It seems that an account of the B&ICO should be given, and that I will have to give it.  I was not in any sense a founder of it, but I was around at the time and I knew its founders, Pat Murphy and Liam Daltun;  Gerry Golden might be named as a third (all deceased).

Murphy belonged to no political organisation but he was very well informed about the intricacies of Irish politics.  Daltun had been in the IRA, the Connolly Association, and some Trotskyist organisations.  Golden had been in the Communist Party of Great Britain, active in its Electrician’s Union [ETU] section, and had tried to persuade the Party Executive to stop election rigging in Trade Union elections, and had been roughly treated by the Party for his concern.

Many others took part in the meetings of the then Irish Workers’ Group organised by Murphy and Daltun but it was these two that gave them a purpose.

There were Irish socialists at a loose end in London at that time (the early 1960s), looking for something to associate with because they were disillusioned with the conduct of the Connolly Association under the (discreet) control of the British Communist Party. 

Insofar as there was a socialist name in Irish culture, it was James Connolly.  People were drawn to the Connolly Association by its name, and for some it had the additional attraction that the Irish Bishops warned emigrants to keep well away from it because it was a Communist ‘Front’ organisation.

The British-based Association was formed in the late 1930s by Republicans who had taken part in the Irish-based Republican Congress in the early 1930s.  For obvious reasons the CA found it hard going in England after World War 2 was declared.  It was atrophying when the Communist Party covertly took control over it after Germany invaded Russia and Russia gave hope to Britain of not losing the War.

The CA magazine, the Irish Democrat, was put on a sound productive footing by the CP.   Party member Desmond Greaves was made its Editor.

After the Bishops pointed out the CA’s Communist Party connection, the CA was given a new Constitution to show that it was entirely independent and had no connection with the CP.  The Bishops took no heed of this feint, seeing that the Irish Democrat retained its CP Editor.

But the trouble for the Connolly Association did not come from the Bishops:  it came from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

That Revolution asserted Hungarian independence and called on Western Europe for support.  Russia intervened, suppressed the Revolution, and restored control by the Communist Party.

The circumstances were that Hungary took part in the 1941 invasion of Russia as an ally of Nazi Germany, that Russia in the course of freeing itself conquered Hungary, and that it remained in effective control of Hungary after 1945 because otherwise Hungary would have joined the Western military alliance against it.  [The same circumstances of invasion and ‘liberation’ applied in several other East European states which, however, did not mount revolutions at the time.]

For Communist Party members the absolute priority was defence of the Socialist system established in Europe by Russia following the Russian defeat of the European invasion of 1941.  But that would not be the obvious position for members in an Association whose view of world affairs was drawn from Connolly’s writings.

Connolly [who was executed by Britain before the Russian Revolution took place] said clearly enough that he regarded the nation as being the medium within which Socialism should be developed.  He opposed the raising of class issues against the development of the nation—which became an Imperial tactic.

The CP was feeling its way towards suggesting that Connolly in his last years was a burgeoning Marxist-Leninist  But Connolly had made it clear that his socialist affinity in Europe was with the anti-Leninist Joseph Pilsudski and his Polish Socialist Party.  He did this before the War, and again during the War, in the pages of the Workers’ Republic.

The Connolly Association had not done anything towards bringing Connolly’s writings on this matter back into view when the CP took it in hand.  Nothing could be done about it under CP handling.  But, when the CP was obliged to keep Connolly Association comment on Hungarian events within Party lines, it was unable to hold the ring.

One of the founders of the Association, who had not acquired the Party mentality, resigned in protest against support for the Russian intervention in Hungary (xxxxxx) and joined Gerry Healey’s Trotskyist organisation, while another (xxxxxxxx) made an uneasy compromise.

That was the breaking point for the Connolly Association.  Connolly might in the future be an icon to hang on the wall:  he was off the agenda of political discussion!  However, the purpose of the meetings organised by Liam Daltun and Pat Murphy was to put him back on the agenda.

I was urged by Pat Murphy to go to a lecture given by Desmond Greaves at Marx House—the first Marxist meeting I had ever been to.  Greaves listed the numbers of Catholics and Protestants in every town and district in Northern Ireland, and showed how elections were gerrymandered—facts with which Ireland had been deluged ever since the re-launch of anti-Partition agitation by Fine Gael in 1948 when it cut its umbilical cord with the Treaty.

The suggestion in that agitation, as it was in Greaves’s Marx House lecture, was that the electoral gerrymander prevented an anti-Partition majority in the Six Counties from asserting itself democratically.  Since that was not the case, Pat wanted to know what Marxist use Greaves had for his exhaustive breakdown of the sectarian make-up of the Six Counties.

There was ample time for discussion.  The two of us were virtually the entire audience.  Put on the spot, Greaves did not claim that the end of gerrymandering would end Partition.  He spoke of a petition for a Bill of Rights.  I knew enough of British political history by then to know that progress by means of Petitions for Bills of Rights had ended centuries ago and its place taken by representative party politics.  (Around that time I chased Lena Jaeger (Labour) around a London constituency during a By-Election campaign in a futile attempt to get her to engage her mind with the Northern Ireland problem as a party problem.)

*

The Connolly Association ruled out realistic political discussion of the Six Counties;  it ruled out discussion of national issues if Russian interests were involved;  it ruled out discussion of Free State politics.  And that was the situation out of which the meetings began, from which the B&ICO emerged, and also another group that has not lasted in any recognisable form.

In the atmosphere of the time the first thing needed was an agreed factual account of what happened in Russia after the seizure of power in 1917, and—since the Connolly Association had been disrupted by a transfer of a founder of the CA to Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League, an evangelically Trotskyist organisation—how Trotsky fitted in.

The immediate issue was Trotsky/Stalin.  Daltun knew that I had no preconceptions in the matter because I had written an article for a magazine published by Pat Murphy (a kind of literary magazine) in which I had treated Trotsky as the founder of the Soviet State system.  (Lenin and Stalin were at that point mere names to me, but I had read Trotsky.)  So I agreed to find out what I could.

Was it the case, as the CP alleged, that Trotsky, in the course of breaking with the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] had become a propagandist in the Imperialist press?

I found in the Newspaper Library that in the mid-twenties Trotsky had written an attack on Russia for the Daily Express.

The question then was whether the Russian State had changed character when Trotsky failed to take control of it after the death of Lenin.  Had Stalin abolished Leninist democracy, ended working class power, and established dictatorship over the workers?

I rooted around and found a pamphlet by Trotsky, published before the Revolution, called Our Political Tasks.  The chief task, according to this pamphlet, was to stop the Leninist movement in Socialism so that the working class movement could develop in democratic form.

So Trotsky wrote in the Imperialist press that Stalin had deformed Leninist democracy into a dictatorship—but Trotsky himself had written before the Revolution that Leninism was itself a dictatorial project.  Which—if either—of these views corresponded with the facts of the matter?

I got some of Lenin’s pamphlets written around the time of Our Political Tasks, and a volume of his Collected Works covering that period.  These were plentifully available on all sides then.  Leninism was part of the English air.  It saturated the polytechnics and colleges.  The Master of Baliol College, Oxford, was a Leninist.

What was at issue in the Menshevik/Bolshevik dispute was whether Socialism would come about through an evolutionary development of the working class movement, which the socialist party could help along, or would be a different kind of development—to be brought about by revolutionary action by the socialist party guided by scientific socialism.

Lenin was very forcefully supportive of the latter view.  He said that Socialism would be “an alien intrusion” into the working class movement, whose spontaneous development was within the horizon of Pay and Conditions set by Capitalism.

Socialism would be brought about by the revolutionary action, in a capitalist crisis, of an independent party, whose membership would be drawn from militant elements of the working class, but which would be led by scientific socialists. 

The most important thing, after the failure of the 1905 upsurge in Russia, was to prevent the scientific socialist Party from being “liquidated”—from being pulled down by gravity into the spontaneous drift of the working class movement.  The Party should maintain its scientific independence while waiting for the moment when it could seize power, taking a substantial party of the working class with it.

Trotsky’s description of Lenin’s project as involving Party dictatorship was not wide of the mark.  Rosa Luxemburg saw it in the same terms, and in 1918 she wrote that its theoretical bias would have serious consequences as the Revolution developed.

Lenin in 1914 was on the verge of giving up his project as hopeless when its moment came with the disruptive effects of the Great War.  He put it into effect with the Party instrument he had kept in being.  Trotsky was swept along by the mass energy stirred up and directed by Leninist methods.  He joined the Bolsheviks and acted with dictatorial freedom as purposefully as any of them.

But, when Lenin—disabled by an assassination attempt by a Socialist Revolutionary—looked to him to take over direction of the Party, and provided him with a letter to use against Stalin, Trotsky backed away  He got offside.

He had described Lenin’s project before the event as a system of bureaucratic dictatorship.  A short while after Lenin’s death he began to talk of Stalinism, describing the regime as a bureaucratic dictatorship—a deformation of Leninism.  Could it be that, when Lenin primed him to take over the succession, it suddenly struck him that the system he had been acting within so effectively since 1917 was the system of bureaucratic dictatorship he had seen as being inherent in Leninism in 1905—and he could not bring himself to become the bureaucratic dictator?

All of this was gone over intensively by the meetings begun by Pat Murphy and Liam Daltun.  Those meetings were held in the offices of the ‘Militant’ Trotskyist organisation led by Ted Grant.

Trotskyism was itself a relatively new development in England—stimulated by the effect of the Hungarian events on the Communist Party—and the different tendencies were separating  themselves out.  Ted Grant’s was the most open of them, and Grant himself was very willing to discuss these things.  Gerry Healey’s SLL was the strongest, dynamised by his gift for oratory.  It gathered up celebrity members—but its moment never came!

A third tendency was Tony Cliff’s (or Ygael Gluckstein’s):  it was the most analytical.  It was called International Socialism, and one of its members—John Palmer—used to come to our meetings.  He was, as I recall, a journalist on the Financial Times.  He was also a relative (a nephew, I think), of one of the famous Tipperary Republicans, Sean Treacy—and had written an article about him, entitled Parabellum Patriot, for the magazine of a previous attempt to form a lasting socialist group.  [a parabellum is a 9x9mm cartridge:  the term means prepare for war:  from the Latin adage Si vis pacem, para bellum.  Ed.]

Tony Cliff himself was so analytical and so Economic Determinist and so Scientifically Socialist that I could not understand how he supported Lenin’s revolution at all!

Cliff demonstrated, with an impressive display of detail, that England was closer to having the necessary economic preconditions of socialist in revolution in 1641 than Russia was in 1917.  But I suppose it was just necessary to be a Leninism in those years in order to be in the game.

I had long discussions with Joe Quinn (who was regarded as the ‘father of Irish Trotskyism’) about these things.  He was well versed in all the variants of Trotskyism but was not a member of any of the organisations. 

I discussed with him the paradox created by Tony Cliff’s contention that the conditions set by scientific socialism for socialist revolution did not exist in Russia in 1917 when Lenin, with his specially-prepared Party, skipped over the bourgeois revolution, which was the thing on the cards, and enacted a socialist revolution by use of the working class;  that Lenin was right to do this;  that the revolution failed because in the long run it lacked the necessary foundation;  and that although its failure was inevitable because it lacked that foundation, it was also right to describe its failure as a betrayal by the Stalin leadership that took over when Lenin died.

Use of the word ‘betrayal’ implied that it could have succeeded—even though it had been held that the lack of the material basis for its success made its failure inevitable.

However, the Revolution was enacted by Lenin on the assumption that the absence of a material base for it in Russia would be made good by well-founded socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist states.  European socialist revolution was inevitable;  it would not be limited by national borders;  and it would make good the deficiencies in the Russian situation in gratitude to Russia for having lit the fuse!

But what happened in Europe during the five years of Lenin’s leadership of the Revolution he had brought about in Russia was not an internationalist victory of Socialism over Capitalism.  National borders had been multiplied by the Versailles re-arrangement and a new capitalist development had begun in each of the new states.  Europe was now more divided by Nationalism than ever before.

Lenin tried to prevent this development by means of a military advance, which had the aim of passing through the newly independent Polish state in order to revolutionise Germany.  However Poland, led by Lenin’s national Socialist enemy, General Pilsudski, defeated him.  

The advanced form of Capitalism in Germany—on the socialist takeover of which he had relied—was disabled for political purposes by the destructive action by Britain and France on the German state.  And the capitalist recession in France and Britain revealed only a verbally socialist movement and a working class waiting for things to improve!

The external factor—socialist revolution in Europe, which would make good the deficiency in the Russian situation—disappeared with the defeat of Lenin by Pilsudski on the battlefield.  It might thus be argued that maintaining the revolutionary system in Russia under conditions in which it could not succeed, and must lead to failure, was a betrayal of the ideal of Socialism that was proclaimed as the purpose of the revolution in 1917.

But, just as it was Lenin who decided on socialist revolution in 1917, it was Lenin who decided to continue the revolutionary regime he had established after the European revolution—of which he had been confident—failed to materialise.  And, in deciding to continue the regime which lacked the necessary material base, he decided that the superstructure—which lacked the infrastructure without which it could not survive—should construct that infrastructure by means of its superior culture, learned from Europe—of which the main thing was the theory of Scientific Socialism.

What that meant in practice was that the Party should enable, or compel, the working class to do what the capitalist class had done in Western Europe, and even that the Party should create the working class to do this.

A Socialist State—instead of being established on a base created by capitalist exploitation of a working class, and thereby superseding the capitalist phase in the scheme of human history, would create that base for itself by organising workers—who had not been disciplined by Capitalism, to do voluntarily and purposefully what a capitalist class would have compelled them to do if it had taken over in 1917.

A Socialism that was committed to creating an industrial working class out of a peasantry, and to establishing, within a generation, an industrial economy that would enable it to hold its own against the Capitalist world, would bear little resemblance to the socialist ideal as imagined working class organisation within Capitalism, and would bear some resemblance to Capitalism.

If undertaking such a project was “betrayal”, then the Revolution was betrayed in 1921-2.

My discussions with Joe Quinn about all of this were invaluable.  Before this I had not read a word of Lenin or Stalin.  I had read Marx—but only his economic work:  Volume 1 of Capital.  I didn’t even suspect the existence of Marxist philosophy!

The little experience of working class affairs in had effectively inclined me towards Proudhonism—something like syndicalism, which is not really anything definite and systematic.  I had come across the magazine of a syndicalist group called Solidarity, which featured the suppression of Workers’ Control in Russia by Trotsky (Suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921). because of this I had read Trotsky’s Reply to Kautsky on the use of terrorism in politics.  

That was all I knew of Marxism when I set about figuring things out for Pat Murphy’s group.  When I finished I could see that, if I had been there, I could not have survived in 1921 Russia.  But, since 1921 was not an issue for either the Communist Party or the Trotskyists, it was not relevant to what I was doing.

The point in the 1960s was to see if a common ground could be established between people coming from Trotskyist and Communist Party traditions (the latter being Stalinist in Trotskyist terms) which would enable the group to undertake the publication of an informative magazine that would not lapse after the first instalment (as had repeatedly happened in the past!).

The discussion group was given a structure:  the Irish Workers’ Group as I recall.  There was a magazine called An Solus, of which a number of issues appeared.  

But the Trotskyist organisations were irritated by this development.  The Trotskyist members of the IWG (Daltun and Gerry Lawless for the most part) were taunted by English colleagues about their association with Stalinism.  Lawless, a weak but interesting character, was particularly vulnerable to these taunts and became uneasy.

The Group changed its name from “Workers” to “Communist”.  Daltun didn’t like it, but he agreed that it was the accurate description of what he wanted, though it had come to smack of Stalinism.  But, on the other hand, he could not clear up the difficulty about characterising an inevitable development development as a betrayal.

So the Irish Communist Group was formed.  Lawless—I assume for the purpose of breaking it up—went to the police about it.  He gave information to the police about a member who was wanted by the British State as a deserting sailor—and who escaped out of the back window when the police arrived at the front door!

That is the last incident I remember from that period.  The ICG settled down to regular publication of a monthly magazine, The Irish Communist, of other periodicals, and of pamphlets that had been rumoured about amongst left-wingers, but never seen—things that the Connolly Association would have published if it had been centred on Connolly.

The first, as I recall, was Liam Mellows’ Jail Notes.  Others included Connolly’s writing on the World War and Germany.  An account of the Polish Socialist Party followed later.

When I went searching for Liam Mellowes’ Jail Notes, they were not to be found in any library catalogue.  Somebody suggested to me that I should ask the man who ran the Repository shop around the corner from the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin about it, as he knew everything.   (A Repository shop was a shop that sold holy statues and other holy things.)  So I tried.  And he quizzed me about my credentials, and was not a bit upset that they were Communist!

He wrote down a number on a slip of paper and told me to write it, and nothing else, on a request slip in the National Library, and I would find the Jail Notes in the bundle that came out.  And so it was.  Such was Dublin in the mid-sixties!

Brendan Clifford

(To Be Continued)