Amid all the words written and spoken about the riots that followed the attack on the children at Gaelscoil Choláiste Mhuire last week, there were few people even slightly inclined to seek to look at things from the perspective of those involved in the violence, least of all to attempt to place their actions within an ideological construct.
One of those who did was Senator Lynn Ruane during her statement in the Seanad on the events that were discussed and roundly condemned on Wednesday evening.
She decried the attempt to “other” the “marginalised” who had been involved, and even moved an amendment which condemned the “classist” nature of the reaction to “last week’s events”, which was seconded by Senator Eileen Flynn and accepted without a vote.
Presumably, Senators did not wish to alienate their vast constituency of the marginalized who might one day come seeking Italian accessories at the Frascati Centre.
Ruane’s thesis appeared to be that the perpetrators were “just as screwed over by the system and more powerless.”
She did not name who they were more powerless than but that it would be much more preferable if they had directed their frustrations at “capitalistic violence.” That might be achieved, perhaps, if there was “cohesion between the two struggles,” by which I infer she means the momentous struggles against racism and classism.
The whole thing is a rehash of the tired old second hand Marxism as kept current by some of those she quotes like Angela Davis, who was besotted by the jail psychopath George Jackson and who favours the abolition of prisons. Ruane also quoted from New York prison abolitionist Danielle Sered and asked “When has prison ever solved violence?”
It is not meant to “solve violence,” it is meant to punish people who commit violence and, in some cases, to stop them committing more violence. Do Ruane and others who are inclined to prison abolition believe that Josef Puska ought to be wandering the streets between “restorative justice” workshops? Do liberals think many black people living in south Chicago, apart from those who prey on their own community, support not sending those responsible for an epidemic of gang violence to jail?
Marx incidentally – although perhaps Senator Ruane has not read this part of his Collected Works which no doubt forms much of her reading matter – despised what he described as the “lumpen proletariat,” and among whom he numbered the criminal and anti-social elements who preyed upon actual working people.
Engels in his preface to the Peasant War in Germany described them as “the scum of the decaying elements of all classes”and noted that one of the first actions of the Parisian proletariat during their regular uprisings was to dispense justice to the scum under the slogan Mort aux Voleurs! – Death to the Thieves. Pre-woke Shinners will get that one…
All of that adoration of the marginalised anti-social dregs comes from Marcuse’s disappointment with the “straight white working class” via the American bourgeois university left. The latter exerted a not inconsiderable influence within the Irish left not only in the NGOs, but far more directly through a former Minister not unknown to Senator Ruane.
In her speech, Ruane also namechecked Michel Foucault who acquired the reputation as a post Marxist critic of power relations and prober of the distinction between what Ruane distinguishes as “the criminals and the good boys.”
There is sufficient evidence from Foucault’s own personal life that would suggest that Guido Preparata was correct in believing that Foucault was more enthralled and even drawn to the degeneration and decay he described than he wished to bring about a world in which such things no longer existed.
I above all suspect that the reluctance on the part of some on the far left to join in the “classist” condemnation is that, similar to Foucault’s celebration of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, is they really don’t have any objection to violence once it is their side doing the violence. Certainly, no one of the far left here was critical of the mayhem that was unleashed by the comrades in the United States in 2020.
Indeed protests that were organised in Blanchardstown following the death of a man who had attacked shop workers, and who was attempted to be turned into a similar icon to the one who was used to excuse the American outbreaks, led directly to violence here which was likewise generally not condemned.
So perhaps Ruane is being more consistent than People Before Profit in openly hoping that those who loot against “capitalistic violence” might join trainer-expropriating hands with their brothers and sisters battling against racist violence?
The only thing that the far left has ever achieved over its history has been violence on a monumental scale. A violence that was imitated by – and indeed between 1939 and 1941 imposed on Poland in collaboration with – the Nazis.
Every leftist revolution, without exception, has not only employed violence that has cost several hundred millions of lives. They have also ended in totalitarian states that institutionalised murder and torture and the mass incarceration that its current admirers affect to oppose.
It is rather sad that this tired, leftist nonsense is still being propagated today by persons whose only excuse is that they are possibly not fully au fait with either the ideology they espouse, nor with its consequences.