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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
VILLAGEAugust/September
POLITICS REVOLUTION
I
RELAND is in dramatic transition. We
have witnessed the collapse of the Celtic
Tiger, economic recession, bailout and
austerity. Many people are scared by the
juggernaut of poverty, oppression, inequal-
ity, environmental destruction and climate
change.
Neo-Marxist thinkers like David Harvey,
Erik Olin Wright and Hardt and Negri show
that international capitalist globalisation
underpins such social catastrophes.
The neoliberalism of the Washington
Consensus – a political project of the elite,
theorised by free-marketeers, Friedman
and Hayek, pioneered in Pinochet’s Chile,
finessed by Reagan and Thatcher in the
US and the UK has belatedly been foisted
on Ireland under the PDs/FF and their
successors.
The Washington Consensus derives from
the crisis of capitalism manifest in declining
profitability, in the s. A frightened elite
resolved to reduce the share of income and
wealth that went to workers, and to increase
the share returned to capital. Neoliberal pol-
icies included the de-regulation of Keynesian
welfare-state protections and the finan-
cial sector, privatisation of public services,
corporate fetishism, neocolonial wars for
resources in the likes of Iraq, and commod-
ification of the fruits of nature like water,
land, seeds and even genetics. Indeed at the
heart of this project of neoliberal capital-
ism is the commodification of everything.
Everything is to be turned into something
that can be bought and sold. Everyone must
compete with everyone for everything.
But neoliberalism is also based on the
myth of freedom without solidarity. Where
is the freedom for low-paid workers forced
to work three jobs to survive? Yet, backed
by the propaganda of vested interests act-
ing through the media and parliamentary
politics it successfully dresses itself up as effi-
ciency and common sense, masquerades as a
somehow unobjectionable ‘managerialism’
and attracts a gormless and unquestioning
‘post-political consensus’.
However, as with all variants of capi-
talism, it is also riven with contradictions
because of the anarchy of free, unregulated,
markets that continually engage in boom
and bust cycles and effect uneven develop-
ment as one area expands at the expense of
another. Naomi Klein has used the term ‘dis-
aster capitalism’ to describe how the elites
use crises to create a blank slate on which
they can further inscribe their commodifi-
cation and exploitation.
Ireland is a study in failure of the neolib-
eral financial capitalist model. The Celtic
tiger was built on belief in the private market
and in complete integration with globalised
markets. McDowell and the PDs promoted
the ideology that inequality was good and
essential to motivate people, and that we
needed light-touch regulation to allow
private developers and bankers to release
their entrepreneurial ‘talent’ and risk-tak-
ing panache. They also built their kingdom
on reduced taxes for multinationals and the
wealthy. Corruption was characteristic, and
rife, within the political system.
Fight for a New Republic – by campaigning, studying better models and not
being afraid of radical change. By Rory Hearne
The failure of Irish social
partnership and ‘soft’ NGO
advocacy
August/September VILLAGE
typically support the Labour party to get into
government and to change things on their
behalf, to mitigate Fine Gael and avoid rever-
sion to some draconian PD-type outfit..
The Irish experience of years holding
back on protest and strikes has yielded few
progressive gains but rather the co-option
and silencing of potential forces of dissent
and a destruction of solidarity. Interestingly
for Ireland, according to Freire, the sys-
tem of dominant social relations creates a
‘culture of silence’ that instills a negative,
silenced and suppressed self-image into the
oppressed. Here in Ireland we have allowed
a system of silence to dominate. The elite
convinced a significant proportion of the
population that their interests lay not in
protesting or resistance but in maintaining
a stoic passivity.
For example, during austerity the leader-
ships of the public-sector unions and ICTU
made agreements with the government not
to engage in industrial action in return for
maintaining wages of existing public-sec-
tor workers and no compulsory
redundancies. The agreements
also included great reductions
in the pay of new entrants to the
public sector and moratoriums on
new recruitment. Furthermore,
the real price of the agreements
was that the major unions along
with other NGOs stopped pro-
testing against austerity, so the
most vulnerable communities
that were devastated by cuts
were left with no one to defend
them but themselves.
This analysis suggests how
enmeshed the unions and NGOs
are in dependency and the ideol-
ogy of the elite system. Symptomatic is how
the potential of the Claiming Our Future
RDS event to turn into a more radical
social movement was lost by a civil society
leadership that did not want to engage or
Inevitably, the greed and inequality of
their boom hurtled into crisis and reces-
sion. Unsurprisingly a political revolution
was promised by Ireland’s new government
in – that never again would such reck-
less mistakes be made. Yet it is clear that the
medicine prescribed by the state including
key civil servants and its main political par-
ties, business, NESC, IBEC etc is a harsh form
of Irish neoliberal capitalism. The paradigm
has been exemplified during the crisis by
both governments backed up by the EU and
IMF. The twisted policy has been to pay back
bondholders unnecessarily, defer abjectly to
the markets but above all never to raise our
hallowed corporate tax rate which seemed
for the elite to be almost a badge of our
nationhood. This mentality sees no repub-
lican contradiction in sundering funding for
marginal communities, social housing and
essential disability services.
Most people who believe in social justice
and those who consider themselves on the
Left in Irish politics are likely to agree with
the above analysis. The question is how to
change the model.
It is essential to understand how the con-
sent of the majority of people, their antipathy
to revolution or even resistance, is assured.
Noam Chomsky, for example, describes how
popular consent (passivity) is manufactured
– in key part through control of the media
and an absence of systemic questioning and
critical thinking in wider civil society. Italian
Marxist Antonio Gramsci explains that civil
society plays a key role in maintaining sup-
port for existing capitalist hegemony and
thus in maintaining consent.
Let’s look at the Irish civil society organi-
sations including the Unions – first at their
characteristic approaches to social change.
They tend to embrace the ethos of service-
providing charities, whose lobbying takes
the form of ‘soft’ advocacy and the embrace
of ‘social partnership’ with the state which
then funds it. They or their members
unleash the popular resistance that radical
change requires.
But this is not restricted to Ireland, at a
global level, the likes of Booker prize win-
ner, Arundhati Roy, author of Capitalism:
A Ghost Story, has strongly critiqued “the
NGO-ization of Resistance”:
“In India, for instance, the funded NGO
boom began in the late s and s.
It coincided with the opening of India’s
markets to neo-liberalism.
At the time, the Indian state, in keep-
ing with the requirements of structural
adjustment, was withdrawing funding
from rural development, agriculture,
and public health. As the state abdi-
cated its traditional role, NGOs moved
in though, of course, the funds available
to them were a minuscule fraction of the
actual cut in public spending. Most large
funded NGOs are financed and patron-
ised by aid and development agencies,
which are in turn funded by Western gov-
ernments, the World Bank, the UN, and
some multinational corporations. Why
should these agencies fund NGOs? Could
it be just old-fashioned missionary zeal?
Guilt? It’s a little more than that. NGOs
give the impression that they are fill-
ing the vacuum created by a retreating
state. And they are, but in a materially
inconsequential way. Their real contri-
bution is that they defuse political anger
and dole out as aid what people ought to
have by right. In the long run, NGOs are
accountable to their funders, not to the
people they work among. They’re what
botanists call an indicator species. It’s
almost as though the greater the devasta-
tion caused by neo-liberalism, the greater
the outbreak of NGOs.
Nothing illustrates this more poign-
antly than the phenomenon of the U.S.
preparing to invade a country and simul-
taneously readying NGOs to go in and
clean up the devastation.
The NGO-ization of politics threatens to
turn resistance into a well-mannered,
reasonable, salaried, -to- job. With a
few perks thrown in. Real resistance has
real consequences. And no salary”.
Faced with this phenomenon – from
India to Ireland - the best approach is one
of critical engagement. That is based on
empowering the marginalised, workers
and those suffering discrimination to speak
themselves to power. Engagement with the
system must be based on using the power of
the majority, or even the ‘%’ in popular
resistance and withdrawal of consent for
the system. Occupy was an interesting mani-
festation of this.
Faced with this
phenomenon –
from India to
Ireland - the
best approach
is one of critical
engagement
“
VILLAGEAugust/September
and personal lives. Why do we think the sys-
tem should operate differently?
• Support social resistance, struggle, pro-
test, and campaigns. Even if we are not
exactly in agreement with the particular
issue (this is obviously not applicable to rac-
ist or xenophobic issues) we should support
grassroots resistance because that is where
radical transformation comes
– from the bottom up. It is good
to see trade unions supporting
and organising workers like in
Marks and Spencers, Greyhound
Waste and the Paris Bakery. We
must ask ourselves: What are we
afraid of? Social upheaval? What
would be wrong with people
waking up and taking control
through mass protest and com-
munity action?
As we approach the anniver-
sary of the Rising and the
Proclamation of the Irish Republic
it is opportune for the Irish left to
engage the public in these debates
and to mobilise action in the great
tradition. The fundamental, and
for some wrenching, question
is: is this neo-liberalism what
the leaders, particularly James
Connolly, fought and died for?
We have never had the social, economic or
political revolution that Connolly, the poor
and the workers of Ireland fought for. We
remain a colonised and oppressed people,
a neo-colony of neoliberal capitalism, pris-
oner of the US, the EU, their corporations
and their elite. Our goal must be to dispel
cynicism, pessimism and inertia and to cre-
ate together a New Republic that will deliver
equality, sustainability and democracy for
all the people. •
(bar Sinn Féin) have remained both thwarted
and under the radar. They are in the tradition
of under-recognised grassroots movements
that permeate th and th Century.
What can we do to raise the efficacy of
such vital movements and of the radical left
generally?
• Shift the focus away from trying to
change the mind of the elite civil serv-
ants, media and mainstream politicians
and focus on educating and empower-
ing workers, communities, students, and
the public through a Freirian approach
of education for political emancipation,
not the mainstream ‘common sense’ of
the system.
• Teach and promote the concrete les-
sons from places and movements which
have pursued alternative models of
development. We can learn from inter-
national and local resistance that has
challenged neoliberalism e.g. Zapatistas,
Argentinian cooperative movement,
Bolivia, Venezuela.
• Teach and promote precise alternative
sectoral models – of health, housing,
employment - from around the world
and from within Ireland.
• Teach and promote how real participa-
tory and deliberative democracy would
lead to social justice. Co-operatives are
an interesting model that could have par-
ticular resonance for Ireland. Ask critical
questions that challenge the alleged
common sense of the system. Why does
anyone need a salary over 1,? Why do
we have housing and health provided on a
for-profit basis? There is clear evidence that
more equal societies do better on a range
of indicators. Solidarity and cooperation
rather than competition and individualism
are driving values we aspire to in our family
The infrastructure of resistance played an
essential role in Greece, Spain, and Portugal
in mobilising and developing alternative
approaches and forcing civil society organ-
isations and political parties to take more
radical positions. In Ireland it was never
developed properly. The state has also
played a clever game. Co-opting some dis-
sent – dividing and conquering, repressing
in some quarters such as the student protests
in and Shell to Sea, removing potential
political rallying points such as the annual
promissory note repayment and manipulat-
ing and distorting to claim that there was a
‘deal’ on the Anglo notes. The Irish state and
political system, in particular an uncritical
media, has been effective in many ways in
anaesthetising a passive population. And of
course in its encouragement of the age-old
safety valve of emigration.
Gramscian frameworks also emphasise
the importance of place-specific context.
In this beleaguered nation there has
been oppression and collusion, resistance
and persecution, flight and famine. Those
who survived the Famine did so while mil-
lions died and were forced to emigrate. A
fearful population, oppressed for hundreds
of years, was liberated by a small group –
only to become oppressed again for almost
a century after Independence. Workers were
defeated in the lockout. Dissenting voices of
communism were forced, like Jim Gralton,
into exile by a conservative, church-domi-
nated and paranoid state.
This shiftiness about standing up to
oppressive powers symptomises Ireland’s
post-colonial mentality of dependency.
We had no large communist or social-
ist party like the rest of Europe; we had no
revolutions, no factory occupations,
no red zones in the s or s. The resist-
ance culture and infrastructure were never
there.
It is significant that the dominant narra-
tive is that the Irish did not protest against
the neoliberalism of the Celtic Tiger or the
antithetical crisis and its agent, austerity.
In fact there were the anti-bin-charges cam-
paign during the Celtic tiger, the massive
anti-household-charge campaign during
austerity, the community-development
protests of the Spectacle, a new youth move-
ment that for the first time in Irish history
is resisting emigration – We’re Not Leaving,
the Ballyhea and Anglo Not Our Debt cam-
paigns, Shell to Sea, Anti-fracking groups;
as well as a new radical Left political group-
ing in People Before Profit and the Anti
Austerity Alliance. We have also seen the
rise of a (for now) anti-austerity Sinn Féin.
What is interesting is how these movements
POLITICS REVOLUTION
NGOs are what
botanists would
call an indicator
species. It’s
almost as
though the
greater the
devastation
caused by
neo-liberalism,
the greater the
outbreak of
NGOs
“
co-operative,
Venezuela
