While we’re waiting for Tuesday, what if the Workers’ Party hadn’t split?

Okay, away from the hub-bub about Bertie and Manchester and who paid what when and to whom let’s calm ourselves and look at a counterfactual that, while having relatively little bearing on the current state of affairs, may at least explicate some of the dynamics of contemporary Irish political parties as they rush headlong to the next election.

Conversing with C of the Connolly Column, I’ve been thinking back to the Workers’ Party, what it meant then, and what are the lessons for the present?

One aspect of the WP that is often overlooked in the hysteria about it’s approach to partition or the gloomily predictable, and often incorrect charge of “Stalinism”, is just how useful a home it was for those of us on the left who had literally nowhere else to go. Not for us the further left sects of Militant or the SWP, nor the rather dull centrism, and seemingly perpetual coalition with Fine Gael, of the Labour Party of the time (whatever one’s feelings about individual TDs). And, to be honest, this was in a period long before Sinn Féin had decided upon a political path, when meetings of various campaigning organisations would devolve—and I blame WP and SF equally—into slanging matches about the morality of the armed struggle.

The WP was a useful vehicle then for people who liked their Socialism on the Moscow side, a bit hard-edged with the whiff of cordite and the steely sheen of a serious array of Soviet ICBMs. There was an odd amalgam of the drabness of the politburo and the shiny glamour of the Cold War. Fianna Fáil might be a national movement, Fine Gael the founder of the state and the Republic, Labour might have a rose and twice as many elected representatives, but Gardiner Place had—well, God knows what—Marxist inevitability allied with a printing press. Although the real truth was a bit more prosaic, there was a cut price drinking den in a basement a couple of doors along with a menacing looking plough as one of the fixtures.

But more than that, the WP had a steely discipline, matched only in my experience by SF, the Socialist Party and certain constituency organisations in FF. And a curious sort of discipline. One which was both ruthlessly pragmatic—come on, this was a party which went through no less than three name changes without significant splits (sure there was the IRSP, but that was different I tell you!)—and also extremely ideological. The discipline in part came from the historical antecedents of the—ahem—more military sort, the ideology one of “progress”. Secular, highly suspicious of electoralism and the democratic system, but also strongly wedded to the idea of expansion which meant electoralism (and why wouldn’t it be, wasn’t electoralism spliced into it’s very DNA from the OSF/PSF split onwards; even the IRSP, for all their ideological heresy, were the same).

They were—and arguably in their current entirely emasculated form are—pragmatic. But like many of the Euro-Communist parties of the 1970s and early 1980s, they were stuck between two very different positions, the ultra-leftism or impossibilism of the Trotskyite and anarchist sects and the centrist reformism of social democracy. The problem, as many of us know all too well, is that either you remain disengaged from the system and therefore wind up impotent and distanced from state power or you engage, and the very process of engagement delivers you into the state system. It’s worse in a way because fundamentally the trick has been to believe that if “we”, by which I mean left radicals, get our hands on power long enough, that alone will demonstrate the correctness of our position. Or rather that if we can grab hold of the state, we can push the dial sufficiently leftwards that no subsequent right-wing or centrist government could haul it back again. Yet, I think that Thatcher demonstrated the vacuity of that particular illusion, and perhaps also the essentially undemocratic nature of it. The election last month in Sweden where the centre-right won will be interesting proof of this. Overall Swedish social democracy is well-embedded. But how well embedded? Sufficiently so that the right has no room to change it substantially. And whatever about my personal beliefs on this issue, which would be strongly in favour of such health and social welfare provision, do I have any right to impose my view on a freely elected government, or more importantly the Swedish electorate who have made their choice? Obviously this generosity of political spirit on my part breaks down when it comes to certain issues, say Labour wanted to introduce Gulags for those who disagreed with Rabbitte or Fianna Fáil sought to bring back the workhouse, or Fine Gael to allow child labour? But outside those sort of extremes it seems reasonable that people have the right to be wrong.

And thinking it through on that level, where would that have left the WP over time? Assume the split had not occurred, or that the party had been reformulated as the “modernisers” sought in the early 1990s, sidelining or even seeing off those like Sean Garland and, more importantly, some sort of purge or decoupling with the last vestiges of the “Officials”, it is difficult to believe that the WP would have sustained their gains. The upper limit for them I would think would have been perhaps ten TDs (curiously similar to the best possible outcome for SF at this point in time). Not bad, but not great either. They might well have supplanted Labour in the urban centres, but that too speaks of a discipline which was beginning to leech away at the end. Yet, what if they had done so and remained intact? As the PDs have proved, you can do a lot with ten TDs, or even four.

One aspect of the split which is rarely noticed, but had a fundamental effect upon the DL, was that many of those who had worked hardest in the constituencies for the WP either stayed with that party or vanished feeling a sense of betrayal. That meant that in the subsequent elections, DL was always in a more marginal position than its predecessor. My own experience bears that out, in that I noticed more and more of the DL membership gravitating towards committees (myself included) and away from the drudgery of party activism in the constituencies. That simply would not have happened inside WP. And it’s notable how it was at by-elections that DL TDs were often elected, simply because it was easier to concentrate limited resources during such electoral contests.

The WP was an all-Ireland party, unlike the DL, which almost immediately devolved into a 26 county organisation. Quite an intriguing animal in the Irish political scene, and one wonders how that would have worked out. One thing that united both traditionalists and modernisers was a strong antipathy towards Sinn Féin and the IRA. But the electorate is less interested in such arcana, and hence we see a reasonable chunk of what must have been the WP working class vote swing behind the modernised SF and the representatives of the WP now embedded within a party with a more emollient line on Irish unity. So perhaps they would have found it in themselves to pitch slightly more towards the green end of the political spectrum. A more powerful, if moderate WP with a still extant Northern representation might well have had a different spin on the peace process. Perhaps. They would certainly have needed to. One aspect of party policy which was difficult to overcome was the aversion to nationalism. That was to some degree masked by the concentration on economic issues, and also by the fact that, by the late 1980s, the North was going through perhaps the worst spasm of paramilitary violence since the mid-1970s, resulting in “a plague on both your houses” attitude amongst the public. But that spasm wasn’t maintained, and later with DL the inability of the former-WP members to understand that PSF might be following a similar path from OSF/SFWP, albeit hesitantly and belatedly, or to project anything other than a rather bitter rhetoric about the cessations was a huge tactical error particularly amongst the working class element of it’s electorate, or indeed with me.

Remember too, as far back as 1988, De Rossa had already spoken of coming to terms with the free market, something that the Garland group accepted, at least nominally. How much further that sort of “reform”—or to use the technical term, “admitting the bleeding obvious”—would have gone is an interesting question. But the reality is as soon as one accepts “markets”, one pretty much has moved beyond revolutionary socialism, whatever else dresses up a political program. Who would see them as a coalition partner? Not Fianna Fáil, at least in the short term, the party was always antagonistic towards FF despite a number of people jumping ship to them throughout the 1980s; both fished in the same electoral pool on working class estates. Fine Gael though was a different matter, despite some competition for votes amongst elements of the working class, there was a clear synchrony of minds when it came to the North.

So is it possible that, say, had another couple of years passed, say two or three, we might have seen a slightly different Rainbow government, perhaps coming to power in 1997 with WP/Labour and Fine Gael? And yet, there’s something that makes me wonder if the hard nosed pragmatists of the WP might well have preferred to exercise power with that other crew of hard nosed pragmatists in FF—people often forget the support WP TDs gave to Haughey in the early 1980s—perhaps that that was the true historical alliance waiting for them—possibly with a smaller Labour Party as a partner. Of course, we’ll never know, but it remains an intriguing counterfactual.

So, what lessons for the present? Firstly, perhaps that it’s difficult to sustain party discipline over decades. The WP, I would suggest, began to lose this after the mid-1980s. This was in part due to the events in the Eastern bloc, but not entirely. Incidentally, that discipline perhaps grew out of the earlier links to the Official IRA, and perhaps didn’t. The ideology was itself one of stakhanovite achievement and effort, and not everyone who joined WP did so because of the murky stories of the OIRA.

That’s something SF should take note of. Is the Eastern bloc link the equivalent of the whiff of cordite for SF? One thing OSF/SFWP and WP was very good at was converting militancy of one sort into militancy of another; it’ll be interesting to see if PSF can carry off that particular trick. Is it likely that as the whiff grows fainter, some of the more hard-edged SF activists will depart the scene? Secondly, that once one hits the electoral path, the innate logic of the electoral path tends to dilute ideology. What was the purpose of the WP contesting elections if it didn’t actually intend at some point to participate in government? And in our system, government can only be attained in coalition with other parties which leads naturally to some dilution of policy. That’s a lesson all to the left of Labour and SF should ponder. Thirdly, that the actual line the WP took on the North was ultimately counterproductive, as evinced by the ludicrous inability of DL to come to terms with the Provisionals as they moved towards the purely political path. It’s fine being post-nationalists, but close to electoral suicide to delude oneself that many if not most people in this state are also post-nationalist. In a way that’s why I suspect the current incarnation of Sinn Féin may have a greater longevity than the WP, if only because it can pitch both left and right under the broad embrace of Republicanism, a technique perfected by Fianna Fáil.

Anyhow, back to the fray! What was it that happened in Manchester again?