LETTER: Fuel Protests and Class Leadership

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A repeated theme throughout the past few days has been the loud declaration that the fuel protestors are working class people being squeezed under the foot of the government. We should remind ourselves that those who own the means of production, regardless of how much labour they personally perform on their land, are not proletariat. We should reject psychological or subjective definitions of class that is the commonplace understanding among a lot of people today. The proletariat is the class that, separated from the means of production, has nothing to lose but its chains.

Looking at the movement at the moment it is clear that this is broadly speaking a petit bourgeois movement organised around petit bourgeois demands. The movement displays the characteristic features of that class. It is disorganised, leadership is diffuse and contested, and spontaneity reigns. Its demands (where they can be deciphered) operate solely as a fight in defence of this layer’s immediate self interests.

This is something the left at large has recognised. What does not follow from this is that we should oppose these protests or support state action against them, whether carried out by the Gardaí or the army. Nor should we take the second, equally mistaken position of washing our hands of struggles that don’t conform to a pure proletarian schema as Kim Ní Chonaill seems to put forward in her own letter. Socialist leadership and intervention is needed precisely in these messy and contradictory moments. Rosa Luxemburg, writing on the Dreyfus affair, captures the principle well:

“The socialist principle of class struggle demands the action of the proletariat wherever its interests as a class are in question. This is the case for all conflicts that divide the bourgeoisie. Every shift in the relation of social forces in bourgeois society, any change in the political relations of the country, influences, in the first place, the situation of the working class… since we haven’t thought of emigrating, as it were, from bourgeois to socialist society, but on the contrary of overthrowing bourgeois society by means created within that same society, the proletariat must make an effort, in its forward march to victory, to influence all social events in a favorable direction.” ¹

These protests are petit bourgeois in character. That does not mean we automatically oppose or support them. The one iron socialist principle is that we oppose any extension of state repression against the protesters, knowing that violence used against these layers will rapidly be turned against the working class itself. Our primary enemy is the state as the working class’s principal task is the conquest of political power. 

This is fine as far as it goes but there are two questions that need answering. The first being how do we develop a long term strategy that reckons with the strength of the petit bourgeois, and secondly what are the tactics we can deploy in a time like now to advance that strategy.

Leadership

Lenin’s concept of proletarian hegemony in Tsarist Russia, that a numerically small working class must lead the democratic revolution by winning the peasantry, cannot be transplanted mechanically to Irish conditions. The Irish working class is not the minority it was in Russia, nor does the farming layer here in any way remotely resemble the Russian peasantry in terms of social position or political psychology.

The underlying strategic insight should still however be very important to us. Any socialist transformation must reckon with the fact that there exists a large class, with the power to shut down the nation that we must avoid immediately driving into the arms of reaction. The question of winning the active support or at minimum the neutrality of sections of the petit bourgeoisie is an absolute necessity. 

The farmers and hauliers who make up the core of this movement are not a homogeneous class. A heavily indebted smallholder farming marginal land sits in a materially different position from a large agribusiness owner, even if both technically own their means of production. It is among the more precarious layers that socialist influence has historically found a foothold. It is important not to overestimate the scale of this layer but regardless we need not set ourselves up as ultra leftists who seek the immediate seizure of small farms to place these individuals as our immediate class enemies. To quote Engels on this point:

“To begin with, the French programme is absolutely correct in stating: that we foresee the inevitable doom of the small peasant, but that it is not our mission to hasten it by any interference on our part.

Secondly, it is just as evident that when we are in possession of state power, we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (regardless of whether with or without compensation), as we shall have to do in the case of the big landowners. Our task relative to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise and private possession to cooperative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the proffer of social assistance for this purpose. And then, of course, we shall have ample means of showing to the small peasant prospective advantages that must be obvious to him even today.” ²

A serious difficulty is that Irish agriculture is structurally dependent on state subsidies and EU support to a degree that ties the farming class, including its most precarious layers, into loyalty to the existing order. The farmers can disrupt, as these protests demonstrate, but the same subsidies that give them a degree of independence from the market bind them to the state that distributes them. It is only in a deep crisis of the state itself, one that renders those supports unreliable or politically untenable, that significant sections of the petit bourgeoisie may become genuinely open to an alternative political arrangement. Short of that, we shouldn’t have illusions about winning the broad farming layer to a socialist politics that challenges the very structures their livelihoods depend on.

This is why the question of building a mass base for socialist politics within the working class must come first. As Trotsky wrote:

“The petty bourgeoisie must acquire faith in the ability of the proletariat to lead society onto a new road. The proletariat can inspire this faith only by its strength, by the firmness of its actions, by a skillful offensive against the enemy, by the success of its revolutionary policy.” ³

Trotsky wrote this in a period of mass proletarian parties. We do not have that. Until the working class is organised under a socialist leadership of its own, we are not a credible alternative to anyone. Winning sections of the petit bourgeois to our side requires us to first demonstrate that the working class can lead. That is a long term project, and involves the patient work of building a mass socialist party.

We have to be sober about our own weaknesses at the moment. No spontaneous upsurge can substitute for the construction of a durable working class organisation. It is precisely the historic weakness of that organisation in our ossified trade unions, in alienated communities and in politics (brought about by vicious counter acts by our state) that has produced the situation we have witnessed for the last week. Sections of the hard-pressed working class, lacking any class-independent political expression, channeling their anger behind a movement whose demands are not their own. 

The calls for general strikes and mass escalation in working class communities made by sections of the left do not reckon with this reality. The infrastructure for such action does not exist because we have not built it. Conjuring it from a moment of spontaneous upsurge is wishcasting.

The blockades are lifting now and the outcome remains unclear. The moment, at its peak has passed but the conditions that produced it have not. The task now is to use the anger this crisis has revealed, the real anger, present in working class areas as raw material for building the organisation that makes working class leadership possible the next time around. There will be a next time.

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1. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case” (1899), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1899/11/dreyfus-affair.htm. ↩︎
2. Frederick Engels, “The Peasant Question in France and Germany” (1894), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/peasant-question/ch02.htm. ↩︎
3. Leon Trotsky, “Bourgeoisie, Petty Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (1932), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/08/onlyroad2.htm. ↩︎