Second Poem

Why ‘Stephen Hero’ is better than ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’

I do not quite believe that Stephen Hero is a better novel than A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Reading Stephen Hero at a significant remove from Portrait convinced me that it could be, for the reason that we get far more frequent and more extensive insights into what Joyce’s actual line on social and national questions might be, but having gone back to Portrait to check I can confirm that the latter is correctly regarded as the better work. 

However, there were a few points that I thought were worth reflecting on, at the risk of falling victim to a tendency within literary studies to treat everything, including what Joyce crossed off the page, as an object of study. This is particularly troublesome to me because in my view, Joyce was not a writer who benefitted from lots of people telling him he could do no wrong.

I have already written about some of my frustrations with Joyce’s elisions of Irish politics and what a shame it is that a truly great Irish novelist, whose writing career aligns with an unprecedented period of social convulsion in Ireland, barely reflects this in his work. It is instead necessary to look to non-fictive writings for direct treatments of the Rising, or wade through layers of irony in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses to figure out what he thought of British imperialism. While glimpses emerge in Finnegans Wake, I would contend that Joyce’s final work has far more to say about Europe and Ireland in the nineteenth century, the Napoleonic wars and incendiary Fenianism, as opposed to the more disciplined manifestation that it had begun to assume at the time Joyce was writing. The section of Finnegans Wake in which Ireland and the cultural revival is dealt with at its greatest length, comes through in the section about Joyce’s prosthesis, Shem the Penman, his grappling with his own impulse to write, his ambivalence with Ireland and flight from nationalist pieties. Again we think of the line in Ulysses in which Dedalus mentions that he is interested in Ireland as it is the place in which his genius happens to have landed.

The idea that Joyce is somewhat aloof from Ireland was, as I understand it, fully entrenched after Richard Ellmann’s biography  represented him as a writer of the metropole, with far more in common with Ibsen and Hauptmann than Yeats or Synge, who left the straightened  Catholicism and myopic cultural nationalism of Ireland behind in order to write in centres of European culture; Paris, Zurich and Trieste. With the rise of post-colonial criticism in the seventies, the idea that Joyce has things to say about Irish society and British domination began to come to the fore. When I studied Joyce in university, it was a very philosophical, post-structuralist and negative Joyce that I encountered there, though this may just have been a function of who was teaching me and where.

All this is part of the reason why I think Stephen Hero is worth reading. In style it recalls the naturalistic approach of Dubliners in which information and visual detail is rendered in a blank and almost dead way, into which we are encouraged to read no small amount of satirical venom but which we would not necessarily be able to pinpoint on the level of the word. On the one hand we have nothing that matches the quality of the section in Portrait in which Stephen has a vision of his personal hell, but it does mean that we get more serious treatments of political ideology and the nature of Irish society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Republicanism, the national movement’s comprehension of liberty, how it looked to France and Switzerland for civic models to emulate, how hurling is regarded as preparing Ireland’s young people for a looming military conflict, are all treated here and I find it really interesting how Stephen Hero troubles the antinomy of Irish Republicanism as provincial / European literature as internationalist, as those writing within the legacy of Ellmann regard it, whether they see themselves as doing so or not.

It is at the same time difficult to say that A Portrait would really miss them as they appear here, given the somewhat rote nature in which these sequences play out. These ideas are introduced in a very breathless manner by one of Stephen’s more naive classmates, Stephen gets the better of them by telling them if they want military training they should join the British Army, or informing them that prominent members of their movement are likely to accommodate themselves with the ruling order to come, ‘the publicans and the pawnbrokers who live on the miseries of the people’ whose business activities furthermore violate Catholic social teaching: ‘One of your professors in the Medical Science who teaches you Sanitary Science or Forensic Medicine os something — God knows what — is at the same time the landlord of a whole streetful of brothels not a mile away from where we are standing’. Everything here remains very much within the tradition of ‘needless to say, I had the last laugh’ of anecdote.

Another example of this is Temple, who is a nationalist and also from outside Dublin. His dialogue is represented with apostrophes and hyphens in some attempt to channel some rural ernacular or other: 

‘—‘Scuse me, sir, said Temple to Stephen across the intervening bodies, do you believe in Jesus…I don’t believe in Jesus’

‘—‘Course I don’t know…if you believe in Jesus. I believe in Man…If you b’lieve in Jesus…of course..I oughtn’t’ to say anything the first time I met you…Do you think that?’ 

The ellipses are Joyce’s and the intention is as clear as it is in Middlemarch or Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South,when more radical factory workers are represented as not really knowing what they are talking about or what’s best for them. 

It should also be said that Stephen Hero has significantly more emotional range, it has far more humour, lust and grief and Stephen feels far more rounded out character-wise as a consequence. While Portrait brings us from early to late childhood, then adolescence and university, Stephen Hero is so focused on Stephen’s years in UCD it qualifies as a campus novel. Stephen and his friends lounge around, fruitlessly debate utopian socialism and talking the particular variety of aimless bollocks you do as a student outside the library, bantering about ‘red-arsed bees’ and how to convince yourself you are the son of God. There is also far more Emma Cleary but there is little here that feels like its missing from Portrait.

I have a vague recollection of some critic describing the section in which Stephen’s younger sister dies as sentimental, drawing a comparison between it and the death of Little Nell, but I personally found the section in which Stephen’s very devout mother explains to her daughter that death is nothing to be afraid of because she will be in heaven with God very powerful and I think does great work in showing how isolated Stephen has become in his attempt to fuse Nietzsche with scholasticism:

‘Life seemed to him a gift; the statement ‘I am alive’ seemed to him to contain a satisfactory certainty and many other things, held up as indubitable, seemed to him certain. His sister had enjoyed little more than the fact of life, few or none of its privileges. The supposition of an allwise God calling a soul home whenever it seemed good to Him could not redeem in his eyes the futility of her life’.

Sections such as these, which represent a small house in which someone is dying, trying to talk to them in a manner that does not broach what is really going on captures very well the feelings of a young man encountering death for the first time. This allows lofty social issues to become more personal; Stephen reads the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on socialism and decides that while commerce is just, rent-seeking is not. In a less virtuoso anticipation of Ulysses’ agenbite of inwit, in which Stephen reproaches himself for abandoning his younger siblings to their lives of deprivation, Stephen also considers the pitiful existences of Dublin’s working class:

‘These wanderings filled him with deep-seated anger and whenever he encountered a burly black-vested priest taking a stroll of pleasant inspection through these warrens full of swarming and cringing believers he cursed the farce of Irish Catholicism: an island the inhabitants of which entrust their wills and minds to others that they may ensure for themselves a life of spiritual paralysis’.

Ultimately Stephen recoils from such judgements in the next paragraph as unfit for one seeking to express themselves freely, a judgement and abdication that is shown to be justified by one such working class subject:

‘—On’y, said she, God bless the gintleman, he uses the words that you nor me can’t intarprit’. 

Dialectical materialism and literary history

Ted Underwood’s hypothesis of literary change as outlined in his book Distant Horizons is that modernity does not bring about a significant change in literary history and that from 1700 – 2020, what we see is the consolidation of a single literary form, realism. My doctoral thesis validated this Underwood hypothesis of incremental change and also found that the findings Underwood also presents regarding the content of modern literary production to be replicable. I observed an increase in words associated with dialogue (‘said’, ‘asked’, ‘say’) and sensory perception (‘touched’, ‘see’, ‘listen’) along with an attendant decrease in words associated with politics (‘liberty’, ‘reason’, ‘title’), economics (‘lodged’ ‘owed’, ‘procured’), and religion (‘blessings’, ‘heaven’, ‘graces’); two trends which broadly align with the rise of the genre known as realism.

The continued rise of realism has significant consequences for Marxist literary criticism as practiced by figures such as Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Frederic Jameson, who have placed significant emphasis on breaks, especially one which is supposed to have taken place between nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century modernism. In doing so, they have made extensive use of political, economic and historical works produced by Karl Marx as well as other works produced within the broader Marxian tradition, due to the robust conceptual framework it offers for understanding industrialisation and its social and political ramifications. However, by virtue of the fact that their foremost argument, that twentieth century literature is significantly different from literature produced in the nineteenth century does not seem to have been borne out by the historical evidence furnished by Underwood, it is necessary to return to them and consider what aspect of the Marxian framework can be retained or salvaged in our account of modern literary production. 

The origin point of this over-emphasis of the difference between the two moments in literary history can be found in the ideological predispositions of the first institutionalised schools of literary criticism of the early to mid twentieth century. Marxian critics such as Williams, Eagleton, Jameson and others working from the sixties onwards within the context of cultural studies and the New Left sought to overcome such ideological readings and to integrate more overtly political concerns into their literary critical practices. Their failure to overcome the ideological formulation of the twentieth century break can be attributed to the abiding influence of the philosophy of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Marxian literary criticism. Hegel’s philosophical system exerted a significant influence on Marx’s own comprehension of the social totality and the role of capitalism as a mode of production within it. It may be argued that such a reversion was inevitable for any criticism which attempted to take Marx’s writings as foundational, given the relative lack of actual works written by Marx, or his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels, which consider culture or processes of cultural production. Critics seeking a means of integrating Marxist theories into their critical methodologies were therefore by necessity thrown back onto Hegel’s system with its highly involved and intricate means of describing processes such as mediation, reflection and alterity in a manner which lends itself to readings of the text as developing rationally out of its own concepts in the process of being read or interpreted. What this reversion overlooks is Marx’s break from Hegel’s philosophical system. Central to Marx’s particular social critique as well as the radical intellectual circles in which Marx formulated it, was the rejection of Hegel’s foundational assumption that Spirit represents the primary agent of world history, emphasising collective social formations arising from within actual human societies to a much greater extent. 

The central objective of Marxian literary criticism, to account for the ways in which historical progress is mediated in literary art, remains the most robust means of conducting an historical literary criticism, especially when empirical methods are involved, but it has yet to manifest Marx’s break from Hegel. This has the result that literary form and content are read as more or less coeval with actual historical processes and our attention is therefore concentrated to a far greater extent on indeterminate processes of mediation rather than the historical processes which Marx identifies as determinative. The reification of textual rather than historical processes could be the reason why Underwood’s findings depart to such a great extent from the literary-critical historiography.

Realism and romanticism in literary history

Realism is a mimetic mode of representation held by Ian Watt to have arisen in the late eighteenth century and, according to René Wellek’s account, to have consolidated itself in the early nineteenth century. Some of its determinants include the development of empirical philosophy, a connection which is integral to Watt’s account, as well as its content, representing as it does individuals within a clearly demarcated social context. Realism has therefore been promoted as literature’s default mode insofar as an objective portrait of modern social reality is concerned. Indeed, Eysteinsson describes it as an effective zero-level against which subsequent aesthetic practices, associated with modernism, may be assessed. Literary modernism meanwhile, can be read as insisting on an opposition to realism’s perceived aesthetic neutrality, and posits itself as a more formally self-conscious endeavour. This greater degree of aesthetic self-consciousness finds formal expression in the autonomy that form assumes within the works of many modernist authors and poets, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) and Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1922). Such works are contained or at least partially subsumed within a unified symbolic framework, derived from a classical as well as other mythological frameworks. We also see a certain degree of reflexivity in such works, an interest in representation conducted from an individual’s point of view, and an overall integration of a stylistic restlessness as though the search for an adequate means of expression has become the formal logic of the work itself itself. Romanticism is yet another literary movement which first arises in the nineteenth century, in Germany and then England and acts as a key mediator between realism and modernism. 

According to M.H. Abrams, romanticism’s emergence corresponds to a point in time in which neo-classical literary theory begins to give way to theories of expressive form, which emphasise the individual faculties and mind of the poet or author to a greater extent, paving the way for the sort of cult of the autonomous artwork operating in modernist literature. Terry Pinkard describes it as one among many of the imaginative and cultural responses to the French Revolution, a means of locating the subjective experience of the individual relative to broader discourses associated with political liberty and emancipation from monarchical authority. This manifests itself most clearly in the breaks from classical form, which Abrams has identified, but also in a manner which is less overtly obvious. Pinkard for instance, identifies the historical unprecedentedness of the centrality afforded to the individual imagination within European modernity as a distinctive aspect of cultural expression which emerges in the nineteenth century. Hegel, writing on this key juncture within the history of Spirit, identifies its arrival as indicative of the movement of Spirit more in the direction of a self-undermining scepticism, a period of time in which previously regnant ideals are dissolved. Art produced within the context of European modernity, will therefore inevitably exhibit a greater tendency towards inwardness and individuality, with the result that the critical reception of works within which the individual’s concerns are emphasised. This has the consequence that art no longer manifests a devotion to any broader Idea, such as God, society or the state, except as a partially ironised exercise. Modern art then becomes an exercise within which the subject exhibits themselves to the viewer, in a recognition of a lack of unmediated access to these ‘givens’. Eagleton has made these trends, described above, legible within the context of literary modernism, identifying Hegel’s conception of Spirit with the alienated subjectivity of the bourgeois subject. Habermas does so specifically with regard to the works of Baudelaire, describing how, as the process of modernisation begins to accelerate in the nineteenth century, established means of locating oneself relative to one’s 

environment becomes increasingly untenable. It is here that we may once more consider the potency of modernism’s attempt to develop symbolic frameworks out of mythology, as if in pursuit of some kind of symbolic framework that can make for up for the absent Idea.

Literary criticism

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While accepting that the first modern literary-critical schools were composed of quite distinct personnel spread over a variety of national territories, a shared tendency towards the valorisation of literary modernism, at the expense of its precursor realism, can be perceived as a more or less universal commitment. New criticism, practiced by F.R. Leavis and his followers was particular to Cambridge in the 1930’s and 1940’s, while a branch of American new criticism propagated by John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allan Tate and Robert Penn Warren operated in the southern United States. Formalism held sway in Russia, while structuralism emerged in France. Identifying a root cause for this shared valorisation of modernism necessitates a consideration of the imperatives guiding knowledge production in the Fordist state in the early to mid-twentieth century. This was an imperative within which the university played a key role, in establishing evidence-based methods for scholarship, while also providing an education to a population now attending universities in significantly higher numbers. The new professionalism of academia, as well as the symptomatic literary-critical conception of the autonomous text, served the practical and ideological demands of an expanded university system during the cold war very well, especially in western states where administering the bureaucracy of the industrial state apparatus in a way which would match or exceed the capacities of the Soviet Union represented a political and economic imperative. These broader sociological changes are key in understanding how and why literary criticism moves from an appreciative and impressionistic form of appraisal more in the direction of a hard science, characterised by rigour, verification and the requirements associated with the weighing different standards of evidence. Such methodologies were influential in elevating particular literary works with specific characteristics as opposed to others into prominence. Terence Hawkes for example, points to the significant influence Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), with its use of verbal interplay and consistent tension between form and content, had in developing Victor Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarsation. The essential commitment of these literary-critical schools of thought to the notion that literature and language operate as more or less autonomous and self-sufficient objects and that in considering them, historical, biographical and sociological fact, should play only a nominal, if any role at all, served to extend a preferential treatment to literary modernism as a project. It is for these reasons that modern literary criticism begins to afford disproportionate amounts of attention to modernism within the history of literature. 

John Brenkman, writing on the degree to which literary criticism has historically been implicated with its object of study, outlines the consequences of the blurring of the boundaries between literary criticism and the object of its attention. Brenkman argues that the rearguard of any given moment of cultural innovation, in this instance realism, comes by necessity to be read as socially conformist, naively empirical, or simplistically mimetic, in order to allow for a subsequent work or literary movement, to render human experience once again unfamiliar or estranged, to in effect, defamiliarise it. According to this argument, literary criticism becomes invested in reproducing narratives of progressivist evolution or supercession analogous to the ways in which modernism functions, a tendency which Williams has also identified. Marxist literary critics working from the 1960s onwards aimed to challenge some of the assumptions undergirding the autonomy of cultural production in order to challenge the political conservatism of these approaches. Of course this did not take the form of a straightforward or open polemical conflict. Rather in specific national contexts, a significant amount of dialogue and interchange between the two paradigms represents the norm. In French literary criticism for example, we see Louis Althusser’s capacity to fuse structuralist critiques of empiricism with Marxian science. In an English context, Eagleton has noted the continuities between Williams’ studies of culture and Leavis’ new critical emphasis on sensibility. For the reason that Marx and Engels’ collected works offer very little in the way of direct theories of culture or cultural expression, it was perhaps inevitable that the New Left would ultimately turn to Hegel’s more abstract theories of mediation and historical development. In this way, the Hegelian dialectic became the primary means through which Marxian literary criticism operated.

Hegel and Marx in literary criticism

At the basis of Hegel’s philosophy is the development of consciousness. As Terry Pinkard notes, Hegel’s primary object of study is therefore dual in nature; it is at once fixed, in that, broadly conceived it represents a single object of study that comes to be expressed and articulated in different ways over time. From this point of view, it is therefore mutable and dynamic as it proceeds along a potentially infinite series of inflection points. It is important to note that Hegel’s philosophy is not limited to any narrow conception of human consciousness, such as that of a single individual or homogenous social collective coming into contact with any one thing outside of itself. Hegel prefers to regard consciousness as just one of the means through which more complex forms of thought are achieved, how the most basic and elementary forms of sense-data accumulate to form more complex assemblages, such as general categories within a system of logic, individual psychology, social and economic institutions, art, religion and even philosophy itself. Michael Inwood provides an example of how this might work in practice, beginning with pre-historic man without the capacity for abstract thought, knowing only a sensuous existence, coming to develop the faculties for the consideration of concepts through the use of tools, or creative expression, as in cave painting. These objects therefore facilitate man’s relation to his environment in more complex ways allowing him to mediate himself to himself, coming to self-consciousness and thereby superseding sensuous, unreflective and pre-historical being and potentially entering into more complex forms of thought, action and sociality. Spirit is the totality within which these oppositions between internal or external, universal and particular, subject and object are reconciled as they develop subjectively out of their own concepts and ultimately become equal to their concrete or objective manifestations. To put this in more straightforward terms, it could not be said that an individual who desires freedom or agency within a particular social formation is free just because they desire it; it would be necessary for social development to be objectively adequate to the subjective impulse in order for an absolute freedom to become manifest. 

Hegel’s system represents a highly involved means of describing how Spirit and its predicates are deployed in developing self-consciousness in each of its stages. As, for example, the subjective desire for freedom becomes adequate to objective freedom and becomes absolute freedom, or how appearances in cave painting provide objects for reflection and eventually prove adequate to the development of the notion. For the purposes of our argument it will not be necessary to provide a thorough account of these processes as they documented in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) or Science of Logic (1812); it is obvious that this model of understanding in its actual component parts has played only a very marginal role in the history of literary critical praxis. In seeking to argue that it is a version of Hegel’s philosophy as regards the state and the history of culture which is far more germane to the history of Marxian literary criticism than Marx’s writings themselves, all that will be necessary is to underline at this juncture is that Hegel is a fundamentally teleological thinker and regards human history as tending towards the development of more harmonious and rational social arrangements. We see this when we compare Hegel’s writings on the place of religion in Ancient Greek society with his writings on nineteenth century Germany. Hegel regarded the folk religion, as it was practiced in Ancient Athens, as providing the means through which the individual’s desires could be mediated within the collective desires of the broader polis due to the specific ways in which religious ceremonies formed an integral and organic part of everyday social life, forming a stark contrast with religion as it functioned within Christian modernity, wherein highly cognised and intricate religious ceremonies have become removed from peoples’ lived experiences. Alienation from social practice is not a problem unique to modernity and it is furthermore integral to Spirit’s development, but from Hegel’s perspective, when industrial and commercial enterprises have developed within the straightened civic and religious institutions of the Holy Roman Empire, historically unprecedented contradictions have arisen. The solution to these contradictions is not to return to pre-Christian modes of existence or to roll back industrialisation however. The task of philosophy is rather to contribute to Spirit’s advancement, to grasp the authentic nature of bourgeois Christian society so that these tensions may be reconciled within a new totality or synthesis, a task within which art, due to it being one of the ways through which man represents the world and Spirit comes to be embodied in sensory form, can play a crucial role. As with Greek folk religion, Greek sculpture is Hegel’s paradigmatic example of an art form which provided an apposite vehicle for man’s stage of development at the time it did; a stage in human history in which there was no developed philosophy or theory of science. However, once specific paradigms of knowledge production arise in modernity, people are no longer capable of relating to art in the more primitive, sensuous form that the Greeks once did; art has become more cerebral and inwardly-directed. Hegel is here presenting a subtle critique of a regnant literary romanticism which he regarded as inadequate to the task by virtue of its interiority and focus on appearances; the work of advancing Spirit is more adequately played by philosophy.

In many respects the inclination of Marxian literary criticism in the direction of Hegelian philosophy was pre-determined by literary criticism conducted by critics working during the period of the Third International which tended to attribute disproportionate amounts of importance to the subjective experience of capitalist production, as though the effects that capitalism exerts on individual consciousness take primacy in any cultural account of them. Gillian Rose has written on the extent to which critics writing within the tradition of Western Marxism such as Walter Benjamin, György Lukács and Theodor W. Adorno misread Marx’s conception of commodity fetishism arising within the capitalist mode of production, with the result that Marx’s critique of the value-form and political economy in general are obscured. In the work of these critics and others writing in their wake, commodity fetishism and reification become mere shorthands for processes of objectification, rather than the social totality or mode of production within which these objectifications are taking place. Commodity fetishism is a concept which Marx introduces in the first volume of Capital in order to account for the ways in which capitalism’s social relations are obscured by the outputs of the productive process. The capitalist mode of production forces the waged labourer to sell their labour power in order to produce a commodity, alienating them from their own productive powers at the same time that it immiserates them from an economic perspective. The increasing presence of the industrially produced commodity in literature represents an integral part of Underwood’s findings (‘hat’, ‘chair’, ‘cigar’). One instance in which real productive processes are elided in favour of a more experiential account may be seen in Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which he co-authored with Max Horkheimer. According to Rose’s account of Dialectic of Enlightenment, alienation specific to capitalism is discarded in favour of a more trans-historical attention account undermining it as an account of capitalism.

Rose’s argument that the first cultural theorists overlooked those aspects of Marx’s writings which pertain to class struggle and the extraction of surplus value, in favour of an idealistic cultural criticism are germane in accounting for why it is that works such as Eagleton’s Exiles and Emigrés (1970), Williams’ ‘When Was Modernism’ (1987) and Jameson’s A Singular Modernity (2002) regard the agency of the revolutionary subject as playing the same role Spirit did for Hegel. The aesthetic is furthermore foregrounded as though it were the key determinant of collective agency. Despite the greater degree of attention these critics aim to grant to historical causality in literary form, under this rubric modernism remains a paradigmatic instance due its correspondence in time with a heightened and protracted phase of class struggle on an international basis. We see this expressed most clearly in Perry Anderson’s account of social revolution as one of the three most significant influences on modernist literature. The other two include the abiding of the European ancien régimes within industrial modernity, as outlined by Arno Mayer in The Persistence of the Old Regime (1981), and the transformations wrought by rapidly developing communications technology. Anderson’s contribution to this debate is prompted by the publication of Marshall Berman’s study of cultural production within both modernity and post-modernity, All That is Solid Melts into Air (1982). In a review of the book in New Left Review, Anderson charges Berman’s text with promoting the idea that modernist literature proceeds more or less in lock step with processes of economic and political modernisation; the development of productive forces and culture are identified as proceeding continuously in a linear direction as the twentieth century advances, more in line with a Weberian than an orthodox Marxist point of view. Williams, by contrast, emphasises changes in institutions of cultural production, especially technological change. Jameson, meanwhile, extending the philosophical legacy of critics such as Jürgen Habermas and Adorno, emphasises an anti-systemic or negative perspective on Hegel’s philosophy introducing a greater degree of conceptual flexibility to the notion of the aesthetic transformation, arguing that a break may be prolonged, overlap with other periods or constitute a period in its own right.

On whatever terms one may seek to criticise any of these models outlined above, their capacity to incorporate both past and future accounts should not be overlooked. Any of the thousands of studies written on the topic of modernism’s genesis which seek to account for why there was a general growth in the sentiment that the then-established means of representing reality had become increasingly inadequate will take some facet of one or more of these three as the decisive contradiction, to which some additional points may be introduced by way of content. Some of these include a generalised societal desanctification which accompanied a decline in Christian belief, catalysed by World War I as well as the growing influence of ideas derived from the natural sciences and German higher criticism. Other critics working in a more directly historical material, identify the effects of these revolutionising changes within the sphere of cultural production, with industrialised printing allowing for the production of large numbers of newspapers cheaply, and this, coupled with an increasingly literate public and the development of mass communications, provided the infrastructural supports through which serially published novels could begin to challenge the cultural hegemony of the multi-volume realist novel, especially once Britain’s oligarchic subscription libraries had entered into a sustained financial decline. Lawrence Rainey in particular, has drawn attention to the role luxury book speculation and networks of patronage played in providing many of the most prominent literary modernists with the means of sustaining themselves.

Given the degree to which historical events and development have been incorporated into the history of literary criticism, it can be difficult to understand how it is that the break away from the Hegelian idealist dialectic has not been accomplished. The first and most significant reason could be associated with the Western Marxist tradition’s turning away from questions of class struggle from the mid twentieth-century onwards and more towards issues associated with culture and artistic representation, a process which Anderson identifies. Based on the history of international class struggle especially from the seventies onwards, the dialectic comes to be increasingly formulated as a tragic framework, more appropriate to the crises of representation and language of post-modernity than enlightenment teleology. Considered as such, Hegel does not provide any means of unifying positive phenomena or understanding human behaviour within a totality, so much as he complicates our object of study. As we have already seen, Hegel likewise regards Spirit as developing through a constant return to itself and encompassing all of its moments sequentially; over time in a motion which may be described as circular. In this way, Spirit represents an organic development out of its own concept. Hegel’s philosophical system therefore insists upon a distinction between two distinct types of teleology; Hegel’s circle returns to itself at progressively higher levels of sophistication and complexity, rejecting the ‘bad infinity’ of the straight line which ascends in a perpetual linearity, the ‘bad infinite’ which we might compare to Anderson’s criticism of Berman’s conception of cultural change within modernity. This could be part of the reason why the synonymy of political and aesthetic progress is assumed within Anglo-American Marxian analysis, a major weakness of the school which Sinéad Kennedy identifies. Eysteinsson locates the cause for this in the lack of an English-speaking avant-garde tradition. This has the consequence that the Anglosphere lacks a significant aesthetic movement, which in continental literary criticism, provides the negative riposte to institutional or classical forms of modernism.

It is necessary at this point to argue that this emphasis on complexity and further periodisation over the past half-century has in many ways been immensely productive. Some of its legacies include the more inclusive models of literary history produced by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar or Nancy Fraser, Edward Said’s studies of the literature of imperialism, as well as the general incorporation of developments within the visual arts, film, fashion, architecture, scholarship and dance. The more cultural studies inflected schools of literary criticism such as neo-victorianism or new modernist studies, which have all been decisive in challenging the value-laden assumptions regarding the distinctions between high and low art represent its contemporary iteration. However, with the emphasis on the mediations between history and literary content, it becomes increasingly difficult to retain our focus on any literary genre in and of themselves as they are made to mediate an increasing and overdetermined sequence of agents of revolution and social change. We see this in the proliferation of categories associated with modernism over the past few decades as in ‘late modernism’, ‘post-war’ modernism or ‘cold modernism’. Experimental literature of the early twentieth century therefore remains for all intents and purposes the horizon of literary and aesthetic achievement, to the extent that realism, the gothic and sensational literature are all subject to potential re-readings as modernist modes and ‘modernists’ such as Joseph Conrad or Kate Chopin are rendered as far more proximate to traditions within which such predecessors as Harriet Beecher Stowe or Elizabeth Gaskell might be placed. This culminates in a situation wherein the co-ordinates of literary history are consistently up for debate, as the old is taken to bear the impress of the new and what was formerly regarded as the new is increasingly sublimated to an abiding traditionalism. Emily Apter’s presentation of provisional, asynchronous, de-sequenced and localised models of literary history oriented in activist directions as the superior alternative to totalising approaches contaminated by their proximity to capitalist and imperialist logics of domination, may be read as symptomatic of this tendency. In this sense, literary criticism becomes itself a modernist project, steered primarily by the impulse to ‘make it new’ or overcome the conceptual reification of categories, rather than to solve or contextualise in a way which would clarify rather than facilitate further argument. One can see how poorly an authentically Marxian theory of literary history, as well as one steered by empirical approaches, with its emphasis on historical determination would fare within a literary-critical milieu within which contingency has become hegemonic. Though as Firdous Azim notes, literary criticism has been conceptually mobile throughout its history and adapting critical concerns to the imperatives of contemporary political commitments lends many works of criticism their particular novelty and impetus, the peculiarities of the predominance of theory and cultural studies in the humanities, as traced by Joseph North, now takes place at a point in the history of the humanities which is qualitatively distinct. This is not solely due to the ways in which these ideas themselves have acquired their own momentum. In much the same way as we have already attributed the professionalisation of literary criticism to the construction of the modern capitalist state, we can identify the greater amounts of interest associated with cultural as opposed to historical concerns within literary criticism as being consonant with the broader logic of third-level education in Ireland as well as other jurisdictions at the present time. This can be illustrated by referring to indicative literature produced both by the Irish government and research- oriented consortia located both within the Irish state and the European union. 

Within this literature, we see the foregrounding of the imperatives of the post-industrial ‘knowledge economy’, wherein western states intend to remain competitive internationally by incentivising universities to prioritise research which aligns with the interests of private enterprise, such as biotechnology, information technology and financial services, according to a tendency which Kieran Allen has outlined, whereby in an age of globalised capital, the objectives of industry and universities are increasingly difficult to differentiate from one another. When we investigate the figure of the discipline-specific department in this literature, we see it consistently invoked as a fetter on the development of an authentically interdisciplinary research environment, due to its tendency to inhibit the movement of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, rendering them inadequate to tackling problems held to be of global significance, such as climate change or ‘migrant crises’. This is due to their ‘inwardly directed social dynamics’ and the fact that the frameworks through which departments assess validity originate from within their own disciplines rather than from without. This makes the task of any supra-departmental management body seeking to implement quality assurance standards from above more difficult, a mechanism which is increasingly to the fore within university administration, as documented by Wendy Brown and Stefan Collini. One can see how interdisciplinary research potentially offering the opportunity to outflank the comparatively rigid autonomous department would represent an attractive prospect to university administrators and it is in this context that the EU’s primary funding instrument placing renewed emphasis on interdisciplinary research should be comprehended. In accounting for these changes we would not wish to merely echo North’s argument that by virtue of their coinciding at a point in time when the university has been transformed into an institution run in the interests of profit that theory-driven or post-Marxist histories of literature are inveterately neoliberal; it is important to understand instead that they merely manifest the economic and financial incentives which are a function of the contemporary university’s primary stakeholders, especially when this material may maximise a particular research project’s public impact. Though such policy literature is overwhelmingly directed towards universities’ STEM outputs — it being where the more straightforwardly commercialisable research sectors are located — it is by no means clear that literary studies can be viewed apart from these broader logics. Just as Fordism was influential in shaping the institutionalisation of literary criticism as we saw above, the current precarious funding environment inevitably influences the type of research being produced. Both Max Brzezinski and Charles Altieri have for example, undertaken close readings of contemporary culturalist readings of literary genre as terminating in aestheticism, effacing differences between actually-existing schools of political thought, simplifying context and subsuming reactionary, liberal and left-wing traditions of literature and literary criticism within single categories, terminating in anachronism, the over-writing of political differences, or both. In this sense a predominantly culturalist approach to literary studies ironically comes to reproduce once again the logic which it ostensibly begins by attempting to reject, reproducing the value judgements of modernist form, the impasse which led to the attempted Marxian extrusion from new criticism in the first place. 

Naturalism and literary criticism

It is in the reading of literary genre known as naturalism that the robustness of a Marxian literary critical approach as it has been conducted within the context of the New Left is most evident. This is due to the degree to which it can be associated with the rise and development of modern state governance and the actuality of governing a population, stratified along class lines and often concentrated within the urban environment. Williams identifies one of naturalism’s key tropes, namely, the registering of the existence of the various disciplinary regimes of knowledge production which have arisen in order to accomplish this end, such as criminology, neurology and psychiatry in the sphere of literature. Joe Cleary, contextualising the milieu from which naturalism emerges in more specific terms, writes the following: 

This intellectual climate helped to mould the naturalist conception of the writer, articulated most famously by Zola in his prefaces and manifestos, as a detached, clinically objective ‘scientist’ of human nature or society, with a duty, like that of the scientist or doctor, to vivisect the tissue of conventional moral niceties in pursuit of the deeper ‘laws’ that governed human behaviour. This emphasis on scientific objectivity, and the conception of the novel as a laboratory where experiments concerning individual and social behaviour could be conducted, contributed to the much commented upon determinist sensibility that supposedly characterises naturalist fiction: its assumption that the laws of heredity and social environment, abetted by the undersell of an ungovernable sexual instinct, allowed for only a very constricted form of human agency.

Naturalism’s ‘view from nowhere’, focalised via the viewpoint of a particularly forensic narrator, is therefore aligned with the interests of state power, which accounts for naturalism’s ‘scientific’ emphasis on societal dysfunction, legible from a contemporary perspective as social crises denotative of modernity, such as alcoholism, adultery or violence. In developing these points further we might consider the work of Stephen Crane, an American writer who has been read both as a naturalist and an impressionist. Crane makes for a productive case study within this trajectory due to his being situated in two different camps at once. Martin Scofield describes how the occasion of the American civil war prompted Crane to move beyond the objectivity which characterises works such as Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) towards The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which, in its representation of reality as existing in an intersubjective state of flux seems to anticipate the vacillating modalities of impressionist narrative discourse. We might further consider Crane’s status as an intermediary figure within this chronology by reading extracts from these two novels closely with words which correlate either postively or negatively to literary change in each instance are highlighted in bold, allowing the reader to identify tangible instances of these changes at their most pronounced.

First, we consider an extract from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets: 

The girl thought the arrogance and granite-heartedness of the magnate of the play was very accurately drawn. She echoed the maledictions that the occupants of the gallery showered on this individual when his lines compelled him to expose his extreme selfishness. 

Shady persons in the audience revolted from the pictured villainy of the drama. With untiring zeal they hissed vice and applauded virtue. Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for virtue. 

The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and the oppressed. They encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and jeered the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers. When anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned. They sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin. 

In the hero’s erratic march from poverty in the first act, to wealth and triumph in the final one, in which he forgives all the enemies that he has left, he was assisted by the gallery, which applauded his generous and noble sentiments and confounded the speeches of his opponents by making irrelevant but very sharp remarks. Those actors who were cursed with villainy parts were confronted at every turn by the gallery. If one of them rendered lines containing the most subtile distinctions between right and wrong, the gallery was immediately aware if the actor meant wickedness, and denounced him accordingly. 

Secondly, we consider an extract from The Red Badge of Courage: 

His tall figure stretched itself to its full height. There was a slight rending sound. Then it began to swing forward, slow and straight, in the manner of a falling tree. A swift muscular contortion made the left shoulder strike the ground first. 

The body seemed to bounce a little way from the earth. “God!” said the tattered soldier. 

The youth had watched, spellbound, this ceremony at the place of meeting. His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he had imagined for his friend. 

He now sprang to his feet and, going closer, gazed upon the pastelike face. The mouth was open and the teeth showed in a laugh. 

As the flap of the blue jacket fell away from the body, he could see that the side looked as if it had been chewed by wolves. 

The youth turned, with sudden, livid rage, toward the battlefield. He shook his fist. He seemed about to deliver a philippic. 

“Hell–”
The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer. 

The first paragraph describes the occasion of a play which Maggie attends. While this play is described in the context of a number of plays and other spectacles that Maggie is brought to by a man named Pete, this particular paragraph seems to describe a specific play or performance. This attempt to render subjective experience within a broader continuity of events seems to terminate in a certain degree of ambiguity, the villains of the piece and the reaction of the audience at once mark specific receptions or occasions and a broader continuity of reactions to other plays which seem more or less similar. The overwhelming majority of negatively correlating word types seem to relate to moral judgements or moralising language (‘affections’, ‘barbarous’, ‘benevolence’), particularly regarding the nefarious behaviour of the villain, the positive qualities of the good characters and the sincerity with which the audience’s reactions are invested. The attempt this passage makes to summon up a more generalised portrait of previous productions means that the exact nature of the evil or goodness onstage eludes precise narrative description. It is furthermore important to note that this passage identified by our automated method describes a slightly retrograde form of populist art in which good and bad characters are easily identifiable. There is a significant amount of irony in Crane’s representing this within a novel attempting to convey a more authentic portrait of modern urban life. The awkwardness of some of the syntax perhaps points towards the inappropriateness of these concepts in a modern context. 

This all stands in quite stark contrast to the second paragraph from The Red Badge of Courage which describes an encounter between two soldiers, the novel’s protagonist, Henry Fleming, and Jim Conklin, who has been mortally wounded in battle. The emphasis here is more on two individuals than the broader collective we see described in our excerpt from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. As a result, rather than a broader account of the milieu, within which no single individual is afforded any more space or emphasis than any other, we see extensive amounts of detail being expounded on the physical appearance of these two men more or less in isolation. One of the most pronounced points of comparison can be identified by comparing each respective paragraph’s treatment of physical appearance; while in the first we see a focus on abstract values, morality and emotion, in the second we see far more concrete physical detail. The body parts which are mentioned (‘shoulder’, ‘feet’ and ‘teeth’) seem to have no broader significance beyond a commitment to representational felicity as such. The words around them, furthermore, are simple and do not introduce significant amounts of additional information or detail (‘left’, ‘tall’). It is also significant that this descriptive passage takes place at a remove from the battle itself, almost as though there is an effort being made to isolate these soldiers from a broader generality of figures and that this occurrence is set apart from the more extensive happening of the battle in and of itself. The view from nowhere we see in naturalism has almost vanished completely, but we might say that Crane’s movement from objectivity to more generalised description, and a tendency towards subjectivity, the wound looking as though it had been inflicted by dogs for example, can be attributed to Crane’s experiences of the American civil war, as if he found naturalism thereafter to give insufficient weight to the qualia of experience. 

So far this chapter has set out some of the problems involved in accommodating Underwood’s empirical findings within a broader history of literary criticism which has by its own account, adopted a more avowedly historical orientation to its approach based on the degree to which it emphasises the radical separation between nineteenth and twentieth century literary art. In a bid to introduce a significantly greater amount of the Marxian dialectic into our approach, we examined two sections from the prose fiction of Stephen Crane, the first dense with word-types which die out over time, the second with words that replace them. These serve to emphasize how sensibility and subjectivity become uncoupled from a surrounding context and begin to be explored or expressed for their own sake. This process takes place even as a greater degree or proportion of the text is simultaneously taken up by nouns and concrete objects. We then saw, through a reading of two quite distinct paragraphs written by Crane only two years apart, how impressionist prose, in its ambition to project a social totality with the shortcomings of naturalism taken into account, paradoxically terminates in its reconstruction in vaguer or more ironised terms. 

We might consider this a repudiation of naturalistic detail in favour of the individual perspective, although this may be at odds with the closing lines of the paragraph, which threaten to introduce an almost cosmic, or avowedly Christian setting for the description. We could see in the sun being cast as a wafer either as a successful re-sacralisation of subjective experience, a Jamesian symbol of a movement from the visible to the valuable, or equally we might regard it as parodic; the promised phillipic is not delivered and perhaps points more towards the breaking down of form in the process of its being constructed beyond the realm of the objective even, or especially, as the attempt is made to map it from a subjective point of view. 

We have yet to offer a secure means of identifying these changes with the more macro perspective. We will now accomplish this via materials offered by Marx in his key work of political economy, Capital. It is in the second and third volumes of Capital that Marx provides an account of the various concurrent cycles of capitalist production, beyond the familiar account of the productive process whereby a given worker is alienated from the value which they produce. This involves a further consideration of the larger-scale movements and processes that are brought into existence by capitalist competition in an expanding world market and a distinction between two different forms of capital, both fixed and circulating. The interrelation between the expansion of capitalist markets across the earth and a broader publication infrastructure, along with the uniformity of language and cultural expression has been well-documented, not only in the polemical writing of The Communist Manifesto (1848) but also by historians of print literature such as Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin. In the most straightforward terms possible, the term circulating capital refers to all capital which is used up within the period of a single turnover, whereas fixed capital carries over from one turnover period into another. A good example of fixed capital might be a machine or the factory premises on which the machine is located, while the circulating capital would represent the machine’s inputs, the component parts of the commodity which form the direct components of the productive process’ final output. As Marx emphasises, this process of circulation is put under acute pressure at all times by the requirement that a profit be realised within the capitalist mode of production. The capitalist needs the commodity imbued with surplus value to be sold and to return a profit in a timely manner so that the productive process may be initiated again, albeit at a broader scale. If the commodity circulates unsold in the market, time is wasted during which the capitalist is not recouping any profits. This places a renewed emphasis on the spatial and temporal aspects of production, as it is now in the capitalist’s interest to abbreviate the period of time between the end of the actual production process and the consumption of the product and introduces factors such as transport, retail and credit infrastructure to production as these can all play crucial roles in allowing for the realisation of profit on a more timely basis. This objective tendency towards the increasing velocity of productive and circulation processes is a significant part of the reason why capitalism is such a revolutionising mode of production as the capitalist is forced to invest consistently in new technologies to monitor and to discipline wage labourers to the greatest extent possible in order to remain competitive, resulting in an attenuation of the period of time between production and the realisation of profit, forcing the circulation of capital to as close to zero as possible and overcoming all temporal and spatial barriers insofar as they interfere. 

By demonstrating how close readings of literary texts which make extensive use of word-types identified as significant within the chronology of literary history may be rendered coherent within Marx’s theorisation of spatio-temporal compression and crisis it is hoped that the utility of dialectical materialism to literary study has been demonstrated and I therefore hope to have identified the ways in which a quantitative literary history will look both to empirical methods as well as dialectical materialism in order to advance its critique, providing as it does the most secure means of locating objective entities within an historical process and the most coherent means of incorporating statistics within a historiography of literature.

Tunnel of Toads

The first chapter of my novel, Tunnel of Toads which will be coming out at some point this year, is available to read in the online literary journal The Momentist now. I hope that you’ll read and enjoy it, cheers.

Irish Studies Seminars

I was thrilled to appear on a seminar with Niamh Campbell, Tadgh Hoey, and Caoilinn Hughes talking about the politics of contemporary irish literature and the relationship between politics and literature in general, thanks to Maynooth and to Michael Cronin for having me along, its up on YouTube to view now.

Poem #1

Putting this up as an image because I cannot get it to look the way I want it to with the WordPress block editor.

Watching documentaries about the Troubles

Most of these have been ripped off old VHS tapes which are themselves recordings of television broadcasts. The uploaders will have been conscientious enough to edit out the ad breaks, but sometimes they are left in. These are never quite as interesting as you expect them to be; none of them offer a very robust insight into the times in which they were broadcast, they are primarily noteworthy from the point of view of how orange television signals seemed to have been in the eighties and nineties. The usual artefacts of video recordings also return; discolouration, especially at the edges, random lapses into black and white, the momentary appearance of a teal screen with the words TRACKING in the top left. The other videos the accounts have uploaded are highly miscellaneous, some will have an exclusively republican focus, others will have a more overtly socialist or working-class history slant, but most of them have no discernible theme at work at all. Bad recordings of live gigs, old RTÉ or UTV idents, randomly edited news footage, audiobooks. 

An Tine Beo (1966) was commissioned by RTÉ as part of a commemorative program for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising. The rising appears here mediated primarily through recollection and recordings of military testimony, which appear as narration over shots of relevant Dublin sites in the sixties; St. Stephen’s Green, Boland’s Mills, the GPO. Sometimes these streets are empty and the effect is sombre, the voices spectral reminders of a time when struggle against the British Empire took on a concrete form. The documentary locates the rising in the context of the United Irelanders, the 1913 lockout, the Gaelic cultural revival and the founding of the Irish citizen army.  The overall thrust is to locate the free state under Eamon DeValera, who appears behind his desk towards the end, as the culmination of these centuries of struggle. In line with this aim, rebel tunes are played throughout, but as stately  and tasteful orchestral scores over close up shots of Merrion Street’s neo-classical architecture, rather than as populist working-class ballads. We are offered a reminder that when in office DeValera put an end to the death penalty, a clear repudiation of the idea that the Cosgrave government can claim to be the first in the state. 

As part of the Abbey Theatre’s commemorative programme in 2016, Fintan O’Toole interviewed Roddy Doyle about his novel A Star Called Henry (1999), which represented a young man from Dublin’s tenements, Henry Smart, as the Forest Gump of the free state. The novel is an irreverent one; it dabbles in magical realism, representing Smart as a big hit with Cumman na mBán brigades and having sex with some of them during crucial moments in the early history of the revolutionary period, in a bid to pour scorn on what we might refer to as ‘romantic nationalism’. I think we can trace this attitude or criticisms of it to Ruth Dudley Edwards’ accounts of figures like Padraig Pearse, who is spoken of as more akin to a suicide visionary or religious extremist than an anti-imperialist. Doyle also recalls episodes from his childhood in school when they were required to learn the names of the participants in 1916, glorify the Fenian dead, have teatowels with their likenesses on them, etc etc. Snapshots of this also appear in Doyle’s more autobiographical novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993). What Doyle seems to object to here is the idea that there is a lineage stretching from Cú Chulainn to Wolfe Tone to Pearse, that the history of struggle against the British Empire forms a totality. I’m not exactly sure why it is de facto regarded as a bad thing to identify the commonalities in struggles waged by the Young Irelanders, the Fenians and the Irish Citizen Army, I prefer to think of the history of Ireland’s solidarity with smaller nations as something to be proud of or celebrated, as in the Dunnes Stores strikes against apartheid, or the reasons why Israeli ambassadors speak openly about what a difficult mission Ireland is in comparison to other states. One of the reasons I can think of in accounting for why it is that Irish writers seem to keen to write this stuff off is revisionism’s capacity to present itself as introducing greater amounts of nuance or intellectual credibility to the wholesale rejection of imperialism, John Banville speaks in very similar terms in his positive appraisal of Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces (2014) which reads the revolutionary generation as bourgeois and anti-democratic narodniki. There are certainly shots of graves, Cú Chulainn’s statue in An Tine Bheo, but in large part the aim of the documentary is to lay such ghosts to rest, incarnate the living spirit of Republicanism in Dev and replace the haunted streets with images of a bustling metropolis. It concludes with full streets, buses, commuters and a voice assuring us that we have ‘paid our debts’, setting the stage for an economic model premised on foreign direct investment. Easter 1916: A Curious Journey was also commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary, but focuses to a greater extent on the actuality of the struggles and its participants. These veterans are equally divided into treatyites and anti-treatyites and important junctures for both camps seems to have been the assassination of Michael Collins (though Tom Barry is not asked about this) as well as the familiar bitterness of the civil war, whose wounds are still evident, bringing more than one participant to tears. A Curious Journey emphasises to a greater extent than An Tine Bheo, the trajectory towards a United Ireland and the anti-sectarian nature of republicanism as envisioned by Wolfe Tone. Partition is identified as a mistake and a causal factor in the ongoing failures of both the Irish state and the northern statelet, but the actuality of getting there is not touched upon to any great extent. 

A Sense of Loss (1972) was directed by Marcel Ophuls and seems to have been filmed in a pre-Bloody Sunday milieu and it therefore affords significantly greater amounts of attention to the Officials than the Provisionals. Ophuls’ approach is an exercise in a kind of a high irony; he poses disinterested yet often deeply challenging questions to everyone he interviews, whether loyalist or republican, military or civilian and manages in that intensely subtle way great interviewers can to get people to reveal themselves in ways I find it hard to think that they intended. Loyalist families say there is no such thing as housing or job discrimination in the orange state and that it would solve everything if Britain annexed and re-occupied the twenty-six counties. This can be over-egged at times; a lot goes into the juxtaposition of families talking about loved ones they’ve lost in the conflict while Irish-American marching bands proceed down a New York street or shots of dolls in military regalia hang in a toy shop. It is difficult to shake the sense that Ophuls is significantly more sympathetic to the republican side of the argument, his random interviews in London reveals the British to be totally ignorant about the roots of the conflict and an RUC man instructs him to interview moderate Protestants for his documentary, presumably knowing people like Patrick Ruddell or John McKeague (the latter filmed sitting between two portraits of Elizabeth II and in front of one of William of Orange) will have no qualms about describing Catholics as ‘gutter rats’ or argue that songs with lyrics like ‘Falls was made for burning / Taigs were made to kill’ do not encourage or celebrate pogroms against Catholics; ‘we were acquitted on this charge’. Ophuls’ documentary remains one of the few which affords significant consideration to loyalism and the facts of the ideology as explained by its adherents render it difficult to present as just another side of one argument. 

No Go (1973) is likewise focused on the officials, but is concentrated primarily in Derry. The documentary’s narrator is Irish-American, everything Irish people say is subtitled and much of the documentary’s soundtrack is composed of ballads which gesture towards the Officials’ supposedly more Marxist outlook which glazes in it a bit of a sentimental pall. The film’s high points are footage of training camps, where a few young men are screamed at for not dropping into a sniper’s position or holding their rifles correctly. Representations of the Bogside as under siege are also very well done with barbed wire, barricades, terraced houses, overseen by snipers between gaps in sandbag walls, facilitated by Derry’s geography. From the point of view of the young men who are interviewed, joining the IRA was either a matter of having been born into it, with one’s father being a member, or an imperative due to the need to protect the community from British forces, or, as another reports, seeing an unarmed teenage girl shot by a British Army officer. A now-familiar account of the IRA’s growth and development is laid out here, from the disproportionate reaction of the RUC to civil rights protesters, to Bloody Sunday, to a lack of economic opportunity for Catholics. A political account of the provisional movement receives short shrift here, an Official presents them as single-minded militarists with no political content to their approach whatsoever. Such lines are continually propagated by the bafflingly resilient stickie-historiographical industrial complex, but as Gearóid Ó Faoleán documents in his book A Broad Church (2019), the split in the IRA was articulated in manifestly different ways in a number of different areas depending on far more pragmatic and local causes than are usually discussed, such as personalities, group affiliation, the capacity of one side of the organisation to mobilise or arm itself in one area as opposed to another. Tyrone in particular represents an exception to many simplistic narratives of provo bible bashers on one hand versus dialectical materialists on the other. No Go also features a B plot wherein an explosive device is manufactured, smuggled across the border and bypasses a British Army checkpoint. Strange dubs clearly undertaken by yanks are used in these reconstructions (‘this will blow away these Pratastant haethans!’) and it is difficult to know what the point of these scenes are. We also see the fallout from the Officials’ shooting of William Best, a teenage soldier in the British Army, and the role his assassination played in galvanising a peace movement in the area, especially by priests who are calling for a universal end to violence. I recall Mary Holland’s documentary Creggan (1980), no longer on YouTube, that represents residents of the Bogside as surprisingly willing to say on record that though Best’s death was regrettable from one point of view, he should not have been in the British Army.

The Patriot Game (1978) emphasises to a far greater extent than elsewhere the political program of the provos. The documentary offers the closest to a Marxist account of the Troubles that yet exists on film, a history stretching as far back as the plantations, through the United Irishmen, the efforts of James Connolly, and to a lesser extent Jim Larkin, to fuse republican and socialist struggle into a single coherent movement. An account of how the partition of Ireland facilitated the construction of the orange state, to which the civil rights movement emerged as a response in the late sixties and how this peaceful protests were in turn responded to by heavy-handed police tactics, consisting of internment, as well torture administered in police custody (electric shocks, drugging, sleep deprivation, beatings, sometimes administered to death, the use of supposedly ‘non-lethal’ weapons) re-vivified the IRA; all this is identified with a broader history of colonial settlement and decolonial struggle. It is likewise attentive to the ways in which the British conducted counter-insurgency operations, bomb alerts passed onto the police on Bloody Friday were not being acted on and special branch both assisted and facilitated loyalist paramilitaries in their efforts to collapse Sunningdale.

The original footage which appears here is shot roughly in black and white. We move through housing estates with children playing, while patrols of armed British soldiers and convoys of military trucks drive by. It’s here that we see something like a recognisable aesthetic of the Troubles take shape, the particular kind of grain that alerts you to the possibility that something in the foreground will be blowing up very soon. One hesitates to apply the concept of the uncanny to these films, signs of youth culture, kids playing in housing estates co-existing with British army patrols, convoys of military trucks, but that it prompted a particular kind of prurience lying behind takes about what the imminent American civil war will look like is undeniable. If one were interested in such things, one might try to re-read Mark Fisher’s notion of hauntology is a more overtly political light here; British council estates populated by Irish people, main arteries marched down by a seventeenth-century union of craft workers and thereby put the mourning for what Fisher refers to as the British ‘postwar consensus’, which was in fact deeply contested, not least in Ireland, under significant amounts of pressure. Provos appear in silhouette assembling guns, drilling, outlining the program for a 32-county socialist republic as well as the Éire Nua scheme. The molecular nature of revolution also receives attention here, self-organised nationalist communities form taxi associations in response to the government removing bus services from Catholic areas. 

A friend of mine recently made the point that the history of Irish struggle is not rife with great speeches. Ruairí O’Brádaigh’s address to a Sinn Féin ard-fheis in 1986 does not quite count as one of them, but the passion with which it is delivered as well as its hitting the reformist trajectory of Sinn Féin point for point means that I am compelled to watch it on a regular basis. O’Brádaigh opens his address with a reference to Adams’ media strategising (‘I shake hands with everyone and at every time not just in front of the media’) and draws on the history of the republican movement to rebuke the idea that recognising partitionist parliaments is anything other than a turn towards parliamentarism and reformism: 

“The destabilisation of the state, we are told, will result and the movement will be strengthened. Always has it been otherwise, every time has it been otherwise, the movement suffered and the state was strengthened. Four times since 1922 it happened, all ended in failure and ended ultimately in the degradation and shame of collaborating with the British, of handing over our political prisoners to them and running counter to what they originally set out to do.”

McGuinness speaks in favour of the motion O’Bradaigh speaks against and is laughable in its evasions of the point, insistence that SF will never do any of the things it ended up doing and renders emotive comparisons with the bourgeoning split and that of the Officials/Provisionals in the seventies. 

Some account of the social and economic milieu of the north emerge in Irish Ways (1989) including how important the securitisation of the six counties is for creating employment for the loyalist population, we are shown bullet holes in walls and ceilings of Catholic homes, that Ballymurphy has an 80% unemployment rate, we hear a woman describing how a British soldier blinded her with a rubber bullet by shooting her in the face. In overall terms though, it represents a pivot in the ways in which the troubles are represented in documentaries, which begin to take a ‘two sides’ version of the conflict for granted. The Republican end is represented by Brendan Hughes, hunger striker and member of the Provisional IRA while Gusty Spence and David Irvine form the UVF contrast to Hughes in Irish Ways and Voices from the Grave respectively. What makes the difference here then is the way in which the Ulster Defence Regiment and the Ulster Volunteer Force are taken seriously as political organisations in their own right. Spence advances a brief analysis of the history of the north according to the idea that Irish republicanism was always a murderous and dissident force against the neutral ‘state’ represented by the plantations, sadly the documentary does not expand on this Kaiserreich version of early modern Irish history to any great extent. For some of the reasons touched upon above, even in these accounts it is always Republicanism that commands greater amounts of attention. There’s a clip of Michael Stone in The Enemy Within (1990) talking about how he always regretted how Republicans were much better at prison propaganda than loyalists were, which leaves you wondering what exactly a paramilitary arm of the existing state could actually be propagandising for.

Voices from the Grave (2010) goes into further detail on Hughes’ biography, due to their being based off oral testimony Ed Moloney collected in the course of his Boston Tapes research. Hughes talks about growing up in the orange state, a neighbour who used to spit at him when he walked past and asked him if he had blessed himself with the pope’s piss that morning. His experiences of the conflict are actually reconstructed fairly well, including when women broke the British Army curfew and allowed IRA fighters to escape the area by putting arms in prams, an attempted assassination attempt, his regrets about Bloody Friday and the assassination of Jean McConville. It is after the resumption of struggle during the period of the hunger strikes that Hughes becomes increasingly disenchanted with the direction of the organisation under Adams and its becoming ‘just another middle-class party’. 

The hunger strikes, especially the second, looms largest in documentaries about the troubles, for the obvious reason that it attracted extensive amounts of international attention. It is also identified as a turning point in Sinn Féin’s electoral struggle, based on the military stalemate the army had entered into in the eighties and the boost in electoral success. One hunger striker in particular argues that Adams stalled negotiations with the British in order to recoup further electoral success, Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA (2002), though Adams-centric to a fault, offers the most fully-fleshed out account of provos’ history with Adams as the Machiavelli. 

Hughes would not be the only longtime Republican to make criticisms such as these, in Maria McGlinchey’s Unfinished Business (2019), Christy Burke outlines his reasons for leaving Sinn Féin in 2009 after becoming frustrated by the degree to which the party’s strategy seemed to be determined by media strategists and consultants rather than his working class constituents. Hughes also outlines his suspicions that there was a high-level informer operating within the IRA after the execution of Joe Fenton had occurred before he could be interrogated, as if to protect this informerand how the UVF escalated their campaign, particularly in the most Republican areas of East Tyrone where dissent to the direction of a peace process could be anticipated, in order to strong-arm the republican movement into the peace process to make, as Bernadette says, ‘the price of staying out of it too high’. The relatively comfortable careers of the two loyalist men in Stormont form a sad contrast with that of Hughes, whose wishes that SF and Adams would have nothing to do with his funeral were ignored.

Shoot to Kill (1990) is a docu-drama about the 1984 – 86 inquiry conducted by the Manchester police Constable John Stalker and the events leading up to its being established in Armagh. In his attempts to identify whether or not the RUC had indeed colluded in the covering up of evidence relating to the shooting dead of six suspects, Stalker found himself stonewalled by the RUC and conspired against by MI5, who had him suspended from the Manchester police force under false pretences. In addition to being one of the best thrillers you’ll ever see, especially if you are into the representation of procedural detail, it is strikingly clear-eyed about just how partisan the RUC were. On YouTube the 3.5 hour film is followed by a thirty-minute panel discussion between the film’s director, Peter Kosminsky (who distaste for fictionalised narrative is deeply refreshing) David Trimble, Seamus Mallon and Ian Gow, a Tory MP who was assassinated by the IRA a few months after the discussion was broadcast. Trimble and Gow argue the RUC probably don’t do enough of what they are accused of in the film, Mallon that the RUC is a good police force but there are a couple of bad apples while Kosminsky speaks on the facts of how the RUC operate and O’Leary keeps interrupting him.

Mother Ireland (1991) is a documentary featuring interviews with Bernadette Devlin, Nell McCafferty as well as scholars, academics and filmmakers about Irish women and Irish feminism. Provisional IRA member Mairéad Farrell also appears with her voice dubbed over in order to satisfy laws on censorship in an appearance filmed a few months before she was  murdered by British intelligence agents in Gibraltar. It offers an expansive history of women under colonialism, the penal laws and outlines the radicalising influence of women in organisations such as the land leagues, Cumann na mBan, the broader Republican movement and the counter-revolution against women and women’s rights waged in the free state. The consensus offered here is that Republicanism is perfectly compatible with feminism as against the growing academic consensus that it has for most of its history been a manifestly anti-feminist or masculinist ‘discourse’ to the extent that it is indistinguishable from British imperialism. On the contradictions between feminism and republicanism, Nell McCafferty argues the following:

The further away the women are who are struggling the easier it is to support them. Irish women for example have no trouble supporting Willie Mandela and the ANC, or the guerrilla women in the Philippines or the women of Nicaragua but when it comes to the achievement of supporting physical force to achieve an objective here at home they are confused and I don’t expect Irish women or feminists…to be any less ambivalent or any clearer-mined than the majority of Irish constitutional nationalists who also don’t know, can’t make up their minds.

Sighle Humphries, veteran of Cumann na mBan in complains about scholars and journalists reading women republicans as mere handmaidens of the volunteers who should have followed the example of the English suffragettes. How the image of Irish womanhood is now used in order to attract multi-national investment and tourists is also very interestingly discussed. 

In 1993, Olivia O’Leary presents an investigation into the 1974 Dublin-Monaghan bombings, an instance in which two bombs were detonated on the north side of the inner city and one around Trinity College. In addition to forensic reconstructions of the routes the cars took across the border and towards Dublin, the report features extensive accounts of confidentially disclosed statements which make clear that the guards were unable to proceed with their investigation past a certain point or to pursue the loyalist terrorists from Portadown who were responsible. Eight perpetrators, all members of the mid-Ulster brigade of the UVF are apparently known to the guards. In the early stages of the investigation the RUC facilitated their investigation, but blocked their capacity to interview the suspects. The documentary also presents evidence which suggests the loyalist brigades were receiving money as informants from British intelligence and also received assistance from the Brits in order to do carry out the bombing.

In 1994 Adams appeared on the Late Late show. The first ten minutes of the interview consists of Gay interviewing Adams by himself and thereafter the playwright Hugh Leonard, Austin Currie (SDLP) Dermot Aherne (Fianna Fáil), Jim Kenny (Labour), Michael MacDowell (Progressive Democrats) show up to heckle him. There is no real substantive engagement with any issues surrounding the conflict in the north or the political approach of the Provisional IRA in this interview, but for anyone who has ever gotten frustrated with the standard of coverage Sinn Féin receive today (Louise O’Reilly being asked about whether a shadowy council in Belfast drafted her COVID policy or suchlike), it will be very familiar. Adams runs rings around them and pulls down applause breaks after almost everything he says in response because he has spent more or less his adult life talking working-class revolutionaries around to giving up every principle they ever abided by as opposed to the private schoolboy L&H society debate clubs the rest of them were spawned in. All of them are only interested in the north insofar as it provides atrocities which may be used against people they don’t like and MacDowell goes so far at one stage to let slip that he thinks the RUC are a legitimate police force. The biggest laugh of all is that what they’re trying to bash Adams for, not facilitating a peace process, is that that is exactly what he’s there to promote. The question arises as to what these people really want? Hard to shake the feeling that it’s for people in Tyrone to stop making claims on being Irish.

Battle of the Bogside (2004) is another instance in which some aspects of the struggle have come to be re-read in new light. Events surrounding Free Derry become an Irish answer to generalised 68’r ructions with people who went on to have careers in journalism or Stormont commanding the bulk of the talking head space as opposed to republicans. Security forces and orange order members are surprisingly forthcoming in their contrition and their awareness about how what they did was wrong and that the violence against the protestors was unwarranted. Jack Lynch is criticised far more often than the actual people with the batons or parliamentary seats. No-one mentions imperialism and radical politics in general don’t get much of a look-in, unless throwing things at the police counts. 

As the constitutional path and parliamentary wrangling begin to predominate and the struggle reaches a lower ebb in the course of the peace process it is through news footage of protests surrounding orange order marches and debates over the passing of another agreed deadline, news panel debates what constitutes an adequate form of de-commissioning that events such as these are recorded. These broadcasts are primarily interesting from the position the UUP are thrown back onto as upstart DUP’rs can just say insane nonsense and make Trimble sound like a provo by comparison.

In this context, obtaining justice then becomes an issue pursued through the courts, NGO’s, activism, appeals, international orgnisations. Some examples of what this looks like in practice include Eamon McCann’s lecture to the British Socialist Worker’s Party on the families of the Bloody Sunday victims securing an apology from David Cameron. Serious examinations of politics receive less and less treatment as time goes on here, the default Republican outlooks seen in RTÉ programming in the sixties have disappeared almost completely. To what can this be attributed? In his book, The Impact of the Troubles on the Republic of Ireland (2018), Brian Hanley outlines the effects of partition on the political outlook of the population in Ireland. Crucially though, Hanley does not do so in psychologistic or metaphorical terms. According to his account, this pivot in terms of how the twenty-six counties began to move away from a Republican orientation took place during the Fine Gael Labour coalition headed by William Cosgrave, a time characterised by the introduction of censorship and purging of the state broadcaster, heavy-handed police tactics which extracted false confessions under torture, conducted widepread surveillance of perceived ‘dissidents’ all with the aim of securing Ireland’s political and economic integration into the EEC. The Irish-language documentary Faoi Lámha an Stáit offers one of the better overviews of the period. In some ways Hanley’s account is made possible by the development of mass-media in the seventies, how this same manoeuvre was by Cumann na nGaedhal in a pre-television era would make for an interesting comparison and draw our attention to a far greater extent to state reprisal as a means of enforcing consent.

Aside from political concerns, the quality of the documentaries produced from roughly the year 2000 onwards begins to decline significantly. While gossipy documentaries produced about Brian Cowen or Bertie Ahern being Taoisigh will always be sort of hilarious because the squalid production values form something of a commentary on the era in which Fianna Fáil were at their political height, documentaries produced by BBC, RTÉ and Channel 4 on the north are next to useless, ceding ground to an Alliance party version of history wherein The Troubles was an exclusively tribal or sectarian conflict. Some more recent ones are just absolutely unwatchable trash, with hours of bizarrely over expressive presenters interviewing journalists and American academics rather than working-class people who lived at the forefront of the conflict, long takes where they speak into camera while walking down a busy high street with a set of mannerisms indistinguishable from Alan Patridge (‘But just what were the Troubles? I went to talk to Professor McElwee in Queen’s University Belfast, to find out the truth, behind the myth’). 

The only ones worth watching now are independent productions, whether these are from commemorative DVDs produced by Sinn Féin or interviews conducted with veterans of the Border campaign. All of these are extremely valuable as historical documents, the insights offered by Jim Lane, Richard Behal and Liam Sutcliffe among others challenge many perceptions of the IRA’s ambivalent relationship with socialist politics which have been emerging amidst SF’s electoral revival. While SF’s ventures take the point of view of individuals mourning rather than broader political questions, broader questions into which dissident factions of the republican movement would have some scope in inserting themselves, they are at least, informative or interesting. Bernadette McAliskey’s lecture on the peace-process dispensation, ‘A Terrible State of Chassis‘, which suggests that the war was not worth fighting given the lack of improvement in the lot of the working class is worth watching, and worth contrasting also with another one she delivers to a Solidarity Group in Sweden at a point when the future of the peace process was evidently less secure. The Siege of Short Strand (2002) is one put together from edits of home footage filming events as they took place in one of the most Catholic areas in east Belfast. It points to some of the contradictions with the peace process dispensation, where pogroms are still eminently conceivable and police reticence to confront loyalist violence is clear. If anything interesting is to take place in breaking the Stormont deadlock in the north, it is fairly obvious that here are some of the primary tension points.

The Production of Style in ‘Eumaeus

‘Eumaeus’ is Ulysses‘ (1922) third last episode and is written in a style manifestly distinct from the rest of the novel. This is due to its functioning, I contend, as a parody of nineteenth century realism, of which someone like Charles Dickens might be said to be a standard-bearer, an author whose works Eumaeus both references and satirises. This would not in itself render Eumaeus an episode all that distinct from the rest of the novel; by the time we’re in the novel’s second half the stylistic ‘norm’ established in the Telemachiad has been left behind, in favour of a style which more often than not parodies more traditional or popular literary forms. However, Eumaeus is distinct among these for its representation of the state, society and Dublin at the turn of the century from a more overtly political perspective and this post aims to flesh out some of these issues to a greater extent.

Tony Farmar and Terry Eagleton identify the Famine and subsequent acts of land reform imposed by the British parliament as Ireland’s answer to the bourgeois revolutions of England and France, historical moments which loom so large within the history of dialectical materialism. These legislative reforms, so the argument goes, further codified in law what the land seizures and clearances which came in the wake of Famine had brought about; the emergence of Ireland as an economy of large-scale pastoral production, requiring the construction of one of the world’s densest railway systems in order to facilitate extraction and distribution of its exports.

David Convery argues that the predominantly rural nature of the Irish economy is often posited as a means of questioning the existence of an Irish class system in any form. This proposition has some unfortunate correspondences to the representation of the working class in Ulysses, a novel more broadly typified by representations of Dublin’s indigenous service industry and petit-bourgeoisie; representations of the working class in Ulysses function primarily as a means of providing local detail (7.21 – 24) or a threatening atmosphere (16.327 – 330). This is despite the extent of the poverty which would have been visible in Dublin at the time in which Ulysses is set in 1904; Conor McCabe notes that Dublin had the highest mortality rate in the British empire around the turn of the century and in a 1937 review of the novel Alick West criticised Ulysses on the basis of this oversight: ‘Joyce shows…little of the relations of production. There are no disputes between employers and labour, no struggle for wages, no strikes’.

Ulysses does manifest a significantly greater degree of attention to the domestic consumption of advertising canvassers, clerks and journalists who are all present in the novel to a significantly greater extent than labourers, industrial workers or peasant farmers despite the fact that clerks and more commercial workers were resident in the city’s suburbs to avoid paying the city rates; the labouring population formed almost half the working population and were concentrated in the inner city. It is worth noting, as Farmar does, that Dublin’s high street stores were, at the time in which Ulysses is set, beginning to stock goods promoting the lifestyle choices of a growing middle class, who were also beginning to enjoy the benefits of a more widespread selection of imports such as stout, biscuits, clothes, sugar and tea. However, this disproportionate amount of attention to the end-point of the productive process, passing over production itself or the labourers on whom these global supply chains depended, is indicative of the novel’s blindness to class antagonisms which were soon to lead to crises such as the first world war, the 1913 Lockout and the 1916 Rising. Ulysses might therefore be described as a case study of what György Lukács referred to as a modernist naturalism incapable of dealing with capitalist society as a broader totality. To provide further context to the relative conservatism of Irish modernism, we might add Joe Cleary’s reference to the dissolution of Irish popular culture after the Famine and the relative lack of a mass print culture, two extenuating factors which might plausibly have stymied the development of a more robust and indigenous literary tradition more overtly engaged in social critique.

What is crucial to recall in this is that by the end of the nineteenth century, Irish agriculture has taken on a global character. It was not an indigenous industry in any sense, but one that had been developed for export, and Ireland’s location within the British empire made Ireland effectively dependent on Britain as an export market which allowed for no protectionist tariffs. The overwhelming majority of these exports took the form of alcohol and live cattle, the latter being transported from big farms in the island’s midlands, to the Dublin docks, to slaughterhouses in the north of England where demand for Irish produce remained constant in order to meet the demands of the growing centres of manufacturing. This relationship between England and Ireland functioned extremely well in delivering capital surpluses to those who owned large farms in Ireland as well as industrialists and landed farmers in England, Irish small farmers being left as poorly off as they were in the mid-nineteenth century.

To provide an example of the ways in which Eumaeus ultimately shies away from the provision of an accurate picture of the working class in Dublin in 1904, we might consider the episode’s beginning, when the smell emitted from a bakery is described, and the narrative voice interleaves Stephen and Bloom’s subjective responses, in modes such as Shakespearean malapropism, folk wisdom, Catholic ritualising and advertising jingles, all of which will be familiar from earlier parts of the text (16.51 – 59). In contrast to the rich symbolic terrain of the bakery, as well the comparatively vibrant account of the grocers, clothiers and North Star Hotel, the warehouses on Beresford place, junctures at which Dublin’s key position within the supply chain outlined above, are primarily defined by their inanition and emptiness. The more commonsensical explanation that it is a time in which warehouse labour would presumably not be taking place should not be discounted, especially given that night work in bakeries was at the time a point of struggle within labour disputes, but the fact that the bakery is operational while the warehouses are not is nevertheless symptomatic of Eumaeus’ political interventions. These warehouses, and the docking infrastructure within which they were a part, formed one of the most important sites of struggle during the labour disputes of 1913; when Dublin’s employers began to import scab labour from England at the end of October as a means of breaking the strike, the workers succeeded in closing the docks. This attenuation of Eumaeus’ scope to Dublin’s domestic economy at the expense of an account of Ireland’s economic position relative to an imperial power, let alone a world capitalist totality, is of a part with the compression or rationalisation of the episode’s style which hails the reader in the anonymised voice of a contrived ‘common man’. Republicanism, trade unionism, socialism and anarchism are all touched upon in this episode, albeit while maintaining the fundamental scepticism regarding totalising approaches that one sees elsewhere in Ulysses, such as those that we might find in these schools of thought and praxis. Eumaeus instead gestures towards some aspects of these anti-statist formations against which Bloom’s liberal reformism contrasts. 

Due to the experiential ways in which Joyce represents the interiority of his characters and erects totalising propositions only as a prelude to their deconstruction, it can be difficult to obtain a precise notion of Bloom’s politics. Nevertheless, there is a constellation of perspectives outlined by Bloom, via Stephen and Eumaeus’ narrative voice, with a direct bearing on the style in which Eumaeus is written. At the beginning of this episode, Bloom inveighs Stephen with a series of monologues, mediated via the narrative voice, regarding the danger Stephen faces in continuing to spend his time in disreputable areas such as Monto, attempting to encourage him to live his life in a more respectable way. As the episode continues, Bloom considers the ways in which Stephen might utilise the talents he presumably possesses in singing and literature in order to manoeuvre himself into some of the more fashionable upper class salons in Dublin (16.1828 – 1860). Throughout Eumaeus therefore, the theme of working one’s way into a higher class or potentially descend into a lower one predominates.

The urban proletariat is increasingly visible in Eumaeus in the guise of three characters who are provided with something approximating an extensive treatment. The first of these is John Corley, a character immediately ironised by being referred to as Lord John Corley. It becomes clear that this is a sardonic reference to a genealogy which links him both with the Talbot family of Malahide as well as Jesus Christ (16.128 – 140). These genealogies not only parody Dickens’ representations of the poor as temporarily embarrassed aristocrats, but represent Corley as an unreliable witness, as when Corley’s account of his unemployment and general lack of funds is glossed by the narrative voice as a ‘doleful ditty’ (16.144), as though Corley were playing up his hard luck solely in order to extract sympathy and money from Stephen. Corley’s vector over the course of the previous day, and indeed number of years, forms an intriguing parallel with that of Stephen. Corley firstly seems to have had some kind of a drunken falling out with Lenehan, just as Stephen has with Mulligan. Stephen is coming from Clifton School in Dalkey just as Corley may be heading there later in the day in order to request a job. Finally, they both spent time in the Christian Brothers. This would not have been unusual for Catholic men in Ireland at the time, but the emphasised difference between Corley’s experience of the school system when compared to Stephen’s is nonetheless illustrative. Based on how closely their experiences of the previous day correspond and their educational experiences diverge, the episode suggests how easy it would be for Stephen to be in the position of needing to beg from people in the near future, given that neither of them at this particular point have a job or a home to go to. When Bloom and Stephen enter the cabman’s shelter, Stephen is reflecting on a memory of the front room in his former home, presumably as a result of some residual anxiety at seeing the state in which Corley is in (16.270 – 275). All these discourses surrounding Corley’s character, as well Bloom’s disinterested reflection on class relations being the product of disproportionately distributed amounts of luck (16.240) or a failure on the behalf of the underprivileged to maximise their own individual capacities, suggest that Corley, like Stephen, is in his current situation due to poor judgement and a lack of initiative. This is emphasised further when Bloom reflects on Corley, as ‘the other parasite’ (16.231), a formulation which would presumably render Stephen the first.

The next representative of the working class in Eumaeus comes in the figure of the sex worker who Bloom sees passing by the cabman’s shelter. References are made to the Lock hospital, an institution associated with the treatment of venereal disease. Bloom’s attitude towards the woman, and the voice of the episode with which Bloom’s perspective is suffused, seems at first to be slightly more liberal than one would expect. At the time, the predominating notion of a prostitute amounted to that of a sinful, fallen woman and little consideration would have been given to the material conditions which might lead to people becoming sex workers. In much nineteenth century medical literature for instance, prostitutes were considered a source of contamination, corruption and disease. The Italian criminologist Cesara Lombroso and French physician Louis Fiaux, studied working class women in the late nineteenth century via phrenological methods, arguing that prostitutes had distorted body parts, primitive and childlike attention spans and limited cognitive capacities. The reactionary tendencies at play in Eumaeus’ representation of sex workers return us to the matter of Ireland’s colonial dependency, there being a correlation between the location of military barracks and areas in which the selling of sex is more widespread than elsewhere, as it was for the famous wrens of the Curragh as well as Tipperary town where there the construction of a garrison led to the residents complaining of a marked increase in sex workers in 1877. The district of Monto has its origins here too; extra troops were garrisoned along Mecklenberg street in the early nineteenth century due to rising anxieties regarding a potential French invasion. The publication of an account written by James Greenwood on the wrens in 1867 in the Pall Mall Gazzette embarrassed the authorities into taking action and passing both the Curragh of Kildare and Contagious Diseases Acts in 1868, laws which permitted state authorities to intervene more directly in the camp and its residents. It is via Eumaeus’ representation of the sex worker then, that a biopolitical framework becomes more clearly foregrounded and the notion of becoming or being working class takes on a pathological valency in its association with venereal disease and the contemporary discourses composing the broader prostitute imaginary. We might recall here Corley being referred to as a parasite as well as the alcoholism of the man who may or may not be the town clerk Henry Campbel. 

It is here that we come to a fulcrum of Bloom’s political beliefs, accounts of which often emphasise his liberal open-mindedness, tolerance and the rational nature of his proposals for the improvement of society. In many ways, these appraisals fail to interrogate these reforms’ dependence on the adjustment of individual behaviour or seeming belief in the capacity of a capitalist market to function according to moral tenets. Some of Bloom’s reflections on improving the lot of the working classes for instance, include the promotion of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association as a means of treating alcoholism and the use of community venues in order to stage educational plays or informative lectures (16.793 – 795). It is interesting to note that in comparison to some actually existing reform movements these policy proposals were not as progressive as they might seem; figures such as James Larkin were making practical efforts to construct a working-class counter-culture within the trade union movement based on collective values such as sharing and solidarity in opposition to a bourgeois individualism. Larkin’s plans depended on the development of spaces within which rank-and-file members of the Irish Transport and General Worker’s Union and their families could receive education, social welfare supports and participate in sporting activities. These efforts, which would have been roughly contemporaneous with the events of the novel, in fact contrast with Bloom’s far more conservative vision of social reform. The extent of Bloom’s social vision therefore amounts to the pithy injunction to more ‘do good and net a profit’ (16.800 – 801), which would locate Bloom’s plans for social improvement and welfare very much within the post-Fordist social contract, whereby increased amounts of private consumption, especially international travel, would be made possible by a substantial universal income (16.509 – 510; 16.1133 – 1135; 16.641 – 16.648). These concessions are then leveraged as a means of de-communalising social welfare programmes and public investment, replacing them with philanthropy or a moral economy. It is fitting then, that within much of Bloom’s narration he seems to regard himself as a corporate entity (16.537 – 538); he reflects throughout the episode on the potentially lucrative nature of the concert tours he might establish with both Stephen and Molly’s talents (16.522 – 526). This is not to suggest that Ulysses or Bloom provide an insight into the future of the Atlanticist economies but what the entrepreneurial logics of valuing thrift and propriety elsewhere praised in the discourse terminates in (16.539 – 562). Bloom’s understanding of the role of policing also casts doubt on the notion that he is representative of progressive politics; Bloom notes in the earlier in the episode that only more fashionable parts of Dublin can be depended upon as areas in which a strong police presence can be noted as opposed to more deprived areas such as Monto. This thought evinces a surprising degree of awareness regarding the political nature of policing and even some degree of cynicism regarding the ruling classes (160.80 – 82), but one should note that Bloom’s complaint originates in his thought that the police are not in Dublin’s red light district in sufficient numbers. This would be despite prostitutes being subject to the power of the state on a regular basis, as Maria Luddy argues  ‘authority in the form of police and prison officers governed their lives’. Of course, Bloom is more interested in ensuring Stephen can have safe traffic through more deprived areas than he is in the conditions in said areas. Shortly after Bloom thinks on this issue, Bloom and Stephen are hailed by a sentry man at Amiens Street who turns out to be a friend of Simon Dedalus. The man is named Gumley and towards the end of the episode, he is represented as being sufficiently free from work to do that he is asleep, suggesting not only that police forces are somewhat ineffectual or benign, but dismisses the idea also that they represent an exogenous, occupying or coercive force; their familiarity and essential harmlessness is confirmed by Gumley familiarity to the two men. 

When the conversation in the cabman’s shelter turns to imperialist violence, Bloom sceptically reflects that Irish soldiers were just as prone to violent engagements such as this (16.1042) and that the English are quite restrained in their use of force (16.1033 – 1034). In addition to being contrary to Bloom’s personal experience, given that he was nearly run over by a mounted policeman at a protest against the Boer war, between these two propositions there is not only a form of both-sidesism at play, where both sides make use of violence and therefore both are equally bad, but ultimately, British soldiers are framed as making use of a restrained or judicious, ‘good’ violence in opposition to the violence committed by bad Irish soldiers, which is of course, contrary to his staunch doctrine of non-violence (16.1060). Booker identifies a both-sidesism associated with Bloom’s character and suggests that this may relate to his class interests; Bloom is shown to possess stocks in the Canadian government to a value of £900 to which a British victory in the Boer war would have provided greater security. Lawrence argues that Bloom’s politics are ambiguous in their orientation due to the half-admiration he seemingly expresses via the ambiguity of a key clause which suggests that Bloom has only been half-cured of his youthful radicalism and admiration for those who would use violence in the achievement of their political aims.

It is primarily anarchists, the labour movement and Republicans who are provided with the short end of the argumentative stick by having their positions represented as confused and inchoate throughout the episode, at the end of which Bloom’s liberal utopianism and Stephen’s aesthetic hermeticism appear comparatively engagé. 

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——. The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981. Print.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage, 1987. Print.

Luddy, Maria. “An Outcast Community:the ‘Wrens’ of the Curragh.” Women’s History Review 1.3 (2011): 341–355. Web.

Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Print.

Lyons, F S L. Charles Stewart Parnell. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2005. Print.

——. Culture and Anarchy in Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Print.

Mac, Juno, and Molly Smith. Revolting Prostitutes. London: Verso, 2019. Print.

McCabe, Conor. “‘Your Only God Is Profit’ Irish Class Relations and the 1913 Lockout.” Locked Out. Ed. David Convery. Sallins: Irish Academic Press, 2013. Print.

——. Sins of the Father. Dublin: The History Press Ireland, 2011. Print.

McCarthy, Conor. Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969 – 1992. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000. Print.

McCrea, Barry. “Family and Form in Ulysses.” Field Day Review 5 (2009): 74–93. Print.

Newman, Robert D. “‘Eumaeus’ as Sacrificial Narrative.” James Joyce Quarterly 30.3 (1993): 451–458. Print.

Nolan, Emer. Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction From Thomas Moore to James Joyce. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007. Print.

——. James Joyce and Nationalism. Abingdon on Thames: Routledge, 2003. Print.

O’Connor, Emmet. A Labour History of Ireland 1824 – 2000. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2011. Print.

Ryder, Sean. “Ireland’s Difficulty, the Novelist’s Opportunity?.” Field Day Review 4 (2008): 288–295. Print.

Slote, Sam. Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.

Watt, Stephen. “Brief Exposures: Commodification, Exchange Value, and the Figure of Woman in ‘Eumaeus’.” James Joyce Quarterly 30/31.4-1 (1993): 757–782. Print.

Fiction: She Flies Far From the Land

I’ve a short story, entitled ‘She Flies Far From the Land’ which was in Banshee #9 up online, you can read it here

https://www.bansheelit.com/read/she-flies-far-from-the-land-by-chris-beausang

An overview of the Irish Left parties

This essay aims to provide an account of the parties of the contemporary Irish left. It provides the briefest of introductions to their respective histories, describes their current political strategies, weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of each from as objective a point of view as possible. A number of problems confront an undertaking such as this from the off. The first is that for many reasons, both legitimate and not, many of the organisations dealt with below are not forthcoming with regard to their internal procedures. It seems to be almost impossible to tell how large their membership is, and when this figure is provided it is often inflated or does not draw a distinction between the number of names on an email list versus the number of mobilised members with an active life within the party. These key indexes of the effectiveness of a political organisation are therefore unavailable. In instances in which verifiable data is not available, we are by necessity thrown back onto general knowledge, experience, information obtained from podcasts, debates on messages boards, social media, anecdote and gossip. I have made the greatest effort I can to parse this information with the scepticism its more dubious sources warrant, but I may not have caught everything. It should be noted that this essay will not engage with the left parties in the north, or provide much information regarding the all-Ireland status of the parties below. I don’t like that this essay is open to the charge of being a partitionist one, but rather than promoting information which would be so self-evidently scanty in comparison to the knowledge I can obtain on parties operating in the twenty-six countries, I thought I would leave it to someone else to provide the Northern Irish context. Union affiliations are also often undeclared; particular members of central committee may be senior members of a union operating within a particular sector but again, how mobilisable this union’s membership is on the basis of more widely political as opposed to narrower, solely economistic aims is unclear.

It is at this point that the particularities of an Irish context must be considered. According to data obtained from the OECD, as of 2018, less than a quarter of all Irish employees belong to a trade union and those that are are far more likely to be employed in the public sector, over 45 and married with children, while the most exploited sections of our workforce, immigrants in the private sector with far less in the way of job security, make up a vanishingly small section of unionised labour. In many ways this is due to the political strategy adopted by Irish trade unions since the late eighties, at which point a congress of Irish Trade Unions entered into a mechanism called social partnership, within which the needs of workers are balanced against the interests of private capital, represented by their lobbying groups in the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC) and the Construction Industry Federation (CIF). Both of these bodies are steered by executive boards staffed by individuals with high positions in some of the world’s most lucrative food wholesalers, construction, logistics and insurance companies. At the basis of the ICTU’s participation in these arrangements was their commitments to keep demands for social improvements modest, assist in the strategic aims of convergence with the European markets and in return their membership would received modest pay increases over time. This is one of the many ways in which Ireland followed the trajectory of the global neoliberal counterrevolution, wherein the economic turbulence of the seventies and eighties gave way to the right deregulating capital markets, weakening labour and depress living standards in overall terms.¹ Social partnership collapsed in 2009 once the Fianna Fáil and Green Party coalition began in earnest to identify pension benefits granted to public sector workers as being at the root of the global financial crisis. Since then, union membership has fallen by 50%, reflecting the strategic limits of corporatist accommodation and pursuing industrial disputes through the Labour court. Irish unions now seem more invested in the production of policy documents for the purposes of arguing the Irish government around to adopting a more progressive social democratic framework in line with the Nordic countries, without mobilising their membership on this front.

The issues attending the organisation of revolutionary parties in the present moment go further than Ireland of course. Economic activity within the EU-American value regime within which Ireland is closely integrated, is primarily engaged in financial services, banking, insurance and the management of investment funds. The world’s ‘most advanced’ economies have therefore moved in the direction of service provision, with high rates of employee turnover within which no successful model of unionising has yet made any significant gains. The predominance of financial capital also renders the forms of collectivised or co-operative worker control which socialist thought took as its starting point, far more difficult to conceptualise, let alone enact. It is as a crisis of left organisation that the current phenomenon of left populism is therefore best understood. The movements and parties surrounding Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Podemos and Syriza all range widely from geographic and sometimes even political points of view, but common to all is a generalised emphasis on a peaceful struggle waged within civil society in order to win an election or a number of elections in order to gain control of the state and invest public money in the construction of a newly-reformed welfare state. With the floundering or failure of these projects, the time seems ripe for a re-consideration and if this article can take preliminary steps towards one which pertains directly to Irish conditions, especially now that there is an increasing number of outlets being produced on the Irish left wherein such questions are being considered, so much the better. 

The aims of this document are not exclusively historical. Outlining the trajectory of say, the Labour Party in its movement from James Connolly, through Conor Cruise O’Brien and Alan Kelly may be left to others; our primary concern here is information which pertains directly to the present moment. This moment, like many others before it, is a crucial one; fascists have been mobilised on the streets of Dublin, at a time in which antifascist and Republican struggle has reached a low point. Sinn Féin, a party whose commitments towards socialist politics has been greatly exaggerated since being on course to become the largest party in the Dáil in the next election, seem unlikely to allow the surpluses which allowed so many socialist TD’s to secure seats extend beyond the confines of their own party next time. Though we have all encountered the phrases ‘socialism or barbarism’ and ‘left unity’ enough times to render them mere nostrums, and often cynically deployed ones, the left cannot hope to succeed without some form of considered response to the political problems outlined below.

The Communist Party of Ireland (Páirtí Cumannach na hÉireann)

communistpartyofireland.ie

The current incarnation of the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) was founded in 1970 after the combining of the Irish Workers’ Party, itself a re-named from the Irish Worker’s League , which Jim Larkin launched in 1923, and the Communist Party in Northern Ireland.² Condemned to irrelevance in the free state during successive red scares stoked up by the Catholic church, as well as the Labour Party, it has remained a relatively small organisation throughout most of its history. Its main branch is currently located in Connolly Books on East Essex Street in Dublin but it also has branches in Belfast, Cork and Galway. The CPI does not seem to have any principled objection to electoral politics and a special needs teacher, Michael O’Donnell, ran in the 2014 local elections in as well in the general election of 2016, both times in Cork City. It publishes two newspapers, Unity (1970 – ) in Belfast, Socialist Voice (2003 – ) in Dublin and is also responsible for the Irish Spark podcast.

The CPI identifies itself as Marxist-Leninist. As its name suggests, Marxism-Leninism proposes a synthesis between the doctrines of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or Lenin. For the purposes of defining Marxism-Leninism it will be necessary to provide an introduction to the thought of both of these figures.

Marx was born in Trier in 1818, shortly after the Congress of Vienna determined that control of the city be taken from the French and delivered into the hands of the Prussian monarchy.³ The powers of old Europe, as Marx referred to Austria, Prussia, Great Britain and France in The Communist Manifesto wereanxious to avoid a repeat of the French Revolution in their own territories and made life extremely difficult for the revolutionaries, reformers and workers in Europe, especially after the revolutions of 1848. Marx and his family were therefore forced to move between Paris, Brussels and Cologne until Marx’s death in London in 1883. Marx’s three-volume critique of nineteenth-century political economy, a field of study involving the study of production and trade Capital,represents his primary contribution to socialist thought, locating socialism on a scientific, as opposed to a utopian foundation. Utopian socialism, with its wedding of worker-owned industries to abstract notions of human flourishing and freedom from labour in general, represented the hegemonic political viewpoint within many of the radical circles Marx and Friedrich Engels, his lifelong collaborator and friend, moved for much of their working lives. Marx held that the worker’s capacity to sell their labour power, represented the origin of all value under capitalism and investigated the real social relations which lay behind the appearances of class society. In this, it represents the primary means through which socialists today understand capitalism, to greater or lesser extents.

Onlythe first volume of Capital was completed and published in Marx’s lifetime, the second two were assembled by Engels from Marx’s notebooks. As Engels tells us on a number of occasions in a series of notes dotted throughout the work, this was a task undertaken with great difficulty, due to Marx’s almost indecipherable handwriting and peripatetic work practices. The first of these three volumes outlines the way in which the labourer creates value. This surplus value, which is referred to as being congealed within the commodity, is the primary output of the production process. It allows the commodity to be sold, as no-one would purchase a commodity without a value and it also allows the commodity to be sold for a profit, as a capitalist who does not realise a surplus on their initial investment, would not be a capitalist for very long. Rather than being free to sell this commodity as their own property however, the terms by which the labourer is employed by the capitalist, who owns the means of production (raw materials, machines, factory premises) the labourer is forced to surrender ownership of the commodity to the capitalist in exchange for wages, which are paid out of the profit realised by the capitalist by his selling this commodity on the market. 

Over the course of the first volume, Marx demonstrates the way in which capitalism develops, especially in tandem with the industrial revolution in England. The development of steam power, railways, communications technology serves to revolutionise social relations, away from the society which prevailed under feudalism throughout most of Europe, with a large peasantry growing food or tending livestock belonging to a lord, bishop or monarch. These peasants would generally grow their own subsistence on smallholdings. In its place, capitalism creates a society of waged labourers, who have no relationship to the land, but possess only their own capacity to sell their labour power for wages. In order to accelerate the rate at which the capitalist obtains their profits, these wage labourers are concentrated in one area, such as a large factory, which necessitates their living in urban areas, in generally squalid and cramped conditions. In order to reproduce their existences, however meagre, the exchange of their labour-power for wages becomes an objective necessity. This state of affairs in its aggregate represents the revolutionising of a mode of production, a movement from feudalism to bourgeois capitalism, so-called due to the class of shopkeepers, factory owners, privateers and money-capitalists, who now possess the default form of social power formerly represented by the hereditary monarch.

From a close reading of Capital as well as historical scholarship, we can see that Marx’s account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is a model, in the sense that it provides an approximate account of a social totality which is conceptually useful but certainly could not be used in order to predict or describe every single economic or political development on the European continent from 1100 – 1850, nor would have Marx intended it that way. It is certainly useful for accounting for, say, what occurs in the English and French Revolutions, in which we do see an existing state bureaucracy enter into a protracted period of crisis as it finds its logistical and political coherence tested and ultimately overburdened by the increasing complexity of events taking place within its remit; international trade, governing colonies overseas, waging wars and acquiring territory. The French monarch was overthrown after all not by the explicit intention of this newly ascendant class who would have been horrified by many of its results, but through unpredicted consequences which arose from their desire for greater say in the state’s financial arrangements. The English restored their monarchy and a monarch remains England’s head of state today, at a time in which its capital city, is one of the world market’s primary focal points. Each of these situations are no less compatible with Marxian analysis, which above all else emphasises the precise ways in which the rule of capital tends towards both towards reproduction and expansion as well as crisis at once. In this sense, most attempts to identify Marx as a technological determinist or stageist thinker are blatant in their disingenuousness.

The second and third volumes of Capital describe the circulation of a commodity invested with surplus value on the world market and how the development of credit, money invested with the characteristics of a commodity, allows the capitalist to accelerate the rate at which industrial turnover occurs, shrinking the time period the capitalist has to await for the realisation of his commodity in the form of money in the direction of zero. Of course, this does not always occur. During periods which we refer to as crises, when there is insufficient demand for the enormous amount of goods being sloughed onto the market, the capitalist finds their commodities are suddenly not realising a profit. The failure of one industry to turnover its initial investment cascades outwards to create crises in other industries, which depend on demand from our first capitalist in order to realise their own profits. Soon we see unemployment rise as labourers are laid off and even less demand which would formally manifest itself in the labourers’ spending their wages, which they no longer have, exacerbates the situation further. At the crux of Marx’s account then, is what we refer to as the class relation, the way in which the circulation of capital reproduces this differential relationship between the capitalist and the labourer. The bourgeoisie, who own the factories, employ the labourers and claim the profits require the exploitation of the proletariat in order to reproduce themselves as a class. In this sense the preservation of the current order of things depends on the proletariat’s immiseration relative to their employer.

Lenin was born in Russia in 1870, a time in which feudal social relations remained more or less intact across large parts of the state with three quarters of the population surviving by growing food on the land according to agrarian practices which had remained more or less unchanged for centuries.⁴ In his work The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1898) Lenin identifies a growing proletariat in Russia’s growing cities, who, together with the poorer elements of the Russian peasantry may possess revolutionary potential. Exiled to Siberia for his role in polemicising on behalf of the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in St. Petersburg, Lenin co-founded the Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). On the occasion of this party’s second congress, Lenin split the party, taking the majority, or Bolsheviks with him, while Lenin’s former comrade in the Union of Struggle, Julius Martov, led the minority faction, the Mensheviks. At issue were differing perspectives on the nature of a forthcoming revolution in Russia, with the Mensheviks arguing for solidarity and co-operation with the more liberal and bourgeois parties so as to facilitate a bourgeois revolution. Before achieving socialism, so the argument went, Russia must proceed through the normative model of the industrialised European powers, overthrow the Russian monarch or Tsar and thereafter lead the industrial working class to take power. Lenin and his Bolsheviks argued for leading the working classes to proletarian revolution as soon as possible and that the party adequate to this task should be populated with a highly disciplined cadre of professional revolutionaries.⁵

Just as anti-Communists can identify this split as the root of Soviet tyranny, laying the foundations for the stifling of political dissent and imprisonments under Stalin, Marxist-Leninist literature can tend to over-emphasise Lenin’s conception of the party as the foundation of the Russian Revolution. It is important to remember that the Russian proletariat and peasantry had demonstrated its high level of sophistication and militancy on a number of occasions before the Bolsheviks took control of the state. Russian workers frequently went on strike, had engaged in street battles with the army and had even assembled its own grassroots representative bodies of government, called Soviets. While accounting for Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party then, we must also be attentive to the historically unprecedented conjuncture which arises here, in which a series of radical parties are bidding for the favour of the labouring masses and only one, in its commitment to withdrawing Russia from the first world war, suffices. Whether the Bolsheviks would have been as successful as they were had Alexander Kerensky, one of the leaders of the Russian Provisional Government established after the abdication of the Tsar, not applied himself so diligently to the task of discrediting himself in the eyes of the masses who wanted an end to the war, remains an open question. Despite these contingent circumstances, by virtue of the Bolsheviks’ role in creating the longest-lasting worker’s state and an occasional counterweight to global US hegemony during the latter half of the twentieth century, the establishment of the Soviet Union and the party which assisted in the execution of this task continues to exert disproportionate amounts of attention in contemporary Marxist strategy.

Critics of Marxist-Leninism, drawing from arguments of Leon Trotsky deny the coherence of the ideology altogether, dismissing it as a stultifying doctrine developed solely in order to assist Stalin’s taking control of the party and re-writing of the historical legacy of the Russian Revolution. If only because ‘Stalinism’ is a byword for transhistorical and ultimate evil in bourgeois historiography it is perhaps a necessity to draw a distinction here, especially as this facilitates more involved discussion on how it is that many aspects of Stalin’s leadership are noteworthy for their failures to abide by the tenets of any particular ideology, let alone Marxism or Leninism. Regardless of one’s point of view of Stalin and his leadership of the party, it is evidently coherent enough in context to be invoked by left formations to the present day, even if this is only as a means of identifying themselves as anti-Trotskyist and as believing that there are a significant number of socialist states in Asia and the former Soviet bloc today; this would certainly account for much of its functions in an Irish context.

Connolly Youth Movement (Ógra Uí Chonghaile)

cym.ie

The Connolly Youth Movement (CYM) is a Marxist-Leninist organisation re-founded in 2002, affiliated with but independent of the CPI. They have yet contested any elections, their efforts have been predominantly focused on a number of direct actions particularly around the occupation of housing in Cork and the disruption of public meetings held by Fine Gael. These actions, coupled with an aggressive and proselytising online presence, seems to have fuelled the parties’ fairly rapid growth over the past few years.

The Green Party  (An Comhaontas Glas)

greenparty.ie

As David Landy and Oisín McGarrity note in their Jacobin piece, the Irish Green Party are in many respects a unique political formation. While most political parties which arose in a European context in the seventies and eighties amid a growing public awareness of the ruinous effects capitalism exerted on the planet, the Greens were more technocratic in orientation, choosing to moderate their goals according to parliamentary arithmetic in seeking to eke out incremental reforms from the two main parties. The Irish media’s consistency in praising current leader Eamon Ryan’s logistical and political genius since taking the helm of the party since its electoral wipeout in the 2011 general election, is primarily due to a point of party procedure which requires a leadership election within six months of a general election. Ryan was therefore obligated to run for leadership of the party against deputy leader Catherine Martin; the latter of which had been identified as a potentially less compromising figure in government. It would seem far more likely that the Green’s success in the most recent general election is attributable to international media interest in promoting the statements of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who not only merits the distinction of exceeding Ryan from the point of view of public speaking skills but also seems capable of making a connection between moderating the effects of climate change and tackling global inequality, however woolly her framework on this point may be, to a degree that Ryan and most of his other party colleagues, have never manifested any significant interest in.

A revealing aspect of the Green’s rise to the esteemed position of coalition mudguard for the second time in just over a decade only to face yet another electoral rout in the near to medium term represents their failure to remain faithful to what should be a perfectly viable strategy in an electoral arrangement; hold a decisive balance of power and refuse to participate in government if red-line issues are not respected. That the most recent negotiations for coalition saw even the most tepid aspects of their own manifesto, including a commitment to an Occupied Territories Bill which had already passed in the last Dáil session, removed from the programme of government should tell us all we need to know about the substance of the Green Party’s principles. One of the most important tasks for any socialist agenda going forward is to stop taking the Greens, as well as their supposed dissident members seriously as a soft-left or pragmatic as opposed to a rightist formation. The project of the Just Transition Greens in rehabilitating the party’s credibility after this forthcoming and richly deserved electoral rout is well underway and socialists from other parties seem mystifyingly willing to assist them in this, in order to woo a mythic contingent of the Green Party’s youth wing to socialist politics. From even a cursory examination of the party’s history, we see that self-serving exculpations, hand-wringing and listening exercises are merely the most frequently adopted obfuscation of this party’s slavishness to capital. 

The Labour Party (Páirtí an Lucht Oibre)

labour.ie

The Labour Party have only ever entered government with the assistance of two main parties, overwhelmingly with Fine Gael as the senior partner, allowing the most reactionary party with the most unpopular and unrepresentative policies to make up sufficient numbers to govern seven times since 1948. The failure of the Labour Party to maintain their bullish opposition to the public spending cutbacks of the Fianna Fáil and Green Party coalition in office, not to speak of the arrogance of their most public figures when confronted with these pledges, nor the spectacle of Joan Burton committing perjury in order to secure the imprisonment of left-wing activists, is much of the reason why their showing was so poor in the two most recent general elections. One fervently hopes for the party’s imminent death so as to ensure their ambitious younger generation never make it into office.

People Before Profit (Pobal Roimh Bhrabús)

pbp.ie

People Before Profit (PBP) is the largest party on the Irish left. It was founded in 2005 by an Irish faction of the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP) of Comrade Delta fame, with which it shares an international, the International Socialist Tendency (IST), founded in 1960 by Trotskyists influenced by the writings of Tony Cliff. 

It is important before getting into an account of PBP to draw a distinction between the beliefs and writings of Trotsky in comparison to those of Trotskyism. Trotsky was born to a middle-class farming family in Southern Ukraine in 1879. While attending university in Odessa he became involved in a radical reading groups, later to become a union which began to organise dock workers and craftsmen.⁶ Trotsky was arrested and exiled for these activities, but escaped to London to make contact with Lenin, who recommended him for a position on the editorial board of the RSDLP newspaper, Iskra, both in order for Lenin to gain control of the paper’s editorial board, but also in order to take advantage of Trotsky’s indisputable gifts for polemicising.⁷ Lenin nevertheless found himself opposing Trotsky on the occasion the RSDLP split; Trotsky described Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party as conspiratorial rather than a revolutionary vehicle inclining towards the working class.⁸ Like many Mensheviks who ultimately came to an anti-war position, Trotsky re-joined the Bolsheviks during the Revolution and was appointed foreign minister in Lenin’s first government, after turning down the head position in deference to Lenin.⁹ In the bloody civil war which followed the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, Trotsky played a crucial role in organising the Red Army in defence of the revolution, demonstrating his eminent capacities as a military tactician.¹⁰ In the months leading up to Lenin’s death, a struggle began within the party for control, particularly between two factions Lenin had posited as counterweights to one another during his leadership, Trotsky on one side, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Stalin on the other. Lenin’s attempts to remove Stalin from the post of general secretary on the basis of his chauvinistic tendencies came too late and Trotsky’s failure to consolidate his own position resulted in Stalin’s triumvirate coming to power.¹¹ Trotsky formed an opposition within the party which called for more rapid industrialisation and action against a new class of bureaucrats he identified as increasingly powerful  both within the worker’s state as well as the party itself, which Stalin had opened up to a far broader membership than Lenin would ever have allowed. Stalin was also victorious on this front however, removing Trotsky from his senior position and going on to liquidate, imprison and otherwise repress perceived oppositionist blocs within the party in a series of escalating campaigns. Once Stalin had secured Trotsky’s deportation, Trotsky produced a series of works from which the majority of left critiques (though how left they are will of course depend on your point of view on much of the above) of the USSR from exile in Norway, France and Mexico. After a brief period in which Trotsky was championed by a western intelligentsia who saw in Trotskyism a democratic alternative to Stalinist repression, Trotsky was ultimately taken aback by how quickly international tendencies in Trotskyism rebounded into condemnation of revolutionary politics and the USSR in toto.¹²

Though Trotsky was robust in his defence of the worker’s state until his death at the hands of an assassin, interpreters of Trotskyism have tended to extend his criticisms far further. It is in the Cliffite tradition that we witness the notion of the USSR as more or less a state-capitalist formation from the twenties onwards. From an organisational perspective, these Trotskyist parties reached their high-point in Britain in the seventies, through an emphasis on establishing rank-and-file trade unions and opposition to American imperialism. Though I have yet to find a study of the Trotskyist party form that does not lay disproportionate amounts of emphasis on psychologistic, behavioural as opposed to political or historical factors, there is more than enough in the way of detail on the internet in the form of internal documents, blogs, discussions from which we may identify some common trends regarding the governance of these so-called ‘sects’ which belong to the various Trotskyist internationals. The use of fronts, umbrella formations which bridge the gap between quite disparate parties especially in the run-up to elections, the use of the phrase ‘democratic centralism’ in accounting for the way in which internal dissent is quashed are all common features. Ireland’s Trotskyite parties are unfortunately no exception to the rule and until very recently, all abided by a slate system under which the outgoing leadership will provide a slate of favoured candidates to take over. In order for a single change in the slates to be incorporated, a party member has to win a majority of the party votes over to a whole new slate and in this way continuity of leadership is assured. PBP recently voted to establish an individual candidate system.

PBP currently possesses 5 seats in Northern Ireland’s local government, 1 in Northern Ireland’s Assembly, 3 TD’s in the Dáil, 5 local councillors in Dublin, one in Sligo and one in Carlow. PBP are affiliated with Right2Change (not to be confused with Right to Change, a party Joan Collins left Independents4Change in order to found) which is perhaps the broadest left initiative, extending demands made in the course of the campaign against the privatisation of Ireland’s water supply towards a broader set of demands for the transformation of Irish society along social democratic lines. In addition to support from PBP, Right2Change has support from the CPI, Sinn Féin as well as a number of left-leaning independent politicians. The Socialist Party’s lack of support for Right2Change came accompanied with a denunciation of Sinn Féin’s involvement, which it identified as opportunistic. Trade Unions which currently support the initiative include Mandate, the Communication Workers’ Union and Unite, a British trade union.

Richard Boyd-Barrett and Joan Collins were elected to the Dáil as PBP TD’s under the United Left Alliance (ULA) in 2011 but Collins left PBP two years later in order to found United Left with Clare Daly, a party which does not seem to exist anymore. In 2015 PBP formed a pact with with the Socialist Party via the Anti-Austerity Alliance (AAA), now Solidarity, in order to contest elections on a joint basis, in such a way which would allow for continuing access to speaking rights in the Dáil, as well as state funding while each party retained their own autonomy. Since 2016, three councillors have left the party, one of whom, John Lyons, did so in order to found Independent Left, citing undemocratic party structures as the primary reason.

Due to the Irish media’s hostility towards any organisation further left than the Labour party, PBP’s approach to opposition hinges perhaps by necessity on providing alternative sources of information on social media, as well as strong media performances from Boyd-Barrett and Bríd Smith, but within the consistent responses to media events in an age of 24-hour news, social media cycles of outrage, it can be difficult to identify a single platform or overarching strategy within which these responses fit. Their economic policies as outlined in their website fit more within a left-Keynesianism and social democratic framework, a Robin Hood tax on financial speculation rather than ending financial speculation, boosting economic growth through nationalised industries etc, but makes no mention of socialism, socialisation or collectivisation. If the lessons of the Greek experience, wherein a new departure received an electoral mandate but was deposed by the European powers, the IMF and the bond markets, this is not clear. Whether the more Marxist orientations of the SWN will make itself felt in the years to come, remains to be seen.

Sinn Féin

It can be difficult to sort the disingenuousness from ignorance with regard to the free state media’s stance on Sinn Féin (SF), but since their presence in the Dáil has been on the rise since the early oughts, the media have been consistent in identifying them as i) not a normal political party, ii) receiving orders from a shadowy military council and iii) with serious questions to answer about their past. The Good Friday agreement has then become a floating signifier in contemporary Irish political discourse. It is a good thing, insofar as it has led to peace in the North, the Brits must respect it with regard to Brexit and it facilitates the lauding of the good and safely dead constitutional nationalists, but it is also bad as it has left no means through which the unconstitutional nationalists will have their relative commitments to provoism re-litigated in every television or radio studio south of the border until the end of time. The efforts of the free state to enforce political policing in the name of anti-Republicanism is a factor here, as well as class snobbery, given SF’s popularity among large parts of the working class but also operating here is a refusal to countenance the political re-alignment which has take place since 2008. Over the past four general elections, the three main parties have seen their vote share shrink from 79% to 47.5%. There are no figures in the state’s primary party of government which are capable of coyly endorsing (let alone facilitating) armed struggle against the British state and with the loss of this populist republicanism as well as FF’s old constituency in the trade unions, traded in for the favour of multinational capital and property developers, they give every appearance of being a moribund party running out of road; in media appearances opposite their Sinn Féin counterparts they are consistently outflanked.

Daniel Finn notes that Sinn Féin’s general election victory seems to have taken the party itself somewhat by surprise, based on many constituencies in which transfers could have gotten a second candidate elected. The result was greeted by some on the left with concerns that SF will now follow the trajectory of Corbynism, in which a media apparatus succeeded in dislodging an internationalist, social-democratic and by all accounts decent man from leadership of the British Labour Party, having convinced voters that he was a Stalinist, anti-Semite, agent of foreign subversion, take your pick. Anxieties such as these seem to overstate the degree of influence of the Irish media at the present moment. Anti-Republican sentiment has been its default setting for almost half a century and SF’s being on track to become the largest party in the state is after all a result of competent media performances from high-profile representatives such as Eoin Ó’Broin and Pearse Doherty. Their seeming commitment to promoting competent women representatives to leadership positions should not be overlooked either; much of the feminist groundswell roused in the two referenda on marriage equality and repeal would seem to have nowhere else to go.

In its current form, SF dates back to a split which took place in 1970, wherein the majority  of a party named Sinn Féin became Official Sinn Féin, the Officials or ‘the stickies’, on the basis of the adhesive strip which held their easter lilies in place, while the second organisation became Provisional Sinn Féin, the Provisionals or the Provos. Over the course of a few name changes throughout the years, the Officials became the Worker’s Party, while the Provos are the inheritors of Sinn Féin proper. The reasons for this split have to do with the two factions’ differing conceptions of the root of British rule in the six counties. On the one side, senior members within the party leadership had come to a ‘Marxian’ conception of the occupation, believing that the sectarianism existing between Catholic and Protestant communities were a product of capital’s tendency towards ‘divide and rule’ and the future of socialism in a united Ireland depended on the two communities coming to a common understanding of their plight under capitalism. The Provos preferred confronting British imperialism more directly and adopted a military solution against state and civilian targets.¹³ The Officials’ analysis convinced them the road to socialism in Ireland lay down the path of stimulating the development of an industrial proletariat via economic modernisation. It is in Eoghan Harris and Eamon Smullen’s The Irish Industrial Revolution that this was outlined, in which  qualified support for Ireland joining the EEC was given, as well as the promotion of economic growth via semi-state bodies._¹⁴

When the Provos and their electoral wing, Sinn Féin began to achieve far more electoral and popular support in the north than the Worker’s Party, in large part due to the violence exerted by British security forces on the nationalist population, the Officials began to make their presence within free state media increasingly felt, stacking audiences in news discussion programmes with Worker Party members without disclosing their affiliation, a technique which reached a peak during the intensification of the conflict during the Hunger Strikes in the eighties.¹⁵ Attempting to convince international left organisations that the Provos were not anti-imperialists but fascists, cheering on reprisals of the British state against Provos, opposing peace talks and identifying nationalist politics in any form up to and including those practiced by John Hume, the Worker’s Party begin to work their way towards an analysis which, for all intents and purposes regarded Protestants as the beleaguered minority within the orange state.

There is a tendency within this account to present the Officials as a non-sectarian road to socialism not taken by the two jurisdictions; if the Officials took a Marxian conception, it follows logically that the Provos were reactionary anti-Communists or too narrow-minded or Catholic to tolerate foreign or atheistic doctrines, when there were in fact Marxist tendencies within the leadership who were capable of grasping British imperialism from a far less wantonly contrarian point of view. This talking point which remains bafflingly resilient based on how prolific and well-placed many former stickies still are in the Irish media and establishment discourse and how well a number of their talking points align with anti-Republican politics in general.

The Worker’s Party did manage to achieve electoral success in the Dáil, but ultimately ended up as a feeder for Labour Party, from which its most high profile members were put out to pasture in or before the 2016 general election. The Worker’s Party now contends elections, running six candidates in the 2011 general election and five candidates in 2016. Neither of these attempts have met with any success.

Now that the brief attempts at left unity catalysed around opposition to austerity have more or less passed, SF’s electoral success came with little interrogation of those with far less in the way of actual commitments to left policies. I’m as happy to see RTÉ and the broader establishment discomfited with the rise of SF as anyone else, but the party’s recent engagements with IBEC and the Dublin Chamber of Commerce should not be mistaken for an attempt to win them over before the required reconstruction of the badly-needed welfare state. I, like most people my age, without international communism could be convinced to settle for a house and a permanent job, but I just do not think this social democratic settlement is on the cards.

Social Democrats (Daonlathaigh Shóisialta)

Since their launch in 2015 by three independent TD’s, Stephen Donnelly, Catherine Murphy and Róisín Shortall, the Social Democrats (SD) have steered between a Labourist (Shortall) and opportunist (Donnelly as well as Murphy, the former now minister for Health in a Fianna Fáil, Fianna Gael, Greens coalition, the latter an ex-Worker’s Party, ex-Democratic Left, ex-Labour contingent) modus operandi. Shortall left the Labour Party partly in protest against then-Fine Gael Minister for Health James Reilly, attempting to locate a primary care unit in his own constituency while Donnelly was elected on a wave of anti-Fianna Fáil sentiment in 2011. While Murphy’s record in opposition was often laudable, her attempt to use Dáil privilege to draw attention to Denis O’Brien’s financial affairs and relationship with utterly corrupt state tendering regime demonstrated how O’Brien’s finances represent a limit-point of the Irish state’s commitments to freedom of speech. The SD’s stated policies align with a framework for a Nordic-style social democracy, but their record of their councillors in local government will demonstrate how they mean to proceed far more adequately than policy proposals in opposition. While sitting on Dublin City Council, one of their ambitious younger crop of TD’s, Gary Gannon, voted in favour of selling the sale of public land at O’Devaney Gardens, formerly a social housing complex. to Bartra Capital, a property developer, in exchange for a commitment than 30% of their housing units will be sold as ‘social housing’. An additional 20% would be categorised at a maximum price of €310,000, almost seven times the median annual wage. These commitments which later turned out to be legally unenforceable. Gannon subsequently argued in favour of a €23 million scheme to construct a white water rafting attraction in Dublin’s docklands, because the transformation of the capital into some kind of adventure centre for Americans was evidently not underway quick enough from his point of view. Their path to coalition, compromise and rout has been well-trodden by public representatives far exceeding their individual talents.

The Socialist Party (An Páirtí Soisialta)

The Socialist Party emerged from a section within the Irish Labour Party, Militant Tendency, which attempted to take control of the organisation and render it a party for the advancement of socialism. Once they were expelled from the Labour Party, they founded Militant Labour and then the Socialist Party in 1996. Since 1997 Higgins was in and out of the Dáil in Dublin, as part of the ULA with Clare Daly in 2011. The Workers and Unemployed Action Group (WUAG) were the first we leave the ULA in 2012, after Mick Wallace revealed that he had withheld VAT from the revenue commission as the SP and PBP refused to join the WUAG in calling for his resignation. WUAH charged the two parties with prioritising the construction of their own parties rather than the ULA. Clare Daly left the SP the same year, the SP saying she did so because of her support for Wallace, Daly responding that she preferred Wallace would pay the VAT but that she had not called for Wallace’s resignation in line with the SP not calling for his resignation. 

In the most recent election, the SP joined with PBP under their election umbrella of S-PBP and kept five TD’s, Paul Murphy, Bríd Smith, Richard Boyd-Barrett, Mick Barry and Gino Kenny, but lost Ruth Coppinger in Dublin West, due to pressure from Roderic O’Gorman and Paul Donnelly on her left. However, given Higgins’ own movements in and out of the constituency over the years, there is every possibility of her getting it back in the next election once O’Gorman and in all probability Jack Chambers, given that Fianna Fáil are currently polling single figures in Dublin, are deposed. 

The root of Paul Murphy’s departure from the SP and the origin of his new party, RISE requires some context from the broader British Trotskyist internationals. A 2019 split within the Committee for a Worker’s International (CWI) founded in 1974, resulted in two groups, the re-founded International Socialist Alternative, also initially founded in 1974, and the In Defence of a Working Class and Trotskyist CWI both of which claim to represent the continuity with the original CWI. Some financial irregularities are also circulating across all sides of the International Secretariat (IS), which take us far beyond relevance to Ireland. At the crux of the problem for the Irish SP is their being charged by General Secretary Peter Taafe of being opportunistic in their feminist organising, over-emphasising events featuring Coppinger, investing too much in their front organisation ROSA (Reproductive Rights against Oppression, Sexism and Austerity) and failing to take advantage of their involvement in the aforementioned referenda on marriage equality and repeal, identified by the Taafite faction as failing to agitate on a sufficiently socialist or economic basis, democratic ownership of industry, living wage for working-class women, state childcare, etc., according to a familiar criticism whereby identity politics has crowded out any role for class-based agitation. This criticism can in all probability be attributed to having one’s core leadership in London; one would have to be English to say something as divorced from Irish conditions. 

The location of the leadership in London reflects deeper problems for the SP, which relates to its own perspective on the north, identifying republicanism as being as reactionary as unionism. This analysis is inherited from longtime SP activist Peter Hadden and the many publications he has produced advancing this point of view, de-emphasising the presence of left-wing politics in republican struggle in the north, denying the involvement of British imperialism and the reactionary loyalist unions, effectively winding up in the WP analysis whereby Republicanism becomes the sectarian force. Whether this anti-Catholic perspective on the north of Ireland is in fact a product of the SP’s British affiliation, or a product of some resentment at the relative failure of socialist politics to take root in Ireland requires access to materials that we do not possess, but the fact remains, that if the SP were more upfront about their policy on the north being the re-partition of Ireland under socialism on the basis of a two nations theory, they would do severe damage to their capacity to get any votes. The reality is that in future attempts to carve out electoral space for itself, the SP will accommodate itself to the baseline commitment to republicanism of Irish society, however muted, whether openly or behind closed doors remains to be seen.

It should be noted that people who departed from the SP in the course of this turbulence in its international organisation have furthermore described its tendency to overburden younger activists, leading to burnout as well as a failure to sufficiently mobilise within the unions. There seems to have been some work done on this front, both the SP and PBP have been subject to this criticism over the years and both parties have begun to circulate internal surveys in order to identify the sectors in which their members are organised.

RISE aims to carve out ground for itself on a more popular front basis and with a leadership structure which is seemingly looser, working not exclusively with socialists in a Leninist party, but people with whom there may be common ground, including Sinn Féin and the Greens. It is currently producing the podcast Left Outside as well as the publication Rupture.

Conclusion

Many of the shortcomings with the above overview have already been mentioned. A lack of access to internal documents means there is little substantive to be said about one of the most crucial issues here, namely how well each party is set up to protect its younger membership from predatory behaviour; based on how often such affairs are litigated on social media much more obviously needs to be done in this regard across the board. The recommendation this essay makes for the parties to enter into the space vacated by the Irish trade unions in rank-and-file organising is not adopted as a means of point-scoring or ‘I would simply’; at various points many high-profile figures within the parties have more or less admitted to this themselves and an inclination more towards short-term recruitment drives, has been a criticism made against the leadership during some of their recent splits. I don’t think this will solve every problem, but it certainly seems to me to be worth a go.

1. O’Connor, Emmet. A Labour History of Ireland 1824 – 2000.Dublin: University College Dublin, 2011. p. 247 – 249

2. Ibid. p. 131, 228

3. Sperber, Jonathan. Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014. p. 14 – 15

4. Smith, S.A., Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis 1890 – 1928. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. p. 24

5. Ibid. p. 44 – 45

6. Deutscher, Isaac, The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky. London:Verso, 2015. p. 40

 7. Ibid. p. 71 – 73

 8. Ibid. p. 90 – 91

 9. Ibid. 335 – 337

 10. Smith, S.A., Russia in Revolution. p. 167

11.  Ibid. p. 283 – 284

12.  Ibid. p. 277

 13. Hanley, Brian & Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Worker’s Party. London:Penguin, 2010. p. 145 – 147

 14. Ibid., p.337 – 339

 15. Ibid., p. 429 – 430

Further Reading

In addition to everything I’ve cited, I’m very indebted to the Cedar Lounge WordPress as well as the various discussions which have taken place in its comment sections over the years, Daniel Finn’s A Political History of the IRA, as well as his various articles in New Left Review and Jacobin, a lot of Lenin and Trotsky’s writings, David Harvey’s The Limits to Capital as well as the few people I had read this in advance and the suggestions they made.