Today’s tale of political woe starts all the way back in 2017.
It was a different Ireland, then: The era before Covid 19, and even before the 2018 abortion referendum. The progressive left in Ireland were at the apex of their political ascendancy. It must have been a heady time to have been a young socialist activist, fighting the good fight against those trying to “drag Ireland backwards”.
On or about the 25th of September that year, two members of the Trinity College Dublin branch of People before Profit, Conor Reddy and Sean Egan, were either assigned a mission, or chose to take one on for themselves: The abortion referendum was still nine months away, and in anticipation of that vote a pro-life group had organised a talk in Dublin featuring a woman who had become pregnant after a brutal rape, but who had chosen to have the child anyway. Posters advertising the event had been erected in central Dublin, near the Trinity bailiwick of our two intrepid heroes.
That night, Mssrs Reddy and Egan did something about it: Venturing from the safety of their campus, the two pioneers ventured out on to the streets of Dublin armed, in their own words, with just “two comrades and one pair of scissors”. The operation was a complete success: 32 “vile anti-choice posters” were removed. Another blow struck for the revolution:
Of course, many things have changed since 2017, and we resume our story on Tuesday last, May 14th. Conor Reddy is all grown up now, and is a candidate for People before Profit proper, where he is contesting the local elections. But woe onto us all, for poor Conor finds himself the victim of assaults on democracy itself, perpetrated by – irony of ironies – “a tiny minority of bigots”:
Now some of you may see an inconsistency here: How can a fellow who proudly tore down political posters belonging to some other organisation suddenly object to persons unknown giving him a taste of his own medicine? On the face of it, that looks like hypocrisy, right?
The problem is that most people simply aren’t sophisticated enough to understand the Marxist theory under-girding the People before Profit project: For most Irish political parties – yes, even the ones you hate – preserving democracy is mostly an end in and of itself. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, whatever else one might say about them, have persistently respected the electorate’s various decisions to kick one of them out and insert the other. They, like most of our parties, are committed to preserving Ireland as a democratic society.
Once you reach the extremes of politics, however, this is no longer the case: For People before Profit, democracy is simply a means to an end. (This is, incidentally, also true of their less successful mirror image on the right, the National Party, whose deposed and re-imposed and politically mummified leader announced openly just last month that he “never wished to lead a Democratic, or dumbocratic, party”)
Anyway, back to PbP: The Party is committed to using democracy to gain power, but to fundamentally altering democracy once it gains power: Consider this from the PbB adjacent news site “rebel news” published last year:
The real fear for the ruling class is the kind of radical democracy being advocated for by People Before Profit: popular assemblies, workers’ democracy, and a serious people power movement that can win gains and protect itself from the resistance of the wealthy. Without this, we will be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Among the lessons are: If you want real change, do not go into government simply to manage the system. Build people power on the streets, build real rank and file workers’ power, and take the fight to the ruling class.
The question is not whether the state and the wealthy will simply roll over and let a radical Left Government dismantle an unequal system. History has provided plenty of evidence that they will not. But will the Left will be up for that kind of challenge?
That’s the PbB vision of democracy if the party ever gains power: For elections to be replaced by “popular assemblies” and “workers’ democracy”: In other words, little trade union soviets that make decisions on behalf of the party. This, coincidentally, is how single-party communism has worked (at least on paper) almost everywhere else it has ever been tried. “Dismantling the unequal system” necessarily means dismantling the conditions that brought about that unequal system, which means “re-ordering” democracy into a system that reliably produces proper socialist results.
People before Profit even has a rationale for this: It’s the only way, serious Marxist thinkers say, to avoid the people being led astray by the capitalists and their money. If people can vote in free and fair elections, they might not choose socialism. This proves that free and fair elections are the problem.
Now, People before Profit does not go around saying any of this openly, because, well, if the people knew everything about socialism there’s a risk the people might not choose socialism. But this is why the party has no particular difficulty with what the rest of us might call hypocrisy: The cause of People before Profit is not fairness, or justice, or an equal playing field: The cause is socialism, and whatever is in the interests of socialism is de facto justifiable.
This, I might mention, is also the theory behind the gulags.
Anyway, Reddy is indeed a loathsome little hypocrite, and we might laugh. But laughter alone is not sufficient: Understanding exactly why the far left behaves as it does, and understanding what exactly it is that the far left wants, is also necessary. Once you understand that, you can laugh freely at the sight of his little headless poster.