Marx vs. the British Left: How a Strategic Weakness Became a Permanent Blind Spot
Martin Collins on Marxism's Ireland Problem
An Introduction to Martin Collins’ Strategic Assessment
Martin Collins, who died last week, spent four decades as a British-based organiser for Irish human rights and liberation; He campaigned for the wrongly imprisoned, for fair employment in the North, for human rights protections in the peace process. He maintained the conviction that effective solidarity required a rigorous understanding of how imperialism functions as a system. Collins was a member of the International Marxist Group, the British section of the Fourth International, in the 1970s and 1980s, and later Socialist Action.
His 1983 essay “Ireland: Europe’s Weak Link” represents one of the most strategically serious engagements with Marx and Engels’ Irish writings from a Fourth Internationalist perspective. Written during the H-Block prison struggle and hunger strikes, Collins recovers Marx’s analysis not as a historical curiosity but as a framework for understanding how national liberation struggles interact with metropolitan working-class politics in imperialist systems. For revolutionary activists in Britain and Ireland today, his analysis remains indispensable.
Collins begins with a seemingly obvious question: why did Marx and Engels, despite their primary focus on Britain as the centre of world capitalism, produce such extensive writings on Ireland? The answer reveals Marx’s materialist understanding of imperialism as a unified system. British capitalism’s power depended not just on industrial dominance but on its control of Ireland as a colonial laboratory for state repression and a wedge driving divisions within the British working class. Breaking imperialism required breaking the union.
What makes Collins’ reconstruction crucial is his identification of how the British Left systematised Marx’s strategic insights into abstract principles, thereby losing their force. Later socialists extracted Marx’s arguments about Irish oppression while abandoning his insistence on the revolutionary necessity of Irish independence as a precondition for British working-class liberation. Collins exposes this slippage through careful attention to Marx’s method: his arguments were never meant to be free-standing principles but tactical guides for raising consciousness while developing struggles in directions that simultaneously aided oppressed peoples and strengthened metropolitan revolutionary organisation.
The essay’s strategic argument is powerful and remains applicable. Collins insists that the Irish question is not peripheral to British socialist politics but central to it. The structural weakness of Irish capitalism within the European imperialist system creates opportunities for revolutionary upheaval. The British working class cannot defeat its own bourgeoisie while dominated by a labour bureaucracy whose material interests tie it to imperialism. Supporting Irish liberation becomes not charity but strategic necessity: it weakens the enemy, strengthens international revolutionary coordination, and splits the labour bureaucracy’s hold over British workers.
Collins wrote before partition’s long-term effects fully crystallised into the Good Friday Agreement, and before the contemporary European integration project transformed Irish capitalism’s position. The fundamental argument remains: revolutionaries must approach Ireland not through the prism of British workers’ consciousness but through the material logic of imperialist systems and the opportunities they create for revolutionary action. This orientation—linking struggles by understanding global contradictions rather than by rhetorical appeals to abstract solidarity—distinguishes Marxist strategy from sectarian moralising.
The article that follows has been carefully corrected from the 1983 special issue of International journal that marked the centenary of Marx’s death. His essay remains a model of how to reconstruct historical Marxist analysis for contemporary strategic purposes.
KARL MARX 1818-1883
IRELAND: EUROPE’S WEAK LINK
MARTIN COLLINS
‘A sore on the face of capitalist Europe’ was how Marx and Engels described Ireland. Martin Collins assesses the significance today of their extensive writings on the Irish question.
You will note, comparing Marx and Engels’ Collected Works on Britain and Ireland that one is far heavier than the other. Now both Marx and Engels worked politically in England for a large part of their lives. They argued the fate of the international class struggle would depend on workers in England because that was the centre of the Empire and the strongest point of world capitalism. They insisted that the Workers’ International headquarters should be in England so that the whole influence of the world movement could help shape the English section. Yet the Collected Works on Ireland is the heavier. Why?
Marx admitted to being ‘preoccupied’ by the Irish question. Engels considered taking the time to learn Gaelic to deepen his reading on the history. They wrote extensively and claimed that Ireland was like a ‘sore on the face of capitalist Europe’. But when Marx demanded that more attention be paid to Ireland, it wasn’t only due to the outrage of over three million Irish starved to death or driven out of their country. He took for granted the commitment of the movement to fight for justice against the savage repression carried out by the English ruling class. What had to be understood, he said, was the direct and absolute interest the English working class had in breaking the connection with Ireland. Until they do, he said, they would ‘never accomplish anything’.
Reading Marx and Engels on Ireland is breathtaking. Not only is their analysis in more depth than any contemporary writer, finding the roots of historical development with meticulous scientific research, but their advice to workers is based on a thoroughly internationalist conception of struggle and revolution, explaining its implications in clear and precise terms. This article argues that the British Left has torn Marx and Engels’ prescriptions away from their strategic context, and left us with a potage of formulae learnt by rote. Nevertheless, those same conclusions properly situated, form an indispensable guide for building a revolutionary party in Britain today.
Traditional Arguments
Marx gave four main arguments to persuade English workers to support the Irish, that are used by the Left today. We can look at how they stand up:
a) Britain’s continued occupation of Ireland drives a wedge between Irish and English workers, weakening the unity of the class.
When Marx wrote about a ‘wedge’ between fellow workers, he said that in all the big industrial centres of England, the English worker hates the Irish as a competitor who lowers wages. The bosses realised this, and encouraged the antagonism because they knew it was the ‘true secret of their power’. Today, the bosses are able to rely on the collaboration of the labour bureaucracy to hold back the workers’ struggles. True, in places like Glasgow the Orange lodges are still powerful, and football fans still fight out battles from the last century on the terraces, but the racist anti-Irish jokes and all the rest only retain a potential for a vertical division of the British working class. They are far more important to confirm the boundaries of the British class struggle and to justify the British occupation.
b) By tacitly supporting the occupation of Ireland, British workers side with their rulers, compromising the independence of their class and their political organisations.
Here, Marx was watching attempts to build a workers’ party in Britain crippled as Irish workers regularly voted Liberal, supporting their Home Rule policies. All these votes would swing Labour’s way, he argued, if only their leaders supported ending the Union. Of course today, Irish voters in Britain vote Labour more consistently than the English. Only in a few areas, like Liverpool, can we trace the remains of Liberal strength based on this phenomenon.
Yet in the battle for the leadership of the Labour Party, where the centre of the fight for class independence is situated today, there are still areas where rightist MPs remain in position because they support British withdrawal from Ireland. The challenge of the Bennite Left would be greatly strengthened by wholeheartedly identifying with the call for getting the troops out.
c) In Ireland the ruling class develops its capacity to confront and contain the struggle of workers which will later be used in England.
The British occupation of Northern Ireland today is a laboratory for testing instruments and techniques of torture and repression to be used the world over. We have seen plastic bullets, CS gas and riot shields brought to Britain. Joint army-police exercises and top brass police chiefs trained in Ireland prepare for the normalisation of the permanent armed defence of ‘law and order’, representing an extension of the strong state. But in Marx’s day, he viewed the use of an army to enforce British rule in Ireland as a qualitative transformation of state power, creating for the first time a standing army which could easily be set against the workers in any area.
d) The political weakness of the English workers on the Irish question allows the ruling class to introduce attacks on democratic rights which would be otherwise intolerable.
The Habeas Corpus Act was meant to be a guarantee against police arbitrariness. It said that the authorities had to state the reasons for arresting someone, and to release them if they were not brought quickly to court. From the suspension of this Act in 1848, to the introduction of the ‘Prevention of Terrorism Act’ under a Labour government, the British ruling class has attacked the democratic rights of all workers whilst supposedly ‘dealing with the Irish problem’. When Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands MP was allowed to die, the British did not want another hunger striker elected in his place. With Labour Party backing, the ‘rules’ were changed making anyone in prison ineligible to stand for election—thus making it possible for arbitrary arrests to determine who is an ‘acceptable’ candidate from the ruling class’s point of view.
So we see, these arguments still apply today. But although when put together they present a powerful case for British workers to break down the wall of silence veiling the Irish question, they do not in my mind lead to Marx’s conclusion that without breaking the domination of Britain over Ireland we can ‘never accomplish anything’, or elsewhere, ‘will never be free’. This was not Marx’s fault.
To elevate four arguments which Marx used to illustrate the practical significance of the Irish question 120 years ago to the level of an explanation of his proposed Irish policy is sheer empty-headedness. The most important feature of Marx’s work on Ireland was seized upon instantly by both Lenin and Trotsky. Marx understood the international character of the revolutionary process—drawing British tactics from a global strategy. Knowing that the political backwardness of the English workers made an appeal for world revolution more of a posture than a practical proposal for action, he concentrated his arguments on raising the existing consciousness of the workers with readily understandable illustrations and examples. This never meant to bypass the strategic tasks of the British workers, but to develop existing struggles in a direction which both gave practical aid to the Irish struggle and strengthened the political organisation of the English workers.
The nationalist and sectarian traditions of the British Left have led them to extract from Marx only what they want to hear. The first thing they want to hear is that the most important job in the world is for British revolutionists to raise consciousness of the British workers. The second is that the issue of Ireland assumes such importance that the actual struggles of English workers count for nothing. This has two consequences: on the one hand a distorted view on how to aid the struggle in Ireland, because it is looked at through the prism of ‘the best way to clarify English workers’; on the other hand a justification of an abstention from the real struggles in Britain substituting imaginary ones. For instance, the way large sections of the British Left respond to Benn’s call for British troops to be withdrawn from Ireland—what does this mean for them? An opportunity once again to show that Benn (by proposing that United Nations troops go in instead) is a muddlehead. Compare this to Marx’s advice in a similar situation: ‘You should never look for general principles in the speeches of English politicians—only for what is useful for the immediate aim’. If the immediate aim is getting the troops out of Ireland, the advice fell on stony ground.
International Strategy
Throughout their lives, Marx and Engels were awed by the determination of the Irish. After every attempt to exterminate them, within a short time the Irish had risen again. ‘Give me two hundred thousand Irishmen’, said Engels ‘and I could overthrow the entire English monarchy.’ But it took the experience of the waves of revolution that shook Europe in the mid-nineteenth century to make them realise the potential of that combativity.
It was only in England that the material conditions for a workers’ revolution existed. Marx urged the International Association to do all in its power to hasten this, as it would ‘throw the decisive social weight onto the scales in favour of social emancipation generally.’ Workers’ revolution, would, it was thought, follow the example of the French Revolution, and spread like bush fire, especially to Ireland where the exploited and oppressed were waiting for such an opportunity.
But by the 1860s, Marx began to reconsider this view of how the revolution would develop. He then recognised that the ability of the English ruling class to maintain its position rested on its domination of Ireland. The power of English capitalism at the centre of the Empire and European capitalism depended on English landlordism, the bulwark of which was in Ireland. This meant, he said, ‘the only point where you can hit England really hard is Ireland’.
Landlords in Ireland were seen not as the ‘local dignitaries and representatives of the nation’ as they were in England, but as its ‘mortally hated oppressors’. The revolutionary fervour of the Irish made the overthrow of landlordism there ‘a hundred times easier’. If landlordism in Ireland could be overthrown, then capitalism could be defeated in England. As long as English workers supported England’s domination over Ireland, they made their rulers ‘invulnerable in England itself’.
It was therefore the special task of the Central Council of the Workers’ International in London, to ‘awaken a consciousness in the English workers that the national emancipation of Ireland was no question of abstract justice or humanitarian concern, but the first condition of their own revolution.’ These views represented Marx’s first attempts to work out a strategy for revolution that took into account the consequences of the uneven development produced by capitalism as an international system. Later of course Trotsky was to elaborate this further in his theory of Permanent Revolution.
Today, of course, we are not fighting an English system of landlordism, which is the bulwark of the Empire. So, is Marx’s conception of a strategic link between the Irish and English revolutions outdated?
The Hunger Strike
Recently, a group of comrades returned from Cuba. They were impressed by the politicisation of the Cuban masses, how every casual remark in a launderette or café led to a stream of questions reflecting a thirst for knowledge of the struggle in Britain. ‘Hey’, they said, ‘you come from Britain, what do you think about the hunger strikes?’ A casual remark with an acute comment. To find out about the British struggle, ask about Ireland.
The recent struggle in Ireland, reaching its high point between May and November 1981, affected not only the whole of Ireland. It was a struggle of international significance affecting every social class and party in Britain. Anyone today who thinks that the British ruling class will be defeated at home by any combination of economic and political struggle lives in a dream. The historical position of the British state at the head of the Empire has irrevocably internationalised the struggle against it.
Trotsky explained that the contradictions of the world system are concentrated and focused in the imperialist heartlands. So, it remains the case that the decisive factor in defeating the British ruling class is the working class in this country; it is still true that the strength of that ruling class flows from its economic, political and ideological role as world power. The British working class alone will not defeat it. It is also true that the British working class is unable to challenge that power whilst dominated by a labour bureaucracy, itself a product of imperialism, and itself having a material interest in maintaining imperialism.
We draw two conclusions from this. First, that wherever people rise up to fight British imperialism they are fighting and weakening our enemies, and helping us. Secondly, the internationalist struggle of British workers to support them represents the strongest possible assault on the labour bureaucracy—both in terms of its ideological hold over the workers, and in terms of attacking the material sources of its own power.
It is not true, as some imagine, that Ireland with its Republican traditions going back centuries is a backwater. Ireland is in the mainstream of world politics. From the French Revolution onwards, every rise of the world revolution has seen an offensive struggle by the Irish against British rule. Dates familiar to us—the 1780s, 1798, 1848, the 1860s, 1905, all mark decisive periods both from the point of view of Irish history and of world history.
Economically and politically, Ireland is the weak link in the chain for European capitalism.
It was the Irish who first put Lenin’s slogan into practice of ‘turning the imperialist war into a civil war’, rising for the Republic in 1916. It was the Irish who drew the lessons of the American civil rights movement, the Tet Offensive and the May 1968 events in Paris, creating a force that brought down the reactionary Stormont regime.
In world politics, it is the British working class which is in a backwater, isolated by the strength of its ruling class and the stranglehold of its labour bureaucracy. To link our struggles with those of the Irish is not a detour from world events, but the best way of bringing ourselves into line. The imperialist domination of Ireland by Britain ensures that there are objective tendencies working in this direction.
The Irish Challenge to the British State
There is no need to dwell on the obvious fact that the high points of the Irish struggle around the national question focus on the military presence of the British and the policies associated with it. In the North, the entire economic base and political superstructure are underwritten and propped up by the resources of the British state. There is a direct sense in which any form of class struggle is a struggle against the British state.
Applying this to the South remains more contentious in the movement. In terms of strategy, no class in the South can advance without engaging in a national struggle for or against British imperialism. This can be shown quite simply by looking at the two issues which dominate Western European politics as a whole—rearmament and the drive to austerity.
The Southern economy is in complete financial crisis, ranking alongside other dependent countries like Argentina or Mexico more than other European economies. As something like 60 per cent of profits from the South end up in the pockets of British capitalists, the British have a strong interest in getting the economy out of crisis. This can only be done to their satisfaction by the same kind of political and economic attacks we are familiar with in Britain—cuts, unemployment, attacks on union rights, etc. Yet the ruling class in the South is not strong enough to carry them out. Its economic structure has been thoroughly distorted by imperialism—firstly in its formation, when priority investment in industry went to the North, and secondly through partition, after which it was forced to rely on investment induced by get-rich-quick projects tempting enough for American and other international backers. The southern economy could not withstand a fraction of the recession that has occurred in Britain without catastrophic consequences.
The southern ruling class does not have the political strength to do it, partially because its formation came about only through a compromise between the Irish workers and the British imperialists, and partially because of the absence of a powerful trade union bureaucracy that can hold back the workers’ struggles. The working class and small farmers (a vital component of the struggle) are strong and have suffered no major defeat since partition. The working class is demographically extremely young, which makes for a volatility otherwise lacking. But when it moves into struggle, as it did, for example, occupying the Tuam sugar plant to prevent a closure, it has only the strength to neutralise the government, winning stays of execution, and so on. To permanently guarantee jobs in the area, it needs a government which can challenge the multinational investors and the unviability of any industry based on one half of a partitioned nation. Neither class can go onto the offensive whilst its horizons are limited to the 26 Counties of the South.
The United States government is putting massive pressure on every European country to participate in the Western arms buildup. Whilst a majority of investment in the South comes from America, there is big economic muscle behind the drive to incorporate the South in NATO and shore up Europe’s western flank. But southern workers regard Ireland’s neutrality (despite being compromised by EEC membership) as a political gain of the national struggle. Quite apart from the economic questions involved (NATO membership would mean more than trebling arms expenditure), both the southern ruling class and the labour bureaucracy maintain their position through the political demobilisation of the southern workers. A frontal attack on the neutrality issue is too risky. The consequences would be immediate and drastic. We saw in the most recent elections Fianna Fáil leader Haughey make one speech accusing Fine Gael of collaboration with the British, and opinion polls moved in his favour by 10 per cent within a week. Over the Malvinas issue, the Irish government was politically forced to distance itself from Britain. The united European front broke down.
So, economically and politically, Ireland is the weak link in the chain for European capitalism. It is a weak link we must seize hold of and break decisively.
Each time revolutionary ideas have gained influence in the British working class, mass currents have been organised to support the Irish.
The whole direction of the Anglo-Irish talks is aimed at holding that chain together. Whilst the immediate priority is joint collaboration to defeat the military/political impact of the nationalist vanguard, behind this lie whole areas of discussion on Ireland’s economic structure, its energy and defence policy—a long-term strategic view to use the southern ruling class to look after imperialism’s economic and political interests.
The urgent need for the Irish workers is to create an equally far-sighted political leadership. One that can overcome the debilitating effects of the division created by partition. In Ireland, every struggle, whether it is against redundancies, for CND, for women’s rights, or in support of political status for prisoners, can only be led forward on condition that it becomes an all-Ireland struggle, inevitably confronting both the British state and its allies in the southern government.
In Britain
By looking at the structure of British society, you can see what the effects of linking up the British and Irish struggle would be.
Right from its birth, the Irish question has shaped the formation of the British ruling class. Cromwell’s reactionary gesture of paying off his supporters with Irish land meant both the defeat of the Levellers, and the possibility for the King of recruiting for a restorationist force in Ireland, ensuring the maintenance of a parasitic monarchy for another 300 years.
The importance of the remaining Union is that a key section of the British ruling class is still based in the North of Ireland. The stable political party of the ruling class in Britain from Disraeli onwards was the Conservative and Unionist Party. Only in the aftermath of the crisis inside the ruling class, when the Stormont government was unable to contain the dynamic of the mass civil rights movement, was the party broken up into its component parts. Since then, the Unionists in the North have fragmented further. This break up of the political institutions of the ruling class can only be positive for us.
But the Unionist bourgeoisie remains the most reactionary section of the British ruling class. It has defied parliamentary rule by taking up arms against it. In 1974 in the Ulster Workers Council strike it managed to win over a section of the army to defy the government, and it is the only section of the ruling class to have a section of the working class armed and ready to defend its interests outside of the ‘legitimate’ framework of the army.
The preservation of the Union keeps open the possibility of the ruling class as a whole using that power for a counter-revolutionary adventure. Breaking Britain’s link with Ireland is not just a good way of avoiding that sort of project. For the Irish working class as a whole, it represents the only way that Loyalist workers can be broken from their bosses. The paper-thin ‘workers’ unity around bread and butter issues’ favoured by the Militant merely prolongs the existence of the sectarian state in the North.
We can look at the formation of the working class in a similar way. As Marx emphasised, a large proportion of the British working class is of Irish origin, its combativity is raised by successes in Ireland. It is indeed unfortunate that the ideology of the class as a whole is dominated, not by Irish workers, but by the labour bureaucracy. But we should note, that each time revolutionary ideas have gained strong influence inside the British working class, there have also been massive currents organised to support the Irish.
The labour bureaucracy in Britain is a product of imperialism, and a product of the Union. Its most reactionary section is based in the North of Ireland. The trade union leadership has a material interest in maintaining its links in the North—financial returns from the province outweigh expenditure on organising there. But there is also a strong political interest at stake. In powerful industrial unions, the Belfast offices run alongside Loyalist paramilitaries, like fiefdoms, which give the right-wing bureaucracy a solid base of support. This is particularly useful now when a section of the left bureaucracy threatens to back Benn. We have every interest in breaking up this reactionary block, and the union bureaucracy as a whole—a decisive blow can be struck by backing all moves to break British Labour’s links with the North.
The Power of the Oppressed
Wherever the national struggle of the oppressed threatens to defeat the imperialist power, we can see a political crisis inside the oppressor country of massive proportions. The Vietnamese struggle traumatised American society and ended up changing the balance of forces on a world scale. The struggles of the people of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau toppled the Caetano dictatorship in Portugal, opening up a revolutionary situation there. The struggle of the Algerian people toppled the Fourth Republic and led to the seizure of power by the Gaullist military in France. In all three imperialist countries, the ruling class was not able to go on ruling in the old way. Whether or not a positive outcome to that crisis will result is the responsibility of the working class and its leadership.
Will the working class in Britain be prepared? By following Marx’s method, we can see that strengthening the links between the struggle of Irish and British workers by acting to break the Union will take us forward, and weaken our enemies.
Tory MP John Biggs Davidson said: ‘What happens in Londonderry is very important to what can happen in London. If we lose in Belfast, we may have to fight in Brixton or Birmingham.’ At the high point of the H-Block struggle in Ireland, the British ruling class did find itself fighting in Brixton and Birmingham. Also in Toxteth and Moss Side. It put this down to the ‘copycat tactics of the youth’. The identification of the youth with Irish revolutionaries is exactly what we need.
Whilst it is not easy to make a revolution anywhere in the world, the fact remains that in Ireland it is one hundred times easier than Britain. Practical support for the development of the struggle in Ireland by campaigns such as that to ban the plastic bullets and for the withdrawal of troops, weakens our enemies and hastens our own revolution.
The message from Marx must be this. No moralistic appeals or hypothetical judgements. Examine the international situation, look at all the classes and see where their struggle is going, attack imperialism at its weakest links, base the building of a workers’ party upon the dynamic of the struggle, and lead it to its conclusion. It doesn’t date a bit. There is a need in Britain to become ‘preoccupied’ with the Irish question once more, not because of some special duty but because it holds the key to open a wider perspective for revolution.