How we intervene in bourgeois elections
A study guide
Workers Party platform
1. Opposition to all New Zealand and Western imperialist intervention in the Third World and all Western imperialist alliances.
2. Secure jobs for all with a living wage and a shorter working week.
3. For the unrestricted right of workers to organise and take industrial action and no limits on workers’ freedom of speech and activity.
4. For working class unity and solidarity – equality for women, Maori and other ethnic minorities and people of all sexual orientations and identities; open borders and full rights for migrant workers.
5. For a working people’s republic
I have become more and more convinced – and the thing now is to drum this conviction into the English working class – that they will never be able to do anything decisive here in England before they separate their attitude towards Ireland quite definitely from that of the ruling classes, and not only make common cause with the Irish, but even take the initiative in dissolving the Union established in 1801, and substituting a free federal relationship for it. And this must be done not out of sympathy for Ireland, but as a demand based on the interests of the English proletariat. If not, the English people will remain bound to the leading-strings of the ruling classes, because they will be forced to make a common front with them against Ireland.
- Marx to Kugelmann, November 29, 1869
The way I shall express the matter next Tuesday is: that, quite apart from all ‘international’ and ‘humane’ phrases about Justice for Ireland – which are taken for granted on the International Council – it is in the direct and absolute interests of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland. I am fully convinced of this, for reasons that, in part, I cannot tell the English workers themselves. For a long time I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. I always took this viewpoint in the New-York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.
- Marx to Engels, December 10, 1869
Over 130 years ago, Marx (and Engels) made the point that the key to the British revolution was the national-revolutionary struggle in Ireland. Central to this was their idea that as long as British workers went along with their own ruling class’s policy of oppressing Ireland British workers would never reach revolutionary consciousness and never seriously threaten the dominance of the British ruling class in Britain itself no matter how splendidly organised they were in trade unions or how militant they were in demanding wage rises.
The centrality of political questions to the class struggle should be well-established by now, but it is often not well-understood on the far left. Or, where lip-service is paid to it, little is done in practice and/or the political issues which are chosen are weak in class content and don’t raise fundamental questions about the system or really open up opportunities for such questions to be raised.
