JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

64SAOTHAR13perhaps Marx and Engels over-generalised from theLancashire case. More crucially, is it reasonable tocharacterise this as 'the secret' of English workingclass 'impotence '? Marx and Engels knew all too wellthat any adequate explanation of British working classreformism was complex and was not cashable into asimple proposition.. Their diagnosis incorporated a nineteenth centuryvariant on the domino thesis. A successful attack onlandlordism in Ireland would generate a weakening ofaristocratic rule in Britain - how simple it all seemed.'Ireland lost, the British Empire is gone and the classwar in England till now somnolent and chronic willassume acute forms'.2The fear about loss of Empire might have helped tofuel British opposition to Home Rule in the 1880s, butthere is a massive difference between Establishmentparanoia and Marxist wishful thinking on the one hand- and on the other, a thorough interrogation of expectationsby inconvenient facts. The dominoes never fellaccording to plan.Marx was clearly right to emphasise the centralityof the Anglo-Irish relationship for an understanding ofnineteenth century politics. His proposition 'Any nationthat oppresses another forges its own chain '. retainsits resonance, but this should not inhibit the asking ofsignificant questions. If the claim is to be more than amoral judgment about the character of genuine freedom,then it raises the problem of the connectionbetween internal and external oppressions. Marx cer- •tainly posed the question, but surely his substantiveanswer has serious weaknesses. Indeed Marx's writingson Ireland retain a concept of the 'nation' which isnot integrated into his overall theory.' He suggests theinseparability of the land question from the nationalone without clarifying the latter's theoretical status;and in correspondence he is prepared to toss in anational stereotype as an explanatory aid. 'The passionatecharacter of the Irish and the fact that they are morerevolutionary than the English'.3 Overall the problemwith Munck's treatment of Marx and Engels is that anawareness of the significance of their questions shouldnot deflect us from a thoroughly critical assessment oftheir answers.The treatment of Connolly raises similar problems:The initial survey is brief and the lack of reference tocontext makes it easy to claim that his attitude towardsIrish Nationalism was consistent. One strand in Munck'sassessment of Connolly's politics is stereotyped. Inwhat sense could the Irish Citizen Army as involved inthe 1916 Rising be seen as 'the advance guard of theIrish Labour movement'? Here indeed is an ideologicalsymbol masquerading as historical fact. Similarly itseems inadequate to argue that Connolly's writings onnationalism were consistently Leninist. Surely thosepieces articulating the morality of Catholic Ireland orpraising the superiority of German civilisation wouldhave posed a few problems for Vladimir Ilyich? Connolly,a principled Socialist facing agonising choicescannot be given a ready label and so consigned to hisdoctrinal niche.The analysis of recent debates over Marxism andIrish Nationalism is controversial. In response to thosehe characterises as Revisionists,4 Munck suggests thatpartition is a question of democracy and as such ofconcern to Socialists. He contrasts the reality of partitionimposed by military force with the hypotheticalpossibility of consent by a majority of the Irish people.Yet a few lines further on we are told that 'the wholemethod of a numerical head count is 'un Marxist' - themain question should be whether a nationalist war ishindering or promoting the prospects of s~cialism'.(pp. 64-65) .This conflates two claims into one. Certainly thereis a strand in the Marxist tradition which insists thatradical changes will not be produced as a consequenceof formal majority decisions, but as a result of directaction. Yet there remains in principle the insistencethat such a strategy be based on widespread support.The claim is that formal headcounts tend to be overwhelmedby other methods at moments of decisivechange; whether they deserve excommunication to theranks of the 'un Marxist' is another matter. This is aseparate issue from Munck's 'main question'. It issurprising to fmd a consequentialist morality trottedoutas if the history ofthis bleak century had never been.A bald justification of actions in terms of consequencesraises the obvious question of limits on means. Ofcourse consequences are significant in any socialistproject but a failure to discuss the complex relationshipof means and ends is a deficiency that socialist argumentcan do without.Munck's subsequent statement - 'Most independentobservers seem to agree that the war is destabilisingthe bourgeois political structure of north and south.Irish unity would be achieved in this process as part ofa much wider social revolution which would overthrowthe structures of dependent capitalism'. (p. 65) - makesa massive claim.If socialist experience teaches anything it is thatradical projects often have unexpected, sometimes grim,consequences. This should not be a veto on radicalismbut simply a plea for an awareness of complexities.This is absent from Munck' s image of stages - 'Until thenational question is settled, there can be no 'pure' classpolitics in Ireland'. (p. 65)But what would count as a settlement of the nationalquestion? What is a pure class' politics? Whatabout the' Unionist working class so absent from theanalysis? The Revisionists are reproached for theirformalism, but what else is this?These criticisms must be placed in context. TheIrish material is only one element in a wide ranging andknowledgeable text. Given the difficulties of the dia-