so on. Some people are physically brave but morally weak, with
others it is the reverse. One person will be generous in giving to charity but
mean with their family; another will be kindly at home but a bullying boss or
manager at work.
Even the very best people usually have some flaws and even the worst often
have some redeeming features. A lot depends on how we are conditioned as
children, by society as well as by our parents, and even more depends on the
social circumstances and situations we are in. People who never dream of
killing a fellow human being in ordinary circumstances become killers when they
find themselves in army uniform and ordered to kill. A teenage tearaway grows
up and becomes a responsible parent. A militant trade unionist turns into a
moderate or even a sell-out when they leave the shop floor and become a union
official. Someone else doesn’t get radical until they are middle aged.
The point is wouldn’t it be better to have a social system which encouraged
solidarity and cooperation as socialism would, rather than encouraging greed
and individual self interest as capitalism does?
And, yes, there may well be ambitious and power hungry individuals who want
to take advantage of the revolution and the new situation for their own ends
but it is perfectly possible to put in place mechanisms to prevent this
happening. In fact we have already given some idea what these should be:
regular democratic assemblies to hold all officials and elected representatives
accountable to the people and a strict maximum wage for all officials and
representatives so that they can’t become a privileged elite.
This depends on having people actively engaged
in their communities and workplaces, not just sitting at home watching TV, but
that is exactly what the whole process of revolution will create.
But doesn’t history show that revolutions always go wrong? That’s certainly
the impression we are often given but it is not what history shows at all. The
Dutch Revolt of the sixteenth century (which was the first significant
revolution of the last 500 years) freed the Dutch from the tyranny of the
Habsburg Empire based in Madrid and created a very successful and progressive
Dutch Republic. The English Revolution of 1642 ended the absolute monarchy of
Charles I and brought about parliamentary rule and made England
into the most economically advanced country in the world in the next hundred
years.* The American Revolution of 1775 freed America from British rule and
launched America on course to both a parliamentary democracy and the world’s
biggest power. The French Revolution of 1789 sounded the death knell of
absolute monarchy and spread modern ideas of democracy and freedom
internationally**
But these were
middle class
revolutions, led by the middle classes, with artisans and peasants as
supporters, with the aim of getting rid of the old feudal aristocrats so that
the middle class could become the new ruling class and develop capitalism. In
this they were generally very successful.
*Of
course what Cromwell did in Ireland, where he was a brutal oppressor, is a different
story.
.** Conservatives make a lot of the ‘reign of
terror’ when aristocrats were guillotined in 1793 but the bloodletting was
short lived and relatively minor (about 3000) compared to that in any number of
wars or the suppression of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland when far more (between
20- 50,000) were killed – it was just
different blood that was being spilled.
But what about the Russian Revolution, wasn’t that supposed to be socialist?
Yes it was and I’ll deal with this next. First however it needs to be said that
actually there is clear historical proof that there is nothing in human nature
that prevents us living together as equals- it’s just that this history gets
much less attention in school or in the media than the history of kings, queens
and tyrants.
Human beings as tool making animals distinct from apes have been around for
more than two and a half million years, and in our current physical form, the
same as contemporary humans, for about 100,000 years.
But the division into rich and poor, rulers
and ruled, only even started to emerge with the development of agriculture
between 10,000 and 5000 years ago.
For the vast bulk of human history people lived as hunters and gatherers
without class divisions and without governments or rulers (or police or
soldiers) on the basis of sharing and cooperation i.e. a ‘primitive’ kind of
socialism. We know this because although class divided societies started to get
the upper hand in places like Iraq and Egypt about 5000 years ago some of the
equal societies survived into modern times – for example among the Eskimos, the
Australian Aborigines, the Amazon ‘Indians’, and the !Kung San (‘Kalahari
bushmen’). These peoples obviously lived at a low economic level but they had
better lives, and better diets, than many of the poor in the third world today.
So we know an equal society is possible and not incompatible with human
nature.
The failure in Russia
The collapse of ‘communism’ in Russia
and Eastern Europe in 1989-1991 was presented in the
media as the failure of socialism. Even now it is often quoted as proof that
‘socialism is dead’ or is a ‘failed ideology’.
In reality the system that collapsed in Russia
and Eastern Europe, and thoroughly deserved to collapse,
was not genuine communism or socialism at all. It lacked what Connolly and
Larkin and all the genuine socialists going back to Marx held to be the genuine
ingredient of socialism, namely the democratic control of society by working class
people. Nor was it a society of equality.
In Russia there
had been no democratic control of the government or industry by working people
since the 1920s when it was destroyed by Stalin and his new class of privileged
bureaucrats.
Stalin and his supporters systematically dismantled the rights the Russian
workers had won in the 1917 Revolution and built up a monstrous police state in
which anyone who challenged the power of the ruling bureaucracy was likely to
find themselves in a slave labour camp in Siberia.
State ownership without democratic control by the workers was, as Connolly
said, not socialism but state capitalism. It was this state capitalism that was
imposed on the countries of Eastern Europe when they
were taken over by the Red Army in the process of defeating Hitler.
It was against this imposed state capitalism that the Hungarian working
class rose up in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 only to be crushed by Russian
tanks, that the Czech people rebelled in 1968 only to be crushed by Russian
intervention, and that the Polish workers created the mass trade union,
Solidarnosc (‘solidarity’) in 1981 to be suppressed by a Russian backed military
coup.
And it was this state capitalism
not
socialism that failed in 1989.
However, the Russian Revolution did not begin that way. It began as a real
workers’ revolution from below that first overthrew the Tsars, who had ruled Russia
for 500 years, and then, in October 1917, established genuine workers’ power
through workers’ councils (‘Soviets’). So how did it go wrong and does the fact
that it went wrong prove that socialism won’t work?
The Russian Revolution started out with incredible hopes and enthusiasm and
achieved some magnificent things in its early days. It gave land to the
peasants who had been exploited for centuries. It took Russia
out of the dreadful slaughter of the First World War. It established complete
legal equality for women before they even got the vote in Britain
or Ireland, and
homosexuality was legalized in December 1917 (compared to 1967 in Britain
and 1993 in Ireland).
But there were huge problems from the outset. Russia
in 1917 was still a very backward country economically and socially – the large
majority of the population were peasants and urban workers were only a small
minority plus the country was devastated by the First World War.
Then, soon after the Revolution, all the Western capitalist powers,
especially France and Britain, got to together to finance and arm former
Tsarist generals in an effort to smash the Revolution. This plunged Russia
into a terrible civil war which inflicted the most extreme damage on the
economy and the people.
The Revolution defended itself by means of the Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky,
and survived but at a terrible cost. The working class who had made the
revolution was virtually destroyed and lost the ability to democratically
control the society.
There was really only one way out of this situation and that was to spread
the revolution to other countries. This was what Lenin, Trotsky and the
original leaders of the Revolution tried to do by forming the Communist
International. They knew, and said openly, that it would be impossible to complete
the building of socialism in Russia
alone.
They were right and when the revolution failed to spread to Italy,
Germany and so
on (though it very nearly did) and Lenin died, Stalin and a layer of
bureaucrats he collected round him were able to take over the leadership of the
Soviet Union. They drove out Trotsky, abandoned the goal
of international revolution, and opted for ‘socialism in one country’. In
practice this turned into state capitalism in one country and a police state.
The key point here is that the failure of the Russian Revolution to fulfill
its promise was not due to the unworkability of socialism but to the
impossibility of sustaining socialism in one isolated country. This is very
relevant to Ireland
because although we could make a start on creating socialism here it would not
be possible for it to survive indefinitely in Ireland
alone.
We will explore this issue further in the next chapter.
Chapter
8. A world to win
The biggest problems facing any attempt to create a socialist society in Ireland
would be resistance from the rich who would want to regain their lost power and
privileges and opposition from the rich and the ruling classes in the rest of
the capitalist world.
These problems are closely connected. There is no doubt the Irish rich would
do what they could to sabotage the new society. No ruling class in history has
ever departed the scene willingly or graciously, but by themselves they would
not be able to do much. The really rich are a very small minority in society,
no more than 1 or 2%, and once they had lost their hold on state power – the politicians,
officials, judges, gardai etc. who protect them – they would easily be dealt
with by the Irish people if they stood alone.
Unfortunately they do not stand alone. The Irish rich are connected by
thousands of ties to the much more powerful force of the rich internationally.
Take for example, Tony O’Reilly. He is the former CEO of Heinz, is married to a
Greek shipping heiress and horse breeder, lives mainly in the Bahamas
and was knighted by the British Queen.
Or there is billionaire investor, Dermot Desmond. He splits his time between
Dublin, Gibraltar
and Barbados,
owns Celtic FC and the luxury Sandy Lane
Hotel in Barbados
(with John Magnier and J P Macmanus), made much of his fortune by buying and
selling London City
Airport and is part owner of a
Latvian bank and a Toronto mining
company.
The Moriarty Tribunal into corruption found that when Desmond gave Charlie
Haughey £100,000 in 1994 (Haughey said he was experiencing ‘a shortage of
funds’).the payments were made via the Swiss bank account of a company called
Anesia Etablissement, Banque Scandinave en Suisse, Case Postale 901, 1211
Geneva 3, of which Desmond was the beneficial owner, via an account at Henry
Ansbacher & Company to an account at Cayman International Bank Trust
Company, held for Haughey's benefit.
These examples can be repeated indefinitely because in today’s world all the
super-rich operate internationally. Ireland’s three richest registered citizens
are Indian industrial magnate Pallonji Mistry (€4.4 billion) who also owns
Jaguar and Rover, the Texas based billionaire John P Grayken(€3.9 billion) who
owns property assets in Germany and a stake in a South Korean bank, and Hilary
Weston
(€3.67 billion) who is married to
Canadian retail tycoon Galen Weston – between them they own Canada’s biggest
grocery chain along with Selfridges in the UK and Brown Thomas in Dublin.
Not only would the international rich have a direct interest in aiding their
Irish friends but also the system as a whole would want to prevent any viable
alternative to international capitalism developing. Consequently they would put
any emerging socialist society under immense economic, political and even
military pressure.
They could subject Ireland to economic blockade like Israel does to Gaza or
the US did to Cuba, while providing vast funds to Irish reactionaries and
counterrevolutionaries the way the US funded the Contras in Nicaragua..
Here we have to be brutally honest. Just as workers in one factory or
industry can go on strike or even occupy their workplace, as the Vita Cortex
workers did for five months, so Irish working people could hold out for a
period against international capitalism. But they could not hold out
indefinitely or permanently and under conditions of siege there would be a
limit to how much progress could be made towards a fully free and equal
society.
However there would be a way of overcoming this problem, as there could have
been for Russia
in the 1920s, and that would be to spread the revolution to other countries in
alliance with the working classes of those countries. Would this be possible?
Spreading the Revolution
There are a number of reasons why spreading the revolution to a number of
other countries – Spain, Greece, Britain or indeed Egypt, South Africa or China
-
in a chain reaction would be very
possible.
The first is simply that the rest of the world needs revolution just as much
as we do. The inequality on a world scale is even more extreme than it is in Ireland.
On the one hand the 100 richest people on the planet got even richer in
2012, adding $241 billion to their collective wealth (according to the
Bloomberg Billionaires Index) bringing their aggregate net wealth to $1.9
trillion- that’s $1,900,000,000,000!! This compares to the total African GDP
(the sum of everything produced in the continent) of $1.8 trillion. Africa
has a population of 1,000 million!
On the other hand it is estimated that 870 million people, more than the
combined population of USA
and Europe, actually live in hunger and about 1.4
billion live on less than $2 a day.
The economic crash that brought Ireland
to its knees in 2008 was also global in nature, like the Great Depression of
the 1930s. Like the Great Depression, which started with the Wall St Crash,
this crisis first broke out in the USA:
a property bubble went bust and turned into a banking crisis much as it did in Ireland.
Now almost all countries are affected.
As a consequence unemployment in the Eurozone stands at 11.8% with the
number of jobless reaching 18.8 million (the highest figure since the Eurozone
began). Greece
and Spain lead
the field at over 26% unemployment each.
Ireland’s
problems of political corruption, lack of real democracy, reactionary religious
hierarchies, sexism and sectarian conflict are all global as well. In Spain
the cry ‘They don’t represent us’ echoed from hundreds of its city squares in
2011. The so-called ‘pro-life’ Catholic bigots in Ireland
are receiving massive funds from the anti-abortion bigots in the US.
The Catholic Church abused Irish children and covered it up, but it did the
same in Canada,
the US and many
other countries and so too did the British establishment; look at the Savile
case and the BBC.
At the same time racism and fascism are growing, with the neo-Nazi Golden
Dawn becoming ever more menacing in Greece,
along with the openly Hitlerite Jobbik Party in Hungary,
the National Front in France
and many other examples.
Alongside of all this the problem of climate change accelerates rapidly. The
world is warming even faster than the scientists expected. The arctic ice is
melting at an alarming rate with an ice-free Artic
Ocean in the summer months only a
decade or so away. In 2012
America
had its hottest year on record.and Australia
is experiencing an unprecedented heatwave as these words are being written.
Temperatures have been so high the Australian Bureau of
Meteorology has increased its temperature scale to 54 degrees, and added a new
colour code to its temperature maps.
What climate change means is not ‘the end of the
world ‘ in 50 years time as it is sometimes caricatured but steadily increasing
extreme weather events and disasters such as fires, droughts, storms and floods
which will have more and more devastating effects on people especially the
poor.
And this is a truly global crisis which cannot be
solved in Ireland or any other single country but which requires an
international shift from dependence on fossil fuels which produce carbon
emissions (oil, gas and coal) to renewable power sources such as wind power,
solar power and tidal power. This can be done but only if we stop producing for
profit and start planning production for human need.
But if the crisis is international so to is the
struggle against it. In fact if we look at the history of popular resistance
and revolution we have that it develops through international waves.
The famous revolts in Irish history have been parts
of international tides of struggle. The uprising of the United Irishmen in 1798
was part of the wave of revolution that followed the French Revolution of 1789.
The 1913 Dublin Lockout was linked to the period of international industrial
struggle known as ‘the Great Unrest’ in Britain, which also included the IWW (Industrial Workers of the
World) in America – both Connolly and Larkin had links with the IWW. The
Easter Rising of 1916 and the Irish War of Independence were both part of the
revolutionary wave growing out of the First World War whose high point was the Russian Revolution of 1917 and which swept Europe in 1919.
This even applies to the start of the Civil Rights
Movement and ‘the Troubles’ in the North in 1968. It was very much a product of
the general student, youth and civil rights revolt of the 1960s.
The last two years have also seen an international
tide of revolt including the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions and the rest of
the Arab Spring, the Indignados movement in Spain, the general strikes and street resistance in Greece, the Occupy movement in America and the Southern European General Strike against austerity
on 14
November, 2012, and much else
besides.
Thus any revolution in Ireland would be sure to meet with a massive response from the
working people of many other countries. Moreover we now live in a world where
global integration, travel and communications are far more developed than in
the past. Just as it was possible to watch the epic battles of the Egyptian
Revolution around Tahrir Square, live on TV, so news of mass rebellion in Ireland
would spread round the globe in hours
and days and a revolutionary government would be able to send its message to
workers everywhere as never before.
Finally there is the crucial fact that the
international working class, the main force for socialist change has grown
immensely. The media is always telling us that class is less important these
days and that the working class is disappearing. This is not true even in Ireland or Britain, once we understand that most white collar workers are
working class, but on a global scale it is the opposite of the truth. Rather in
China, India, Brazil, Egypt, Korea, Indonesia and many other countries that used to be mainly peasant
countries there has been a vast expansion of the working class and,
concentrated in great cities, these workers have immense revolutionary
potential as the great revolt against Mubarak in Cairo
showed.
All these factors make it very reasonable to expect
that a revolution and socialist change in Ireland, or anywhere else, would spread rapidly to other countries.
A Socialist
World
If working people took power into their own hands in
several major countries – say Ireland, France and Greece - it would create a massive momentum for change. If
socialism then triumphed in the world’s key economies – USA, China, Japan, Germany – the rest would follow suit without much trouble and we
would have a socialist world.
A socialist world would be a new beginning for
humanity. It would generate immense possibilities for the human race which we
can only speculate about.
But some things are clear: no child would go hungry,
poverty would be abolished, the causes of war would be eliminated, and the
exploitation of the many by the few and all the immense inequality it produces
would end. Mankind would be able, for the first time in history, to control –
collectively, democratically and rationally – its production and its future.
The alternative if we leave our world in the hands
of the rich is also clear – increasing inequality, hardship and barbaric
destruction for us, our children and our grand children.
Chapter 9: Get
involved! Get organized!
As we have said, we, the ordinary people, are going
to have to take mass action to defend ourselves against government attacks and
to force them into any sort of alternative policies.
This is even more the case with the struggle for
socialism. Real socialism won’t be, and cannot be handed down to us from above
by politicians, leaders or anyone else. We have to win it for ourselves. This
means getting involved in the struggle.
However, it is also not the case that Irish working
people will all wake up one day and say, ‘That’s it we a need revolution, we
need socialism!’ Rather, the struggle for socialism and socialist thinking
among the mass of people will develop out
of the struggle against government attacks and austerity, and campaigns on
all sorts of local and national issues.
Therefore everyone who wants to see a better, fairer
more equal Ireland and a better world should get involved in the battles and
campaigns of working people going on around them; like, for example, the
campaigns against the household charge and the property tax, or for a woman’s
right to choose or to stop the cuts in child benefit or to defend education or
stop the sell off of our natural resources.
Another way to get involved is through the trade
unions. Trade unions are not very popular with many working class people in Ireland at the moment. This is because the main leaders of the
unions are in the Labour Party and have failed to lead any serious resistance
to Fine Gael/Labour cuts or, in many cases, to defend their own members against
the bosses.
Nevertheless, trade unions are mass organizations of
working class people which link people together in their workplaces and by
their occupations or industry. This means they have a very important role to
play in mobilizing the working class. People who want change should be involved
in their unions and work to reclaim them from leaders who sell out.
But, as well as campaigns and trade unionism we also
need political organization. This is not just to contest elections, useful and
important as that is, but to be the element that draws together all the
different struggles in a coherent strategy.
Our rulers – the rich and the government together –
plan and strategise and they have a worked out view of the world, in which the
bottom line is profit, on which to base their plans. Our side also needs to
plan and strategize and we too need a worked out view of the world which puts
people first. We need a political party.
This doesn’t mean a party like Fianna Fail, Fine
Gael or Labour, run from the top by professional politicians and rich donors or
by well heeled trade union leaders. It means a genuinely democratic
organization rooted in working class communities and working people’s
struggles.
It means a party which takes an active part in the
day to day campaigns and, at the same time, puts the case for socialism and for
revolution within the movement.
This is what we in the Socialist Workers Party are
working to build. We work alongside and with everyone who wants to resist and
as part of the People Before Profit Alliance and the United Left Alliance. We
are involved in many grassroots campaigns across the country and in trade
unions and student unions.
Movements and struggles we have participated in
include the movement against the Iraq War in 2003, the campaign against the bin
tax, campaigns against racism, for a woman’s right to choose, against cuts to SNAs,
for the Home Help Service, against student fees, and against the Household Tax
and the Property Tax.
In the unions we work to mobilize solidarity for
strikes and sit ins such as the Vita Cortex occupation and to win the unions
back from the right wing leaders and officials who currently dominate them.
Experience has shown that the presence of socialists
in campaigns and strikes helps them to struggle and win. It has also shown that
when a revolution does break out the existence of a strong revolutionary party
can make the difference between the revolution winning and it being defeated.
For all these reasons we ask you if you agree with
our basic ideas to join us in the work of building such a party in Ireland.
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