Returning to Saorstát as neo-colony

Sorry I'm using this too much

A few years ago I wrote a piece for Rupture arguing that the twenty-six county is a neo-colony. Sinn Féin’s relative success in the elections and a lot of good trad bands were giving republican socialism a newer sheen, or at least me and a lot of people I knew were taking the pandemic as an opportunity to learn Irish, read Connolly, Tone, The Lost Revolution, as well as the various books which have taken up a broad conception of unequal exchange - this is the idea that colonial relationships exert long-term structural and institutional influence which formal legal independence can only be partially successful in overcoming - and applied it to an Irish context. I’d be thinking here of writers like Conor McCabe, Gerard Coakley, Denis O’Hearn, Gerard McCann and Raymond Crotty.

A lot of people seemed to like it and a lot of people really did not. One guy from a left split off the Greens said I was bigoted against Protestants, which is pretty funny. The more substantive disagreements focused on the idea that I put too much emphasis on the revolutionary potential of Irish nationalism, that Ireland was a county populated either by the Normal International Working Class Who Have Nothing to Lose But Their Chains or labour parasites getting fat off their tax haven dividends. Within both is the idea that I attribute too much progressiveness to the Irish bourgeoisie and propose what amounts to a cross-class developmentalist alliance. People did not like the term neo-colonialism, which seemed to propose an unacceptable analogy between a place that has since 2008 become one of the more prosperous countries in the EU, and large parts of the earth where forms of super-exploitation are actually in play, I did not have a good answer for the ‘This isn’t Ghana’ critique at the time and I probably shouldn’t try to.

Since then, contrary to my predictions at the end of the piece, the far-right have begun to establish roots in some working-class parts of Dublin and my own inclination would be to understand this as the correct intuition of the relatively immiserated, that an influx of migrant labour will lower the floor for their own working and living conditions; as an article in The Guardian demonstrates, these are people who don’t know their rights or are so desperate that they are not in a position to challenge their employers or landlords and this leaves them disproportionately subject to wage theft and other forms of exploitation. I know what my intuitive response to the politics of immigration would be, particularly one informed by dependency theory, but I haven’t read enough for it to take a systematic form, or at least one I’d care to lay out here for the moment.

Another book that is cited in the literature is The Irish Economy in a Comparative Institutional Perspective, written by a Norwegian sociologist named Lars Mjøset in 1992 for the National Economic and Social Council. I ordered it from the library system while I was researching the article but it only came to me months after the piece had been published and around the time I was beginning to think I was wrong about the whole idea. In any case Mjøset’s book is easily the best work of Irish economic history I’ve come across. I was going over notes I took for it this weekend, available here if anyone’s interested and I actually think I’m right again but perhaps for slightly different reasons.

What comes through in this work is a very clear sense that Irish capitalism was built by real social actors. It was not an abstraction or wage relation that landed here and got bigger. Now no-one’s actually out there arguing this, but sometimes I get the sense that it is a precept in some political circles or writings which purport to advance a class analysis of Ireland since the financial crisis. This isn’t me lecturing or hectoring anyone or any organisation about what should be done. I know no-one reads this, I’m just amusing myself here.

The problem class differentiation poses for conventional Marxian analysis has been significant. From the iron law of wages to the many succession of times the death-agonies of capitalism have been proclaimed, to Germany, we tend to be blindsided by the working class in richer countries - where they were supposed to be the most educated and sophisticated - opting for parliamentary representation, trade union consciousness, and fascism when there’s a new world to build. Class, exploitation, dispossession for me still represents the central contradictions of contemporary social life, but it obviously has become significantly more complex and seems to be getting more so with every passing year, with the consequence that there are any number of ways in which the worst-off can be integrated within and reconciled to, the state and private ownership. (This is where I think a Marxism inflected by dependency theory is needed, together with an understanding of concepts such as super-exploitation, the international division of labour, notes on these subjects here if anyone wants).

Since getting a lot of what I needed from books about the Irish revolutionary tradition I’ve been reading more Lukács and Gramsci, after a long period of being turned off by the centrality they enjoy relative to uncut Marx in academic settings, but unfortunately they are very good and important, particularly in challenging what I feel is lacking from that ‘nothing to lose but our chains’ position I glanced off above. To state what I get out of them in the most stark terms I can because I want to avoid getting into the weeds: the working class have no good ideas. More gently, it’s very very difficult for them to arrive at durable solutions, these can only come from the development and testing of theories which emerge from systematic analysis. (This is incidentally why, like a lot of other people these days I really value the work Adam Tooze does in parsing the scale of content that he does, even though there are significant political differences there).

Everyone reading this will have heard of Quinn Slobodian and the work he does in contextualising neoliberalism as a developed political programme that responded to the challenges posed not only by communism, decolonisation but also their collapse as social forces in the eighties / nineties. I would say before reading him I was more accustomed to thinking of neoliberalism as deregulation, shrinking the state, a sort of nihilistic egalitarianism gestured towards in the Friedmanite ‘the world is flat’ slogan, but what Slobodian reminds us of is exactly what Marx says about capitalism itself, that this thing is red in tooth and claw. It took institutional, ideological and cultural form in advancing its proposals and ideas, these changed according to place or time, and in a manner with direct relevance to our own epoch, prioritised a vision of a social order that was explicitly racialised.

Let’s think now about the capacity of social media algorithms designed under the supervision of self-radicalised oligarchs to stir up mobs with explicitly fascist blood-and-soil propaganda. This has taken root within an Irish context to the extent that the working class in the twenty-six counties hold the same views on immigration as loyalists in the six which, for obvious historical reasons, does not bleed over into the nationalist population. I’d say that this tells us at least three things, the first is that unification will be a prerequisite for achieving a form of democracy in Ireland that is worthy of the name, the second that conservative or reactionary forces will line up perfectly well in a unified state. Pace Geoffrey Bell, the social base aligned with a white Atlanticist order will be broadened. Now as we saw in Coolock this, for the moment, remains a blocker for the fascists and there’s no reason why that contradiction shouldn’t be exploited. The third is the regrettable fact that the key to the future of emancipatory politics in Ireland is currently in the hands of Sinn Féin, and they’re still making up their mind as to what they’re going to do with it. Personally I think the global new right have comprehensively demonstrated the viability of a Leninist strategy, generating new forms of sociality, imbuing people with a sense of their own agency by pushing at the limits of common sense and bourgeois legality, basically assembling all the fundamentals you need for hegemony. All sections of civil and public life are being pulled in their wake, the results are everywhere for to see.

Capitalism is mobile, it is creative, it is always at work in legitimating itself in very concrete and specific ways, and we do not contest it on the level of the abstract models of Departments I / II or the value-form. It is challenged in the everyday, the workplace, the community, this is where a revolutionary party will get something to point at and say ‘go there’. This is where I would bring back a re-configured understanding of what I wrote before, in the same way that Connolly contested the United Irishmen and Mitchel and the constitutional movement despite passing over the ins-and-outs of just what Tone meant exactly by ‘the men of no property’, we absolutely must use the tools we have, not project any virtue onto the working class, and certainly not treat them as a universal, which I’m still working on.

Anyway, please ignore me this shit is boring who cares.