Billy McMillen 40th anniversary memorial address, Belfast

I am very privileged and honoured to be asked to deliver today’s memorial talk on Billy McMillen. Many years ago, when I joined the old Republican Movement over in Strabane, where I originally come from, he was held in extremely high esteem and enormously respected by my elders who did know him. And even though at most I was present in his company on relatively few occasions and cannot consciously remember ever meeting him personally, I still recall feeling a great sense of loss the day the shocking news broke that he had been murdered when down town shopping with his wife Mary. Some memories simply stick with you. I instinctively knew then that a great man had been callously, cynically, murderously taken from us. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain and anguish felt by those of you who knew him intimately during those dark and dangerous days in Belfast and beyond.
We know then that Billy paid the ultimate price of his life for his commitment to radical socialism and anti-sectarianism. Indeed, again as you all well know, Billy not only resisted the evil sectarianism that so tragically stalked this part of Ireland but fought tenaciously and courageously against it! And in doing that he was ever alert and mindful of falling into the many traps and snares that were being set for him by the Irish Government and other deadly enemies back in 1969 when he led the Republican Movement in Belfast in resisting the bribe on offer to reject socialism and retreat into sterile nationalism. In resisting that Billy sent out a clear message to all that he and the other good Comrades were not prepared to allow the honourable traditions of Republicanism become sullied and stained by mindless sectarianism. There would be no retreat, no surrender! And in leading the more forward thinking members at that time – as many of you here today were then and now- he also provided enormous levels of loyalty, dedication and leadership to help guide the Republican Movement away from that moribund, narrow nationalism of the past, and in the process made an enormous contribution to turning it into the revolutionary party of the Irish Working Class that it currently is. That, more than anything else, is the legacy of Billy McMillen that I intend to address today.
In taking that stand in the 1960s Billy was acknowledging that times had both changed and would continue to change. He knew that better than most. Indeed, in keeping with the radical re-appraisal that followed the disastrous Operation Harvest of 1956-62 he realised fully that for the Republican Movement to recover from that enormous failure, indeed for it to have any
viable future at all, it needed to recover its true meaning and identity. As part of that radical reassessment of where the Movement then stood, Billy was convinced by the argument of Cathal Goulding and Tomás Mac Gíolla amongst others – including Seánn Garland- that, in truth, the Movement had lost touch with the new realities of the ordinary Irish people. And
amongst those realities there stood one, single, simple truth; that the core of that ‘ordinary Irish people’ was in fact workers and their families. In this they were looking again at what James Connolly had stated many years previously in his writings prior to the Easter Rebellion; ‘Ireland without its people means nothing to me’.

This was what had been lost virtually from the very day Connolly died in 1916. For, in the aftermath of 1916, not only was Connolly gone but the crucial role of the people had been eclipsed and in its place a new leadership of middle-class merchants and professionals whose interests were not those of the ordinary people, but the elite interests of capital and their supporters had emerged. This then was what Billy instinctively realised was necessary back in the mid-sixties; that the interests, the fate of the ordinary people had to be once again inserted into the dynamics of the Republican Movement. Without that it meant nothing to him!
Once persuaded of that unavoidable truth, Billy dedicated himself to making it a reality. And for that to become a reality he also came to realise that there was far more to a successful revolution than fighting British Imperialism. That imperialism was, then and now, far more sophisticated than any that had gone before. More importantly, what that imperialism represented at that time were the interests of monopoly capitalism- the same capitalism that had quickly established itself in the new ‘Free State’ from 1924 in the aftermath of the victory of the establishment forces in the civil war. Imperialism was by then no longer necessarily following the flags or other symbols of nationalism. By then, more than ever before, it had become the imperialism of international monopoly capital and by the 1960s it had conquered all before it in Ireland, north and south. Again, just as Connolly had so accurately recognised years before, true liberty involved much more than simple political independence:
‘If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.’ (P. Beresford Ellis (ed.), “James Connolly – Selected Writings”, p. 124)
This was never more true than in the Ireland of the 1960s with many of the traditional, so-called home based industries in serious decline and Ireland both north and south opening up to the new trans-national corporations –many of them actually US based companies- as they poured into Ireland enticed by special tax-breaks, financial grants, advance factories and all sorts of inducements offered by both sets of governments who now unashamedly showed their true bourgeois colours.. This was the new face of imperialism in Ireland and Billy knew only too well the enormous implications that held for the future of any party or organisation that believed itself to be on the side of the people. What the new reality demanded was a new more radical, more sophisticated organisation, one that was firmly in tune with the new realities, an organisation that could and would respond more effectively to each twist and turn of the new imperialism as it sought to extract ever more profits at the lowest possible cost from Irish workers and their families, and in full concert with the governments both north and south of the border. To do all this effectively, and to do so with a determination that such exploitation would be forever banished, he knew that a major new type of organisation was needed, and needed urgently.
It was in this context, therefore, the context of exploitative capitalism now rampant throughout all of Ireland that Billy realised not only that a Revolutionary Party was needed, but that the then Republican Movement was the best positioned not only to lead that party but to become that party! The party that would set its aim not just to free Ireland from its invasive neighbour but to free it from the clutches of capitalism which formed the new and most dangerous enemy to true freedom and liberty. In this Billy was following closely in the footsteps of Connolly and the Citizen Army. It was not the green flag of nationalism but the Red Flag of socialism that he wanted to see hoisted over government buildings in both Belfast and Dublin. This was the new energy, the new direction as the old Republican Movement slowly, but surely, was changed into the new Revolutionary Party of the workers!
Central to this Revolutionary Party idea was Lenin’s theory of the necessity for a Vanguard Party to lead the workers to victory in the class struggle with the owners and controllers of capital. Lenin, as leader of the Bolsheviks, knew only too well that ill-thought out actions and proposals for the revolutionary overthrow of the oppressors of workers were always doomed to failure. Unless such actions were based on clear, well thought out positions and accompanied by high levels of organisation and discipline they could never, ever, be successful. For Lenin this was the central feature of what was needed in order to pursue successfully the cause of radical, revolutionary change.
He also knew and relentlessly argued that such revolutionary change could never happen of its own volition, as the result of some un-assisted evolution of social and economic factors that would somehow lead to an age where workers would cease to be exploited and where capitalists would, as if by virtue of a new progressive and superior moral code, come to recognise the error of their ways and permit workers to share in their profits! Nor could it happen as a consequence of a ‘spontaneous uprising.’ For Lenin, quite rightly, this was the world of romance, of dreams and fiction. In the real world there existed a harsh reality where political and economic dominance was wielded by the owners of capital. In such a real world workers could never expect a voluntary surrender by the reactionary forces; it would have to be forcibly wrested from their greedy, grasping hands. There never then could ever be any evolutionary process to socialism; workers could only ever hope to be free of the clutches of capitalism, and be free to own collectively all that they had ever made by means of strong, centralised and collective organisation and taking it forcibly by those very means.
Undoubtedly, that path to freedom for workers, true freedom, would not be a short one. Nor would it be an easy one, or one without failures and well as successes. There would indeed be moments of near triumph and moments of morale shattering defeats. But each time workers would pick themselves up collectively, re-organise and re-engage in their struggle; ceaselessly, fearlessly, endlessly seeking at all times to achieve true liberty from their historical bondage to capitalism.
For this to happen Lenin and the Bolsheviks convincingly argued successfully for the urgent establishment of a Vanguard Party that would lead the workers to their victory.
So, what did he mean by a vanguard party? Well, quite frankly, a lot of gobbledygook nonsense has sometimes been used to describe that phenomenon, particularly by its critics and I don’t intend to go into that here today. What I will say, however, that this concept was central to Billy’s new understanding back then in the mid to late sixties, and its essence is actually quite simple as you well know.
If spontaneous revolution is not possible then its opposite could be. And the opposite of spontaneous of course is that which is organised and planned; something that is designed deliberately and consciously to achieve a specific outcome and which tries to reduce considerably the elements of chance. The implications of this type of thinking are quite clear, really. Given the dominance of capitalism and in particular the power and rule of the dominant capitalist class, then a voluntary relinquishing of that power is utterly improbable. The implications here of course are quite obvious. If it will not be relinquished voluntarily then there is a necessity to take it forcibly and by whatever means are necessary and available. But unless it is accompanied by good leadership, careful planning and in conjunction with a critical understanding of what is at stake, then it is unlikely to be successful. And it is precisely the vanguard party that is designed to fulfil those roles.
It is not, as some would misrepresent it, some sort of elite conspiratorial sect secretly planning to overthrow democracy! Not at all! What it is in real time is a Party which by its very being forms an integral, inseparable part of the working class. It doesn’t ‘represent’ it; it is part of it. Its task is to lead, to advise, to agitate, to educate, to organise. And above all else to ensure that when the ripe moment, the moment of extreme crisis for the capitalist system itself actually occurs that it is there and poised to lead mobilised workers towards victory. Without such a vanguard party and no matter how deep the crisis of capitalism, revolution can simply never happen. Without such a highly organised and motivated core Party leading workers at the moment of such crisis, and no matter how mobilised workers may be at such a moment they will be always be confronted by the full array of highly organised and professional coercive apparatuses at the disposal of the modern state. A modern state which ultimately, and particularly at moments of great crisis for capitalism is unashamedly on its side and no other. Only in conjunction with a Vanguard Party that has the accumulated wisdom of experience of providing leadership, of expertise gathered over years of agitation, of knowledge gained though political activity and education, that has been integral to and part and parcel of the struggle against the powerful agencies defending capitalism, only then can a mobilised working class be confident of ultimate revolutionary success.
To be frank, those who suggest otherwise are either fools or liars; maybe even both!
To quote Lenin:
‘Political questions cannot be mechanistically separated from organisation..’
To do so loses sight of how central good organisation is to good revolution!
Directly related to this of course is the question of class consciousness and we all know the central importance of this for Marx; that successful revolutions could occur only when the workers are fully conscious of both their identity and of how to change things irrevocably. For Lenin, the most demonstrable form of that consciousness had to be a vanguard party; by its very nature it could not but be so. By its very nature it would be a product of that consciousness, or at least the consciousness of advanced sections of it. For if it were absent, then so too would true class consciousness. In this sense for Lenin, as well as for many others who arrived at the same conclusion using precisely the same logic of good argument, the existence of a Revolutionary Party would itself be a product of class consciousness and that consciousness itself would be a product of the age of advanced capitalism, marked as it was by the profound and deep class antagonisms that invariably and inevitably flowed from it.
Lenin also acknowledged, however, that the development of class consciousness was unlikely to be even and uniform. There would undoubtedly be occasions when there would exist or come into being sections of the working class whose experience of capitalism would vary over time and across space too. There would be those who would at some times have more privilege and some with less so according both to the terms and conditions of their respective employments as well as of their understandings of the same. This would have undoubted effects on the levels of both consciousness and organisation of workers. Some workers would undoubtedly be more conscious and, therefore, more organised that others. And this would also, undoubtedly, manifest itself in political terms. In essence, then, the role as well as the existence of a Vanguard Party was not and could not be incidental to whatever stage of development class consciousness itself happened to be at. To the contrary; for a such a Vanguard to be present at all and functioning as it should would itself be dependent upon a high degree of such consciousness amongst what Lenin termed the ‘advanced sections of the working class’.
In this sense, then, the Vanguard Party was not, is not and could never be an elitist organisation’. By its very nature it could not be so because for its very existence it depended upon a close and reciprocal relationship with the very class it both sprang from and represented. If either were absent it would represent little more than an abstract, elitist debating club with little or no meaning whatsoever, and most certainly not for the working class. That was crucial for Lenin. The Vanguard Party he argued had to be integral to all aspects of the class it led. Its key members would be both drawn from and, most crucially, deeply embedded within it during its daily struggles and trials with capitalism. Its key members would also be deeply aware and conscious of all that was meaningful and relevant to it. Ultimately, the vanguard party had to rest upon an organic bond with the class it was part of, but never above.
This, then, was the very clear sense that Billy McMillen had when he consciously and purposefully accepted and worked to adopt those very principles to guide the new direction for the then Republican Movement back in the ‘sixties. He was one of the first to begin the task of constructing that Vanguard Party for the Irish working class. And he did so ever mindful of the specific conditions that applied here in this part of the island, and recognised the vital role that class unity had to play as an essential pre-requisite to a successful revolution for the island. For without that class unity, there could not ever be such a revolution. He instinctively knew that a divided class is a weak class. And a weak class is an easily defeated and controlled class. The events since 1969, when the PA emerged with the assistance of Irish Governmental aid and assistance, are full and tragic proof of that.
Billy McMillen was not following blindly a strategy designed by others simply out of a sense of loyalty and obedience. To the contrary, he actually played a central part in the overall intense discussions and debates that had actually preceded its introduction and paved the way to the adoption of the same. In that sense, then, the task he undertook – with others it must be said for he was not alone in this – was to turn the old Movement into a new and radical vanguard party for the Irish workers both north and south, for catholics, protestants, dissenters, agnostics and atheists!
And let this be clearly stated; he was successful! Despite being struck down by a coward’s bullet in 1975, and despite the savage sectarian war then being waged by the sectarian forces in the north, he had brought the nucleus of the vanguard party into fruition by then. More than that. Even after his shocking murder it not only survived but grew throughout the island. True, there were indeed major setbacks, particularly following the desertion of the parliamentarians back in the early ‘nineties, but it has also survived that. And the reason it has done so is precisely because of the skills, the determination, the motivation, the incredibly courageous and inspiring sacrifices made by men like Billy McMillen.
Comrades, the ultimate tribute that can ever be paid to Billy McMillen, that we can pay, that any of his friends and Comrades can ever pay, is to complete the task that he helped to initiate. That means not just to continue the building of a Vanguard party, but to also lead Irish workers towards the complete, revolutionary transformation of our society both north and south. And to finally realise the project that drove him relentlessly forward, the same project that Connolly fought and died for: to erect the Red Flag of Radical, Revolutionary Socialism over this entire island. That would indeed be the most fitting of all tributes!