Closing address of Workers’ Party Ard Fheis 2017 delivered by Party President Michael Donnelly
What the Workers’ Party represents
As a product of all the working people of this island, the Workers’ Party proudly stands as the vanguard force in their struggle with capitalism and their fight for justice, jobs and equality. But we also recognise that as that vanguard our role is not simply to passively represent our class, or to merely engage in a ritual series of political contest for seats in either or both local or central representative agencies.
No! Our role is to lead from the front that great mass of organised and mobilised workers and their allies towards a new world that banishes poverty, and unemployment. Towards a new world where our class finally takes control of the great wealth that they have made and to use it for exclusively social and progressive purposes.
This is our historically determined role Comrades. But it is a role that we cannot and will not do alone or in isolation.
So then, along with developing policies and strategies for elections and engaging in specific political campaigns – vitally important as they undoubtedly are – we must also be part of the construction of a new critical discourse about contemporary Irish society – both north and south- one aimed at connecting with and radicalising the very workers that we seek to represent and lead. And it must be a critical discourse that goes well beyond that of merely challenging the prevailing orthodoxy of our times. For it to be meaningful and positive, radical as well as potentially revolutionary, that new discourse must also have as its essence, its core, that which promotes a mighty, irresistible alternative to the corrupt and corrupting world of capitalism. Its task then is to seek to promote a radical and completely new normative framework, one which stands as a direct antithesis and alternative to capitalism; an alternative framework of thinking that shifts the focus away from the prioritising of individual interests and towards that of the social and the collective; one which prioritises and applauds the dynamics of class over the purely individual; of the communal over the singular or private. To provide alternative boundaries for a new normative framework that goes well beyond simply challenging and denouncing the obscenity of increasing and exploitative privilege. In a world where, despite the trillions of dollars of profits that are accumulated annually by transnational corporations, millions of innocent people continue to die annually for want of the most basic nourishment and water, this alternative is urgently needed!
We need then to construct a discourse framework that sets it face against this, and which sets among its goals not merely the ripping from the face of privilege its false and pretentious mask of concern in order to reveal its hideous, cynical and exploitative features, but simultaneously to posit the radical, revolutionary and alternative new goal of the communal ownership of the means of production as well as the wealth that it creates. A communal ownership that will be manifested in providing fully for the accommodation needs of all of the people, giving them access to the fullest possible expression of their identities and lives; enabling them to be fully in control of their material world and to finally banish inequality, want and poverty from their lives.
THE TRUE REPRESSIVE NATURE OF THE EU
Let’s park for the moment the extreme, xenophobic, nationalist rhetoric used by some of the promoters of so-called Brexit and focus instead upon what the EU actually represents in real time politics and economic policy. Far from being the fountainhead of progressive thinking, or the source of benign civil liberties and expressions, the EU represents in the most fundamental of ways the base, selfish interests of monopoly capital in the modern age. In its response to the most recent crisis of capitalism the EU’s essential focus has remained fixed upon constructing further opportunities for monopoly capitalism to grow and flourish. There has been no attempt towards repairing the untold social damage that the crisis causes but, rather, to use that crisis as an opportunity to further entrench the steely, death-like grip the same capitalist interests have upon its liquid capital base. It did this in the most cynical of fashion. Despite rampant unemployment, collapsing pension schemes, and massively increasing levels of poverty, the EU swiftly, cynically and quite brutally, effectively moved swiftly to rob the resources of the existing social budgets and to transfer those finances towards bolstering and shoring up the crumbing edifices of monopoly capital. And not satisfied merely with doing that, it also enacted a raft of new, fundamentally regressive treaties and regulations designed specifically to further limit any attempts at socially progressive initiatives on the part of any individual state member that would even dare to attempt it. This is particularly manifest in the way in which the Fiscal Compact Treaty of 2012 between the Euro-member states, that compelled its member states to adapt so-called fiscal stringency measure, would be subject not to the will either of Parliament or Council, but the opinion and rulings of the Commission and where the only oversight would be provided by the European Court. In essence, it represented the formal elevation of neo-liberal economic orthodoxy to the status of a constitutional imperative and rendered any future attempts at progressive, re-distributive use of resources to a status of illegality.
So, let’s not harbour any doubts as to the true nature of the EU. It is the agent of monopoly capital in the new age. And a major part of our task, indeed the task of all true revolutionary socialists, is to continuously challenge and expose all of the false and hypocritical claims to the contrary.
NEED FOR AN NEW, RADICAL ALTERNATIVE DISCOURSE
To reiterate and extend on what I said in my opening remarks Comrades, an integral and central part of what we are as a Revolutionary Party is, in essence, being a constant part of the working people’s daily struggles with modern capitalism. We must continuously strive to be the Vanguard of all Irish workers. And to be that means, just as the Bolsheviks were some 100 years ago, also being part of the workers’ existing organisations, organising them where none yet exist, and always, always being integral to their struggles, their trials, their campaigns. It means in essence providing real and meaningful leadership to workers in that struggle. And to do that not just where workers are truly conscious of their relationship, the exploitative relationship they daily endure and have inflicted upon them under capitalism. But it is essential too, to be involved in those many situations where there are many workers who have not yet reached consciousness of the exploitative nature of that relationship and where, especially in the current era, decreasing numbers of workers are actually or formally dis-organised within their numerous places of work.
So, then, our task includes not simply to lead those who are already conscious of their exploitation, but also to reach out to and engage with all of those that have yet to reach consciousness of the specific nature of that exploitation; who have yet to grasp that such exploitation can never end as long as capitalism and its lieutenants remain in control of the system of production and exchange, and continue to monopolise and direct the equally vital systems of knowledge and information.
FREEDOM AND THE NEW PUBLIC DISCOURSE
Part of the task that we, then, must set for ourselves also means that we must of necessity be involved in the construction of an ever deeper and critical discourse about the nature of the society that we live in. One that presents and promotes a sustained, systematic critique that not only challenges and confronts the current ideological hegemony of capitalism but which also formulates and articulates a radical, alternative and revolutionary vision for the future. And in doing so we must constantly and continually seek out and engage with ever new allies in discharging that task.
This is especially crucial since for some considerable time, now, especially following on from and indeed in response to the collapse of the USSR back in 1989, apologists for unfettered, free-market economics have relentlessly sought to tie their new-found economic dominance into an ideological dominance for neo-liberalism over all other forms of public discourse. They have, with considerable success, sought to frame it fully within the meanings and sentiments of so-called ‘free-market’ capitalism. In this sense their successful capturing of the very word freedom, one that historically and culturally has had such a firm and unmistakeable radical resonance with all sorts of positive and valuable psychological feelings and emotions, has now led to it having been emptied of such meanings, and essentially re-invented and inserted back into the common vocabulary as that which now represents something radically and perversely different, something coarse and debased. Made into a word that is now is used as an integral part, a central symbol of capitalism’s ever corrupting moral discourse.
This attempt at framing of all public discourse in the language of the private market place is of course no casual or accidental thing. Rather, it represents in the current age a continuance of the longstanding and relentless drive by modern monopoly capitalism to ruthlessly crush all ideas and aspirations towards a set of moral or political imperatives that is seen as contrary to or hostile to its world view and interests.
We know that such an alternative is actually available. Indeed we constantly seek to offer such an alternative. But that which we offer is an alternative that not only is frequently and deliberately misrepresented and distorted, but even, in those rare occasions when it does appear it is frequently restricted to a minimum by the various news media, and rarely if at all given any prominence. It represents, therefore, an alternative which still struggles to be heard or seen, especially by those at whom it is targeted and who need to hear it! This, then, is at least part of the less than subtle way in which our arguments, our policies and our critiques of contemporary capitalism are frequently both silenced and censured.
In order to combat that we must then find new and imaginative ways to overcome these deliberate attempts at silencing both our dissenting views and our radical alternatives to the existing orthodoxy of capitalism; ways and means of challenging its dominance of the modern media of communications. It means that to do that effectively also requires the utilising for our benefit all possible and available forms of the modern means of communications in order to gain traction with both new people and new groups of workers. It means engaging in forums that bring our message to the widest possible audience; to increase our ability to speak to those whom we must organise; to increase and extend our attempts to offer leadership and direction. It means expanding our horizons in ways that enable us to become instantly recognisable as THE Revolutionary Party; the one that truly understand what is going on, the Party that stands at the epicentre of a revolutionary, radical alternative discourse. The Party that demonstrates convincingly that it does has its finger on the pulse of what modern Irish workers are thinking, feeling, seeking and demanding. Doing that will bring us further along the road to being the Party then that is even more strongly in a position to confidently offer such leadership and to be the true Vanguard of Irish workers more than ever before in our history.
And what this means for us going forward, Comrades, is that we must also regain control of that word Freedom; to re-possess and re-shape it once again into the radical idea with revolutionary undertones that it represented all of those many decades ago; Freedom from poverty; from unemployment and exploitation. Freedom for all women to have full control of their bodies, their fertility; a Freedom from fear, from prejudice and from all forms of sexual harassment. Freedom from the socially destructive vices and vicissitudes of capitalisms’ falsely named free markets. These are part of the true Freedoms that can only ever be fully realised when capitalism itself has been completely and utterly overthrown, removed as the final remaining obstacle to the true freedom we all seek.