The Big War and the children of lesser wars

international | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Saturday April 15, 2006 17:32 by MichaelY - iawm - in a personal capacity

Parties and the Party System

What did the insurrectionists of 1916 fight and die for?
It is after all Easter Week.

The recent ‘decommissioning’ and the standing down of the IRA, it is argued by some, was the final nail in the coffin of the struggle to unite the country – to create a democratic, if not a socialist republic of the 32 Counties by the force of arms. In the context of a capitalist economy in ascendancy in the South, many are those who are shouting: ‘Wake up, the war is over, the world (read the country) is moving on!’
Simultaneously, however, a few other wars are taking place affecting our lives big time. On the one hand, there is the war of the Empire and our Government’s complicity in the invasion and the slaughter in Iraq. Shannon is being used as a warport, including now for the transport of Apache helicopters to Israel. To be used in the war against the Palestinians – and very likely, soon, against the people of Iran.

The Empire is on a warpath – Karl Rove, Bush’s main advisor, was sent to Italy and loaned to Berlusconi to help him with his recent electoral campaign. As the latter blathered Bush-style about the communist threat, the incoherence and the lies did not work.

Then there is the Coalition’s haphazard war on crime. Virulent Unionism and militant Republicanism, further north, are also in the process of locking horns in a confrontation which may have unexpected and long term consequences. Then, there is the forthcoming war on the electoral front, likely to unfold over the next 12 months. The Labour Party and its Sticky induced leadership will regale us no doubt with a few ‘bread and circus’ situations. Finally, we can expect a war on nuclear power too over the next while – perhaps after the elections. RTE and the Irish Times have already started on this front with a few opening salvos.

War ? These are not wars some may retort….Nay, methinks, it is war, it is undeclared war, it is a war much more intense, much deadlier than the military achievements of the IRA or likely to have many more victims than whatever the Unionist cabal has managed over the last 25 years.

It’s a war you can see in the blanked out eyes of our increasing numbers of young people stuck in drugs – those committing suicides. It’s a war reflected horribly by the greed, social schizophrenia and alcohol related ‘accidents’ on our roads – north and south. ‘Carnage’ is most people call the results of that specific war! 122 deaths at the time of writing and still counting…

It’s a war in the human misery of the 5 hours a day to go and come back from work. War is not over…it may be over for those who think they have won…..but the social contradictions, the human conflict, the class struggle that mark this war go on…and keep intensifying. And in this war we are all participants – no exception.

The ideological weaponry of the Empire – and its allies – in this war of attrition is a combination of a discourse based on the catastrophic self-combustion of the so-called ‘actual’socialist States [you see – that was supposed to be the alternative!] coupled with a massive attempt to bury the desirable alternative to capitalism [you see, you can’t fight the machine – lets be realistic!]. I will not dwell on the first parameter of this duality – suffice to say that the imposition of an economic/political system by no more than 50 members of Lenin, Trotsky and – later - Stalin’s party on the Russian people cannot be our model for struggle and political power 100 years later. Neither can we take as a model the ways the Eastern European and Far Eastern clones operated in the 50-60 years that followed. It is the second parameter, the Empire’s attempt to destroy our dreams and desires that will be the focus of my article.

I am writing these lines only a couple of days after Berlusconi’s Forza Italia lost the elections. The corrupt billionaire has been over the last few years a mainstay of the Empire in Europe and his demise should be greeted with celebrations by all of us – even as some will say that the Government will get in as a result. There’s a good wind blowing: Chirac has been forced to scrap the hated Employment Bill his government tried to ram down the throat of the French people. Polls in the heart of the Empire show that Bush’s approval rate has been the lowest ever…more than 66% of Americans think he’s fucking up big time. No wonder Martin Sheen, the real American President, calls the White House cabal “gangsters”.

I hope some of the arguments developed below will find a resonance among those comrades who will demonstrate in Baldonnel and in the centre of Dublin, Galway and elsewhere over the next couple of days. Those of us who will meet on the 22nd to discuss the future of the antiwar movement. All those who will be around discussing the prospects of an independent left wing alternative to the existing party system. There are questions there and very few answers. But that’s a task for all of us involved in this war. As far as I am concerned, we have lots to say and much to do in the ongoing war in our country. To borrow a FF slogan – much remains to be done.

Elections and the party system

Political parties are an expression of the divisions in a society through a variety of interests, strata and sections. I will argue, however, that the party system, as we have seen it develop over the last 50 years in Ireland, has operated in a contradictory fashion to this traditional definition of what a political party is supposed to be. To be more explicit, while a political party, as such, should represent and mediate specific and partial interests, the party system ends up representing the sum of societal interests. So, while at the outset of the democratic system as we know it, over the last 100 years in Ireland, the Civil War parties, as well as the Labour Party and Sinn Fein, represented very specific interests and groups, today the party system, and the parties that make it up, ends up purporting to represent the ‘general good’. Now that’s a concept that needs analysis.

In this restructuring of the societal interest, striving for the so-called ‘general good’, the political parties, willy nilly, negate their own beginning as a representative of the partial and specific interests. The so-called ‘general good’, of course, is not the sum of the partial interests but an ‘all things to all people’ construction! The general good – this hackneyed but so fashionable notion – is only general and only good at the level of philosophical abstraction alone. It’s a model, a prototype, which as soon as it is moved to the actual world of differences and inequalities, it appears in its real colours: it’s the Emperor without clothes, a lie.

The transition therefore of the political party from the partial to the general, from the specific interest to the general good, does not in any way alter the divisions in the society – it simply attempts a superficial balancing act. The Parties, particularly in their coalesced form, or in the specifically Irish ‘partnership’ model, do not even pretend to represent class, national, sectoral or even tribal interests but instead become managers and controllers of a State induced social balancing act. The parties unite, despite their differences, while the society continues to be fractured along a number of fault lines. One eloquent example of this is the result of the much vaunted capital/ labour partnership…in 2005 Irish banking capital amassed super profits, a state of affairs of which the Coalition is super proud, while labour income growth was lower than inflation!

Parties and the system of political representation

Alongside their role of intermediation and management, however, the political parties still go on and on about their role in the democratic [see parliamentary] representation. It is as if the people who vote for a party are supposed to see themselves, or an image of themselves, in a parliamentary mirror. Is this a reality or a mirage? To go further, even if we supposed for a moment that this mirror actually exists, does it reflect correctly the society that it is supposed to represent? And after all is said and done, who exactly do those party members sitting in the Dail actually represent? The electoral body? The people? Individual citizens?

And on the basis of what common identity, collectivity or communality, can the sum of these individual citizens be said to be represented? How, for example, can a member of a political party be said to represent simultaneously a large company owner/manager, a farm labourer, the single mother and the unemployed fitter who has just lost his job because the company decided to pack up and leave? How can parliamentary representation, in the way we know it in Ireland through the party system, provide answers to the needs of these disparate sectors and guarantee their specific interests? The simple answer is a straight IT CANNOT !

What does happen though is that the political parties become more and more managers and controllers of the State and less and less representatives. And the contradiction here is that the better this management and control function, the more negative the attitude of the people towards the parties becomes. As the party system becomes more and more complete, struggle of all forms in the society moves out of and often against the political parties.

As the party system tweaks itself, the mirror begins to show a State of the Parties. Anti-State mobilisation and struggle tend to become anti-all Party mobilisation and struggle. Examples of this tendency would be the recent Irish Ferries, Rossport, Anti-War and Anti-Incineration struggles. With Aer Lingus and the Health system coming areas of confrontation.

But what is the significance of this trend? Does it negate the need for political parties? Does it put into question the parliamentary system? Are we for or against elections? And what about democracy and peace?