Troops out of Northern Ireland!

(Quote of the issue)

August 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the despatch of British troops to Northern Ireland. The Labour government led by Harold Wilson sent the army to suppress a popular revolt against the oppression of the Catholic minority. At the time the International Socialists, forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, cravenly claimed the imperialist troops would provide a “breathing space” for Catholics. The fallacy of this was shown on Bloody Sunday in January 1972 when the army shot and killed 13 Catholics on a civil rights march in Derry. Our tendency has a proud record of consistently calling for immediate, unconditional withdrawal of British troops, as part of a proletarian revolutionary perspective.

An essential element of our program is the demand for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of the British army. British imperialism has brought centuries of exploitation, oppression and bloodshed to the island. No good can come of the British presence; the existing tie between Northern Ireland and the British state can only be oppressive to the Irish Catholic population, an obstacle to a proletarian class mobilisation and solution. We place no preconditions on this demand for the immediate withdrawal of all British military forces or lessen its categorical quality by suggesting “steps” toward its fulfillment (such as simply demanding that the army should withdraw to its barracks or from working-class districts).

At the same time we do not regard the demand as synonymous with or as a concrete application of either the call for Irish self-determination (that is, a unitary state of the whole island) or for an independent Ulster — two solutions which within the framework of capitalism would be anti-democratic, in the first case toward the Protestants and in the second toward the Irish Catholics. Nor is the demand for the withdrawal of British troops sufficient in itself, as though it has some automatic, inherent revolutionary content or outcome....

As historically demonstrated by examples such as India, Libya, Cyprus and Palestine, the withdrawal of British imperialism, while a necessary objective of the communist vanguard, in itself does not automatically ensure an advance in a revolutionary direction. Thus, the demand for the immediate withdrawal of the British army from Northern Ireland must be linked to and constitute a part of a whole revolutionary program.

— “Theses on Ireland”, Spartacist no 24, Autumn 1977