Ireland. The setting The "peace people" emerged from the streets of Belfast, which have seen eight years of violence. The civil rights movement of 1968-69 had become transformed into an armed national liberation struggle directed against the very existence of the Northern Irish state and determined to secure the reunification of Ireland. That the struggle developed in this manner was in many ways inevitable. The original demands of the civil rights movement, aimed at thoroughly restructuring and reforming the Northern Irish state, proved unwinable as long as that state continued to exist. Although various reforms were granted, the extensive privileges enjoyed by Protestants (who support the link with Britain) over Catholics (who tended to be Irish nationalist in sympathy) remained. Indeed, maintaining those privileges is the very raison d'être of the Northern Irish state, which was created by the bayonets of the British army in 1921 to safeguard the interests of the pro-British minority in Ireland. A state described by one of its own former prime ministers as "a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people." Such was the maxim on which the rulers of the state operated. Catholics were denied various bourgeois rights and the Protestant working class was given preferential treatment in employment and housing. This forced many Catholics to emigrate and thereby countered the higher
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birth rate among Catholics, who threatened eventually to "out-breed" the Protestants and thus vote the artificially created state into the rest of Ireland. It was this system of privilege that the civil rights movement attempted to change, but since the privileges were so deep-rooted and bound up with the existence of the state itself, the challenge proved unsuccessful. In August 1969 the aspirations of the Catholic population were finally met by an armed invasion of Catholic areas of Belfast by police and civilian forces. Nine Catholic were killed and many Catholic homes were burned down. In general the reaction of the Catholic working class was twofold: to ensure that they would never again be defenseless in face of such attacks; to abandon any hope of reforming the state and to direct their efforts to the traditional struggle of ending the partition of Ireland and securing reunification. Seven years later this remains the essential nature of the struggle, a struggle which has two decisive characteristics. The first is the military campaign of the Provisional IRA against the Northern state and its backer, British imperialism. And although the Provisionals can be described as a petty-bourgeois elitist military movement, the war against Britain affects the Catholic working class as a whole, for the occupying forces play the traditional role of all occupying forces and unleash their violence against the civil community as a whole, in this case the Catholic community. The second is the civil conflict between the Protestant or "loyalist" (loyal to Britain) forces and the Catholic or republican forces. In the main this conflict has taken the form of sectarian assassinations, with the number of Catholics murdered exceeding the number of Protestant victims by a ratio of about three to one. In other words, both the violence of the sectarian conflict and that of the British army are primarily directed against the Catholic population. The loyalist and army violence is aimed at forcing the Provisionals and others to give up the struggle for national self-determination. As for the Provisionals, seven years after the opening of their military campaign, they appear as far from victory as ever. They have developed neither the strategy nor the tactics to defeat British imperialism, and while many people in the Catholic working class areas continue to sympathize with their aims, and indeed with the movement itself, the failure of the Provisionals to present a way forward makes it extremely difficult for the Catholic community to see the light at the end of the tunnel, to see any achievement for all the suffering they have gone through. Gathering support Such, in brief, was the general situation in which the "peace people" movement arose, and although those leading it are not the naive innocents they pretend to 22 be, it is true that the movement's growth in the North of Ireland was largely spontaneous. The way the leaders of the movement dealt with the death of the three children in August was an early indication of their general approach. They did not blame the British army, which had fired the shot, but the Provisionals, one of whose members was driving the car when he was shot dead. Betty Williams, an initiator of the "peace people, " made banner headlines in the British right-wing Daily Express, stating her aims this way: "Why | Must Stop the IRA. " From the start, then, the movement was directed against the Provisionals. But it was not this orientation that brought many Catholics onto the streets behind the banner of "peace" during the first few weeks. Rather, it was a general war-weariness, a simple and understandable desire to live in peace and to see the violence end. The movement also attracted support because it professed to be "non-political, " thus managing to gain credibility among both loyalists and republicans. The supporters of the movement on the Protestant side occasionally acted against the armed Protestant group the Ulster Defence Association, as the Catholic supporters acted against the Provisionals (much more aggressively than the Protestants), action which varied from informing on the Provisionals to the security force to blowing whistles if the Provisionals were seen hijacking cars. What the leaders of the "peace people" did not condemn was the role of the British army. For nearly two months they adopted an equivocal attitude. Thus, the day after the deaths of the three children, a British soldier shot and killed a 12-year-old Catholic girl in County Armagh. It was only after pressure from the Provisionals that the "peace people" condemned the murder. But overall they remained as silent as possible on the role of the British troops; they were equally as silent about their political solutions. There was good reason for this. They were attempting to build a campaign that could pose as neutral, condemning the "madmen" on both the loyalist and republican sides. The problem was that in fact not only were the "madmen" supported by a considerable number of people in their respective communities, but their aims, whatever their tactics, were supported by a majority of each community - on the Catholic side the aim of a free, united Ireland, on the Protestant side the aim of defeating the Catholic rising and guaranteeing the Protestant state and its privileges. So the communities, and those who marched behind the "peace" banners as well, were and are divided on political solutions. Therefore, to maintain the unity of the campaign its leaders had to avoid any statement that would offend either side. This applied both to political solutions and to their views on the British army. The Catholic working class is hostile to that army, while the Protestants support it. In order to maintain broad support from both communities the "peace people" thus had to maintain silence on their attitude to the army, hoping this question could be held in the background.
There are indications that the leaders of the movement grasped these problems and hoped, at least initially, that their marches would be so large and spectacular that the Provisionals would be forced to call off their campaign. In an interview with an English newspaper on August 22 Mairead Corrigan said, "Believe me, in a month's time there's not going to be a bombing or a hi-jacking or a shooting. There's going to be peace. " But of course there was not peace; indeed in September violence rose to its highest level in three years. It was one thing to sing hymns and pray for peace - the major activity of the peace rallies — it was another to say how peace would come. In the meantime, the "peace people" exported themselves to England, Scotland, Europe, and America. In Glasgow, Scotland, they received the backing of the trades council (a local confederation of trade-union branches) and of the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland. (The Orange Order is a violently anti-Catholic outfit organized along the lines of the Free Masons.) In Liverpool they received the support of bishops of both Catholic and Protestant churches. More surprisingly, throughout their campaign they have been backed by the CP's newspaper, Morning Star, and in some areas the CP has actually joined in the marches. The CP was not fooled by the nature of the movement. Indeed, CP members launched a similar campaign within the Irish trade-union movement under the title, "A Better Life for All. " Essentially, these attitudes flow from a denial by the Stalinists in both England and Ireland that the major enemy of the Irish is British imperialism and from the CP's hysterical animosity toward the Provisionals. Politically, the CP's attitude is essentially a "workerist" version of that of the "peace people": calling for "unity" of the Protestant and Catholic working class and relegating solution of the national question to the distant future.
The evolution of the "peace people" has illustrated the idealism of such notions and has shown with increasing clarity where these ideas lead politically. But what about the army? Sooner or later the "peace people" had to be driven to the wall on their attitude to the army, because proclaiming the need for "peace" and maintaining silence on the British army, the major source of violence, was a contradiction that could not be left in suspense indefinitely. This was all the more true since the period of growth of the movement coincided with a period of intensified army repression in the Catholic ghettos of Belfast. One example was the death of 13-year-old Paul Stewart, killed by a plastic bullet fired by a soldier. The ariny claimed the boy had been taking part in a riot, but the local residents of the area where it was alleged to have taken place, the Catholic Turf Lodge, knew this was false since they knew that there had been no riot. The death of the young Catholic triggered an angry reaction and on October 15 a local meeting was held in Turf Lodge to discuss the incident. Supporters of the "peace people" were invited to attend but none in the area could be found. So the leaders of the movement, Williams, Corrigan, and Ciaran McKeown turned up. Angry about the murder of the boy and about the equivocal attitude the "peace people" had shown toward the army, the audience chased the movement's leaders out. Indeed, only the intervention of local Provisionals stopped them from being badly injured. This treatment shocked the "peace people"; it was a sign of how fragile their support was becoming in the Catholic areas. Consequently, the "peace people" attempted to regain support from Catholics by making their most critical statement yet on the army, attacking it for the death of the boy. This criticism may have been enough to regain some Catholic support, but it immediately caused a furious reaction from loyalist "peace people". A prominent Protestant religious leader said the views of the leaders could "do nothing but alienate even the most moderate loyalist. " Other loyalist leaders made similar statements and these attacks threatened to break the campaign overnight. The following day in an effort to regain this now fragile Protestant support the "peace" leaders made a second, "definitive" statement on their attitude to the British army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the almost exclusively Protestant police force). They said: "Our attitude to the security forces is: we fully support the rule of law and order and until the Northern Ireland community themselves evolve their own community constitutions, then the Royal Ulster Constabularly and other security forces are the only legitimate upholders of law and order. " Behind these carefully chosen words the message was clear. As the popular bourgeois newspaper the Daily Mirror put it: "Ulster Peace Brigade Back Army."
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IRELAND This alignment with the main oppressive force in the North of Ireland took place in the same week when two other developments were pointing in the same direction. First was the news that the British government was sympathetically considering an application by the "peace people" to hold a rally in London's Trafalgar Square, a venue that for four years had been banned for any Irish demonstration (the application was subsequently granted). Second was the news that the organizers of the London rally were Lord Longford and Mrs. Ewart-Biggs, wife of the British ambassador assassinated in Dublin earlier in the year. Longford is a leading English reactionary on the issues of censorship and abortion, while Ewart-Biggs stated her politics clearly when she said she wanted "to carry on my husband's work, "that is, the work of the direct British imperialist representative in the South of Ireland. Thus, after two months of trying to please everybody, the "peace people" revealed their real political character. They stood with British imperialism, and when it came to choosing between loyalist or republican support they chose the loyalists. Centrality of the national question Even at its height Catholic support was limited. An example is the large Catholic suburb of Ballymurphy in Belfast. The attitude of the residents in that area toward the "peace people" and the British Army is summed up in this quotation referring to the week before Paul Stewart died: "The Army is viewed with unconcealed hostility as forces of occupation .... the hostility and hatred was unremitting with never a sign that the peace movement might gain a foothold there. " The source of this quotation is not a republican or socialist newspaper, but Visor, an official internal weekly publication of the army. The developments that followed Paul Stewart's death, particularly the movement's backing of the army, increased the movement's unpopularity in the Catholic working class areas. On October 23 two opposing marches took place on the Catholic Falls Road in Belfast. One was another "peace" march, the other was a "peace with justice" rally organized by the Provisionals. Before the event, "peace" leader McKeown predicted 'We will have 30,000 marching. We will outnumber the Provisionals at least 10 to 1." As it turned out the "peace people" got only slightly more than the Provisionals. More important was the make up of those attending the two events. The Provisional's rally was Catholic, working class, and socialist; the "peace people" rally was a mixture of loyalist, Catholic middle class, and as the Provisionals newspaper described them, "clerical orientated
"Even the English ruling class press could not disguise the differences in support, with the right wing Daily Telegraph saying, "The pro-IRA march, complete with swirling Republican bands, earned warmer applause than the joint Protestant-Catholic
So while the "peace people" will continue to attract support from bourgeois liberals throughout the world, they are rapidly losing support where it matters most: in the Catholic working class areas of the North of Ireland. Sensing the mood, even two former members of the Northern Ireland Parliament, members of the bourgeois nationalist Social Democratic and Labour party (based entirely in the Catholic areas and hysterically anti-Provisional) took their distance from the peace leaders, with Ivan Cooper and Paddy Devline both attacking Williams, McKeown, and company for "hypocrisy." It must be pointed out, however, that the fact that the "peace people" received the initial backing they did jn some Catholic ghettos is an indication of the failures of the Provisionals to offer its community a concrete way forward. While the heroism of the Provisional rank and file is undeniable and while many, especially in Belfast, are committed to a united and socialist Ireland, the fact remains that the Provisional leadership's conception of how this is to be won is totally bound up with its elitist conception of victory through secret bands of armed men and women. But such errors and failures pale by comparison to those of the Stalinists, whose unflinching support for such an obviously pro-imperialist movement has been as big a scandal as anything they have done in Britain and Ireland in the past few years. They hide behind a smokescreen of mechanical Marxism (insisting on the need for working class unity), but totally ignore reality and end up backing a pro-imperialist movement. They ignore reality in that talk of "uniting" the Protestant and Catholic working class is total humbug while the Irish national question remains unresolved, since the loyalists support a partition of Ireland, which in its very nature and purpose divides the Irish working class, and since the Protestants support a system of privilege in the North of Ireland which discriminates against a section of the working class. Only when the Protestants are prepared to give up their support for this system will the unity of the Irish working class be possible. And, in brief, this means that only when the partition of the country is ended and the sectarian Northern Irish state is overthrown will talk of "unity" become at all real. The experience of the "peace people" has strikingly confirmed this. In the end the only way the leaders of this movement could put forward the prospect of "unity" was to urge the Catholics to accept the British army, the very force that has murdered, tortured, and imprisoned them without trial for the past seven years. Such a peace is the peace of surrender; such unity is the unity of submission. What recent events have shown is that despite the urgings of the Stalinists and despite the worldwide support the "peace people" have achieved, for the Catholics of the North of Ireland the price of that sort of peace is too high to pay. November 12, 1976
LOTTA CONTINUA CONGRESS trxopr.itn The second national congress of Lotta Continua (LCStruggle Continues), one of the largest organizations of the Italian far left, was held in Rimini October 31November 4. The first congress of the group had been held at the beginning of 1975 (before that there had been various national assemblies). A very lively discussion opened up in Lotta Continua after the elections of June 20, 1976. Various positions were expressed during meetings held on all levels of the organization and in the columns of the daily newspaper, also called Lotta Continua. At the end of July a national assembly was devoted to a discussion of the causes of the electoral failure of Democrazia Proletaria (DP-Proletarian Democracy) (1) and to a new analysis of the political situation in the country. The national congress was prepared by two long internal bulletins, which included the documents and discussions of a whole series of national meetings (the assembly of late July, the national workers assembly held at the beginning of October, and others). No document was submitted by the outgoing leadership nor by any other body of the organization. A document published in the daily newspaper in mid-October was limited to posing some organizational and leadership problems. It put forward a proposal to nominate a new national secretariat excluding some of the best known leaders (among them the secretary, Adriano Sofri), who had themselves attempted "to win over the rank and file again" in various cities. The congress was attended by 1, 000-2,000 delegates, observers, and invited guests. Discussion was opened by a long report by Sofri. Immediately after this report the congress divided up into four separate assemblies, the aim being to foster broader participation in the discussion. But from the very outset another, more substantial division occurred. On the one hand the women - some of whom were no longer members of the organization - met to discuss their problems and their intervention at the congress; on the other hand the workers acted basically within the same logic. At the same time, other gatherings were held on sectoral bases (youth, particular sectors of intervention, and so on).
CRISIS AND NEO-SPONTANEISM
RIVOLU.: ZIOMARIE LIBERAZIONE cell DONN STRUAMDA MOMMENTO by LIVIO MAITAN The discussion, very extensively dominated by the women militants, was extremely fragmented. In the end no text was voted on. It was decided to continue the congress in the local bodies. The only vote concerned the election of a National Committee, a vote in which delegates, invited guests, and observers all participated with the same status! This committee has sixty members, of which about twenty are workers. The women decided not to participate in the vote (the only woman elected was Lisa Foa, a longtime militant and former member of the Communist party). The national secretariat has not yet been elected as of this writing. Some 'shake-ups' In an attempt to grasp the elements that lay at the root of the crisis of the organization, which broke out just after June 20, Sofri spoke in his report of several "shake-ups": November 25 in Portugal, the December 6 women's demonstration in Rome (2), the June 20 elections, and the Chinese crisis after the death of Mao. At the same time, he tried to set down some reference points for the congress discussion and to define a few lines of orientation. This attempt failed completely. The report was taken up in only a few interventions. The congress unfolded according to a dynamic that completely escaped the effort at political recomposition made by the reporter. It must be immediately added that Sofri did not even sketch out a response to some of the great problems posed by these "shake-ups" (especially as far as Portugal is concerned), and when speaking of China he reduced Maoism to the dimensions of a method. Which was frankly too little. Worse yet: the definition of this method was based on certain variants of Maoism of the time of the "cultural revolution" much more than on historical Maoism. It was extremely revealing that Sofri emphasized "the preponderant subjective character of Maoism, which is not only opposite to Stalinist economism, but also far from the objective realism of the Leninist theory of the