PROVISIONAL Sinn Fein's campaign in the 26 County election was a new departure for that organisation, encouraged by the H-Block vote last June. The initial assessment published in An Phoblacht of February 25 — 'Questions Posed', by Kevin Burke — suggests that a recoil away from that new approach may develop.
Writing "an initial assessment of Sinn Fein's election intervention “, editorial writer Kevin Burke says that "Sinn Fein is faced with the serious task of soberly, and intelligently, assessing its structures, strategy and policy in the light of its electoral experience". His article is an honest attempt to start doing that.
He says that Sinn Fein's campaign was rushed and Sinn Fein lacked 'preparedness' to carry through its recent decision to offer itself in elections.
"There was a level of confusion in the electoral strategy" among Sinn Fein supporters, and "Sinn Fein was struggling to develop a policy to put on offer". A tendency developed for Sinn Fein "to distance itself from the armed struggle in the North" — especially as they had to campaign against a government ban on their broadcasts. (The ban was eventually declared illegal by the High Court).
Difficulties arose in arguing abstention, especially as people were confused when Sinn Fein decided to take the government to court on the radio and television ban.
• Sinn Fein got drawn into the "figure-swapping and suggested reforms" of the election campaign. The "defining of partition by the economic cost of partition..." was a valid point to .make, but not the main one.
"The vital message here is the crushing violent oppression of the nationalist population by a foreign army as evidenced by death, torture, imprisonment, constant harassment and so on. To support those taking up arms against this enemy is vital and it is to this support existing in the 26 counties that Sinn Fein must always first appeal" (emphasis added).
"It is imperative that the economic and social struggle is not divorced from the national struggle; that is the path of reformism. The emphasis must always be that native capitalism and British imperialism are interdependent and the former can only be overthrown when the latter, its prop in Ireland, is broken.
"Capitalism in the Free State thus depends on the British as its first line of defence and has come to depend on it more than most neo-colonies".
Now, while this may be a convenient propaganda 'line' to link the northern question with socialism, it is nonsense as a description of reality. For example, the Southern bourgeoisie on issues like agricultural policy pursues policies in the EEC hostile to British interests. The implication that military withdrawal by Britain would be the end of the power of British capitalism — or perhaps of all capitalism, including Irish — in Ireland is also nonsense.
It is not an adequately true view of the nature of modern imperialism — which does not mainly depend on military occupation — or of the nature of capitalism and how to overthrow it in Ireland. It ignores the centrality of the communal antagonism in Northern Ireland.
It justifies the 'nationalism first' political focus of the Republicans — by way of transparently spurious and false definitions of the realities of Irish economic and political life.
Kevin Burke is merely restating the central error of socialists in Provisional Sinn Fein — that the national question can be the main locomotive of working class revolution in Ireland.
Against the elements of 'social work' politics he sees in PSF's election campaign, against the huckstering and 'clientelism' that is dominant in 26 county politics, and against the possible notion that a socialist republic can come by parliamentary decree, he argues that the road to the socialist republic lies through "the moulding of all the working class, including the unemployed, the youth, women, small farmers and the underprivileged in whatever way, into a definable and self-conscious class which is in a position to take into its hands and control for itself the economic wealth of the country. Without that, party political success is meaningless".
Exactly (though small farmers are our possible allies, not part of the working class).
Rut how? With what slogans? With the class struggle in the south related how to the Northern struggle?
Burke: '' individual battles and campaigns on housing, employment and so on must be engaged in and fought with vigour; but the final goal must always be kept in mind, the politicisation not on;«y of Sinn Fein members but of all the people towards the removal of the British presence from the North and the overthrow of the capitalist system, North and South". (Emphasis added).
Burke's conclusion is clearly that what PSF needed was a harder, sharper version of the nationalist core of their campaign, and a more general, 'elevated' and abstract proclamation of the socialist goal alleged to be at the end of the nationalist road. That is,an intensification of everything that showed the impotence of PSF's campaign in the 26 county elections.
No, the lesson is that the national question must be viewed, assessed, and reassessed in the light of a working class programme for Ireland of which it is only a part, and not the other way round.
Provisional Sinn Fein and its political satellites have an upside down, back to front view of the proper relationship of the national question and the fight for workers' power, north and south, in Ireland today.
SO 11 4 1982