Political Policing

Political Policing

©    Joseph Paul McCarroll  L.L.B.    2001,2002, 2003,2019,2020,2021,2022,2023,2024




Third Edition


WHO ARE THE ‘PLAYERS’?

“Recruit those to whom life has been unkind”, (General Sudoplatov quoted in The KGB by Brian Barron).

                                                           

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

One of the most insidious and subtle activities of the police and military in a revolutionary crisis is to arrange “street scenes” with the socialists.  Since the late 1930’s, the old communists have protested at these “street scenes with fascists”.  The aim is to deceive, confuse and neutralise the socialist workers.  This “targeting” of “key players” is accompanied by sleep deprivation inside and outside jail and physical attacks on socialists in and beyond the work place.  The socialist revolution is, by and large, not the product of the isolated socialist cells or of leading individuals – it is more often the outcome of a crisis in the accumulation of capital which can only be understood by linking the national economy to the world market.

On the streets, the militant labour activists of the eighties met the freaks of nature in such a brilliant array of extremes and opposites that they called it “Barnum and Baileys” after the famous American circus troupe.  In the thirties, violent fascist things were sent by the political police and military to confront the nationalist socialist party.

In the nineties the leaders of the socialist workers met the same caricatures of comrades, republican heroes, British soldiers, sporting celebrities, former republican prisoners and activists in such circumstances as to imply a “resonance” for themselves.  Sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, sometimes heavier, sometimes thinner – the authorities drew on their wide pick of personnel and associates to create these captivating impressions, reminders of the past and portents of the future.

To achieve a result and the proper impression, revolutionaries were isolated beforehand and afterwards subjected to violent assault by the Dublin gougers (the cutthroats).  Sleep deprivation can only be practised under these conditions with the assistance of the bribed gutter proletarians and thieves.  Everywhere in the South, the neighbourhood watch mobilised the eager householders to slam shut their doors as the ‘target’ approached.

The art of targeting developed in Germany after socialism was put on a scientific basis using old police tricks learned from the anti-Semites who hated the Jews with a vengeance. The soundalikes, lookalikes etc. are identified by the military intelligence and political police from their files and intelligence gathering.  They call this, in total, “all kinds of sensory information”.  The term “Erkenntnisse” (things that put one in mind of something else) sums up these phenomena perfectly. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation exploited the decline of the Northern physical force party in 1984 to employ more subtle yet brutal methods of drug disorientation.  Fortnight magazine recorded their assistance to the northern police.  This magazine omitted to describe the use of lysurgic acid (LSD) as a matter of routine to incapacitate the Northern revolutionaries as the movement went political.  The U.S. authorities have been publicly shown to have experimented with LSD on prisoners and soldiers in the 1950’s.  The United States government agencies are the main exponents of psychological operations (psyops) and have gathered in the accumulated experience of many countries.  The F.B.I. hounds musicians, actors, playwrights, producers and political activists of every conceivable hue when it judges them to be communists.  The English military authorities ‘target’ those whom they believe are “a threat to the security of the state”, a geometrically expanding multitude.

While the American songwriters may plead “stay away from my window, leave at your own chosen pace . . . “ the friends of the socialist movement warn “Keep your head down!“ And “The rush-ons are coming! The rush-ons are coming!”.  On the street during the months of targeting, one is privy to “overheard conversations” and estimates of the numerical strength of the socialists.  Likewise in shared accommodation De te fabula narratur, Marx said of such allegorical tales.

One thing is certain: these riffraff are not productive workers, they exist at the expense of society.  Throwing shapes will not avail them when the cell door finally closes behind them.

“UNAUTHORISED PUBLISHERS” – A PROBLEM FOR SOCIALISTS

“He fell victim to a shot, His agency was soon forgot”

Ever since the retreat of socialism in the 1930’s, revolutionary socialists have been at the receiving end of the attentions of the police and military intelligence – informer rabble who attempt to combat the influence and spread of socialist organisation.

From the Smith Act trials in the 1920’s and 1950’s to the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of communists in Indonesia in 1965 an unrelenting campaign of vilification, harassment and intimidation has been presented by the imperialist powers under United States and British leadership.  In quieter times and in backwaters such as Ireland, subtle yet brutal methods have been put in place by the state.  The agency of repression is carried out by the unproductive classes; - house breakers, thieves, billyboy cut throats, pimps, former male prostitutes, former policemen, vagrants, registered “aliens”, ambitious psychiatric nurses, bankrupts, promoters, Catholic school managers, millionaire state narcotics dispensers, dealers in proscribed drugs on the street, waifs, newsagents, the cast off mistresses of the aristocracy, penniless daughters of the landlords and unemployed ‘actors’ and ‘actresses’.  These parasites are organised by the police to give the ‘news’ to the socialists.

In their “Spiel”, movements of waves, colours, lights and sensations give way to violent attacks when their “moral pressure” to isolate and “neutralise” socialists no longer avails. 

As the number of the Party faithful has steadily waned and the forces of manufacture and industry grown, so has the quantity and quality of these “players”.  When answered by the people with bricks, petrol, bombs and bullets the riff-raff have shrunk away and the uniformed (and armed) police have stepped into their station.  When the pressure of the mob proved too much for the police, the soldiery has been sent in by the politicians in aid to the civil power.

Socialists endeavour not to respond to provocation but, truth be told, the dispersal of the rabble has dissuaded their police masters from running any police “play” in the North for more than three decades.  The drone of army helicopters, the hum of taxi engines and the blight of constant police surveillance has taken the place of what revolutionaries loosely call “informers”.  In the south, the old methods are still practised against those who have traditionally instilled opposition to the state and private property. 

Of late, international socialists have been hauled before the courts as the mask of mutual agency has slipped off in the south.  The frontmen for the police must be exposed.  

In 1986, this author maintained a meticulous record of daily and weekly expenditure in a notebook, which he left at his London lodgings.  He never published this notebook – it was for personal calculations only.  The British authorities had, however, taken an interest in matters.  In late 1986, the Catholic chaplaincy  in Camden Town – known as the Irish Hostel – published their estimated of weekly expenses of living in London.  These living expenses amounted to £96 per week.  This was the exact amount calculated by the author in his notebook.

A strange coincidence, perhaps?

“ECONOMIC DAMAGE”

It is a well-known truth that the police regard a socialist movement as a collection of individual law-breakers.  They never see a revolutionary situation developing and see the revolutionary socialist party as an aggregate of ‘malcontents’ and terrorists.  They often send into the socialist movement the cast off mistresses of the old rulers of society to wear out the ‘key’ organisers with their constant carping and attention seeking.  When a revolutionary movement is getting too big to handle they also endeavour to cause it “economic damage” i.e. force it in to bankruptcy.  Their taste for tittle-tattle, gossip and bankruptcy proceedings display no scientific appraisal of the socialists as products of objective (economic) and subjective (political) conditions. 

Experienced revolutionaries must therefore verify the claims of spouters by investigation.

In terms of finance - and these are sometimes quite important – the party has to avoid running up liabilities.  This is the task of the party as a whole and, in particular, of the servants of the party who mann telephones and offices – the party officials (or secretariat).  Test, then verify.

“INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS”

Speaking on RTE Radio One’s series on globalisation on 11 November 2001, the head of the World Trade Organisation, Sutherland, claimed that the production of cheap generic anti-Aids drugs was “extremely dangerous” for the profits of the billionaire drugs monopolies.  Generic drugs are those medicines, which are produced in dependent countries to the same chemical formula of the drugs giants without a payment for the use of the formula to the patent holders.  The World Trade Organisation organises the world market for the capitalists and its warnings are to be taken seriously – as threats.  China recently joined the WTO to boost its exports of commodities (or use-values, to use the correct term).

The recognition of “intellectual property rights” is being forced onto the dependent and lesser economic nations by the United States, Japan and Western European powers through the W.T.O.  The term “intellectual property rights” has sinister connotations for socialists.

In the 1980’s and early 1990’s, the audio-recording of copyright music performances was used as a pretext to launch the filthy, greasy, drug-crazed criminals, smackheads and heroin-dealers against republican socialists and revolutionary socialists and communists in Dublin.  Violent attacks and sensory deprivation, including sleep deprivation were carried out under the auspices of the Musical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) which is a front for international intelligence agencies such as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.  The pretext for the attacks of cut throats and criminal scum was the innocent recording of charity concerts. 

Socialists must therefore be warned – firstly, no recording of copyright auditory material which bears the stamp of the MCPS. Secondary, no purchase of material, which bears this impress and thirdly, a boycott of all music and video shops which sell material bearing the MCPS impress!

The price of production of a compact disc is about twenty-five pence. When one considers that the compact disc of a popular artist is between £12 and £16, where does the rest of the money go to?

                                                “DER SPIEL”

Aberglauben und Pest, Volle Strassen, Leere Strassen, Ruhe

und Larm, Larm und Streit, Staub und Schrott, Hunger und Not, Not und Armut, Armut und Elend

The military “targeting” of revolutionaries (or occult intelligence, as Marx put it) has been a feature of state repression since the emergence of socialism in the nineteenth century.  Where police terrorism, arrests, imprisonment and fear of assassination or fatal “accidents” fail to deter, the Army steps in with more subtle, yet more brutal methods (Massnahmen, as German military intelligence calls them). 

The role of a military intelligence officer is to gather all types of sensory information about revolutionaries.  This means visual appearances, mannerisms, features, manner of speech, verbal cognates and so on.  Then the search begins for lookalikes, soundalikes etc. from the ranks of the soldiers, their families, and those compromised by the police, criminals and the lumpen proletariat.

After a process of selection and acquisition of clothing such as is worn by the revolutionaries (and cars of the same marque and colour where the “target” is mobile), the ‘racing’ of soldiers and police through the streets when their ‘target’ appears in the morning can begin.  Speed-up (or “The rush-ons are coming!” as Irish military intelligence calls it) is followed by frosty responses from barmen, shop assistants and public officials.  Plays on words i.e. semiotics, semantics or semiology is practised by these reprobates and numerology is used to make an impression on the visual faculties.

When the rebel keeps his head down he is met by dog dirt and obstructions on the pavements near his home. 

This too, may not have a sufficient deterrent effect on the police “target”.  Then, constant auditory disturbances during the night are deployed.  Steel lampposts are tapped with a small, metal-working hammer in the immediate vicinity and taxi-drivers are enlisted to run their engines underneath the target’s flat or make a ‘drop’ during the early hours of sleep.  Where there are heavy steel doors on a shop or office in the vicinity these doors are noisily slammed shut at regular intervals with military precision (sleep deprivation). 

The offal of society are enlisted by the Army for the purpose of these “plays” of waves of sensations, lights, colours and movements.  To punish the more resilient revolutionaries when months of “targeting” have not had the desired effect, Irish lazzaroni are paid with alcohol to attack them with cut-throat razors or to throw rocks through their windows.  In the end, after the police are called, the culprit is arraigned and cautioned since the military and political police are oath bound (under the Official Secrets Acts) not to disclose their activities to their colleagues. Juridical cannon-fodder complement the activities of the police.

What is to be done?

Firstly, avoid unnatural sensory information by “keeping the head down”.  Secondly, change the radio stations one listens to, the pubs and shops one frequents, buy a different daily newspaper, turn off the television for the duration of the ‘targeting’, count your money at the local shop so as not to provide the pennies given to waifs to cause annoyance and keep in credit with the banks.  Thirdly, listen to your friends and socialise positively.  Remember that those who fights alone, falls alone.  Do not take doctors, social workers or nurses into your confidence – they are servants of the state, no different from policemen or spies and not servants of the public.

When military aid to the civil power (ACP in the UK and Free State military parlance) fails, nocturnal auditory disturbances, Trommein in der Nacht, (Brecht) give way to armed convoys and patrols. 

In revolutionary Russia, an economic strike led to an armed uprising.  Then workers and the police and military contended for power.  Revolution and civil war bring Der Spiel, Massnahmen  (‘active measures’) and Erkenntnisse (resonant sensations) to an end – the weapon of criticism gives way to the criticism of weapons.

POLITICAL REPRESENTATION

The radical lower middle class has always chased after political representation, constitutional reform, cheap government and low taxes in the North and South and, indeed, throughout the civilised countries since the battle of this class against the concentration of industry and money capital on the one hand and the revolutionary workers on the other hand which heralded its extinction as a class and impending absorption into the working class.

In the South, the Live Register of the Unemployed on 4 October 2002 enumerated the number of the destitute poor at 162,900.  In late 1996 this figure had stood at 300,000.  The Southern politicians cheerfully ignore this figure and claim jokingly that the true figure for those actively seeking work is less than 60,000 on the basis of the Household Survey, the statistical fig-leaf for the presence of the industrial reserve army.  There are almost 1,700,000 in the workforce.  Therefore unemployment is 10%. 

In Germany, the statisticians put the number of unemployed at over 4,000,000 or 10% of the total workforce of 40 million.

This labour pool operates as an immense burden on society yet it is essential for capital that such a dead-weight be maintained so as to drive down the wages of those in employment. 

The destitute poor are increasingly in the South denied medical care.

Marx characterised the demands of these beaten down mendicants in his articles for the Rheinische Zeitung between 1842 and 1843.  The cause of his remarks was the publication of an article in an Augsburg newspaper, which called for the convocation of the Estates Committees. (Students of French absolutism and the revolution, which swept it aside, will know that the Three Estates were advisory committees which represented the aristocracy, clergy and middle classes).

With regard to Ireland in 2003, Marx’s remarks on this proposal ring as true as if they were written yesterday.

Marx remarks, “to be represented is in general something to be suffered, only the material, spiritless, dependent, insecure need representation. . .  Representation should not be conceived of as the representation of some stuff that is not the people itself, but only as its self-representation ..  as the self-conscious vitality of the strongest force.  . . . it is only in their resurrection in the state in their political rebirth, that natural powers are capable of having a political voice”.

Marx remarks earlier in the passage that if the “political self reliance of particular interests” were a necessity, it would only be a symptom of a disease.  There are two principal points of views which are synthesised in the quotation above.  Taken separately, these are, firstly, that “the particular interests overstrain themselves, become alienated from the political spirit of the state and wish to limit the state” and, secondly, that “the state concentrates itself in the government alone, and grants the limited spirit of the people as a recompense simply a sphere to ventilate its particular interests”.  (Karl Marx, Selected Writing, Oxford University Press, 2^nd ed., 2000).

The state as a product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms is also exhaustively dealt with by Lenin in the concrete expositions of Marx and Engels’ writings in The State and Revolution of 1917.  How fresh and vital is the “old-fashioned” Karl Marx.  

The German opportunists of the twentieth century led by Kautsky, Scheidemann, Noske and Co.  could barter their principles to support German militarism but could not bring themselves to approve of the dictatorship of the proletariat and hostage-taking (after the Prussian practice) i.e. terrorism, by the Bolsheviks. 

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 swept aside the sham parliament of the opportunists who wanted to continue with an unwinnable war against the Central Powers and gave “All power to the Soviets!”.  The middle class were disenfranchised and put under strict supervision and control.  In 1936 the Generalissimo, Stalin, restored universal suffrage in his new constitution. 

Pure democracy or universal suffrage is not how and never has been, with the exception of the Paris Commune, a political demand of the socialist movement but the overthrow of middle class democracy, the abolition of all classes and private property has, since 1848, been the revolutionary political demand.  Democracy can only be the democracy of that class which holds social and economic power.  Socialism means the replacement of the democracy of a handful of exploiters and tycoons with the democracy of the many, the productive classes i.e. nine-tenths of the population.

“THE DEVIL IS GOOD TO HIS OWN . . . “

On 4^th October 2002, workers demonstrated for better redundancy payments. Six to seven thousand members of SIPTU and the craft unions assembled at Smithfield, Dublin.  Thousands more demonstrated in the Midlands.

Statutory redundancy payments are calculated at half of a week’s pay per year of service in the South and from ½ week to 1 ½ week’s pay per year of service for Northern workers.  (The payments for Northern workers vary in accordance with the age of those paid off).   The media – apart from the socialist press- ignored the protests.

In the case of Irish Glass Bottle workers, the employers, Ardagh, offered £42,500 to each redundant worker after a sit-in and demonstrations.  This offer was rejected.  The Ardagh Group owns five or six glass factories in Europe and grew up as a protected industry in the thirties under Fianna Fail tariffs.  IGB had-as its name suggests – a monopoly on Irish glass production and recycling until four years ago.

Let us move on to the 200 and more redundancies at RTE in December 2002.  These cost the State Broadcaster over £100 million in redundancy pay-outs.  The minister with responsibility for RTE, Dermot Ahern, approved these payments of in excess of £500,000 for each employee made redundant and immediately increased the television license fee – a proportionate rather than a progressive tax which is levied on the unemployed workers with an income of  €118 per week at the same rate as the billionaires – by €43 from €107 to €150 per annum.

These Southern place-seekers and sinecure holders are drawn exclusively from the middle class.  They are believers in the lying propaganda which they disseminate and blacklist socialists and their activities today just as they blacklisted republicans in the seventies, eighties and early nineties.

A productive worker is worth less than a tenth of a capitalist functionary when it comes to a redundancy payment.

Strange and monstrous.

GRINS, GRIMACES AND MENACES

The call-up of British troops and their Irish auxiliaries has taken the ‘players’ in the street scenes with the socialists to faraway ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­climes for Britain’s 89^th  (?) imperialist adventure since the First Imperialist World War.

On the streets, this class of wasters with time on their hands frown, smirk, grimace and attempt to menace the socialists. When these ‘plays’ no longer availed the Irish military, they organised gangs in Dublin and Cork in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  These reprobates went by the name of Catholic Action and the Army Comrades Association. (For a time, they drew the most degraded and oppressed elements of the poor into their circles).  They attacked and savagely beat Palmer and burned Connolly House.  The Irish Catholic led the chorus of disapproval of ‘a Communist’s wedding to a Catholic girl’.

Events have moved on. Socialists must expose agent provocateurs to the workers just as we would ‘out’ lower middle class elements in the socialist party.

On the street ‘overheard’ remarks – street commentaries - are directed at the revolutionaries to project an image of an all-knowing state apparatus.  These ‘captivating impressions’ are false sensations.  The state is neither all-knowing, quick-off-the-backfoot nor indestructible.  It is “ a parasitic excrescence” (Marx, The Civil War in France).  Socialists have no intention of accommodating themselves to the state or the police.  The state can not be laid hands on as a ready-made instrument of the workers.  It must be smashed. The gods of monopoly capital and finance are destined to join them on the chain gang and in jail.

          OF MAGGOTS AND PARASITIC EXCERESENCES

The dark world of the military and police must be illuminated by those who seek a fundamental reconstruction of society.  One of the most common devices employed by those who have wormed their way into the circles of revolutionary politics is to play on personal friendships to ‘draw out’ the ‘key players’.  The more educated bourgeoisie read the nationalist histories of the nineteenth century about ‘race’ history (as well as vast array of detective novellas).

Charles Singer identifies the mystical belief in the worm, the number nine and the ‘elf shoot’ in the history of Anglo-Saxon folk medicine.

Agents provocateur have since the 1890’s been given to placing the eggs of tapeworms in the food and beverages of the socialists, having insinuated themselves into their confidence or gained access by the usual police methods to their apartments.  The practice of occult intelligence goes back to the enlistment of swaths of lumpen proletarians into the armies of Europe.  These reprobates are the mainstay of the reactionary party on the streets and in politics. 

There would be little harm caused if the doctors treated the revolutionaries as the Hippocratic Oath requires i.e. “Do No Harm”.  The doctors became state servants long ago.

We all must learn again that there is no such thing as ‘free’ medicine.  Unless one pays hard cash, one is given the status of a mendicant.  Doctors in the pay of the state are a section of the ruling class and will act as a class against the revolutionaries who come to them.

                                                                                               

PLAYLISTS AND PRODUCERS

It is a truism that a state will mobilise all its social base in a political and military crisis to neutralise the revolutionary movement whether it be democratic or socialist.  The permanent military and political crisis in the North offers ample proof of this phenomenon.  All civil servants must gain the approval of the police to the effect that they are not members of the revolutionary movements before they gain employment (‘vetting’).  The leading public figures in television broadcasting, radio communications and executives in the civil service must be positively approved by the police as ‘safe’ (‘positive vetting’).  Any taint of revolutionary or terrorist attitudes means instant disqualification.

In public and ‘private’ broadcasting the producers, newsreaders and presenters are positively vetted by the authorities.  All functionaries must perform ‘safely’ like well mannered poodles.

In the ‘targeting’ of socialists and democrats, radio and television play an important role in “getting at” the revolutionary and insurgent just as news editors ‘manage’ the latest sayings and doings of government ministers.  The targeting of individuals goes hand in hand with police surveillance and ‘active measures’.

A play-list of even the most innocent nature is chosen on the grounds that it will have a “resonance” for the police target.  Non-conformists are likewise forced to live a precarious and unsettled existence.  The heavy hand of police government pervades all areas of civil society in a political and military crisis and is often followed by usually successful attempts to injure the police target financially, socially etc.

The aim of the State is clear to the thousands of revolutionaries on the receiving end of things. 

To maintain our connections and keep our heads on we have to demonstrate to all and sundry that we are not isolated.

Unity is strength!

“TROMMELN IN DER NACHT”

The Free State and British police and army use sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation to ‘neutralise’ their ‘targets’.  These practices are long established and entirely unwritten.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the main training and organising centre of Irish (and world) reaction.  This ‘dead knowledge’ is supplemented by the recognised methods of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.  The South African regime’s Interior Minister once remarked that he would swap all his arsenal of repressive laws for the six counties’ Special Powers Act.  In the South, the word of a Chief Superintendent of police that a person is a member of a terrorist organisation is sufficient proof to secure a conviction on that count.

The favoured methods of the Southern police have been practised without the interruption of these acts of terror caused by the insurgency and revolutionary violence in the North.  As was documented in The Guinea Pigs, sleep deprivation is a standard method of weakening a prisoner’s resolve and extracting valuable information.  This practice was used against ten suspects in Girdwood Army Barracks in East Belfast in the very earliest years of the military crisis in the North when the State was put to the test.  Assassinations by the Special Branch and Military Intelligence directly and through “pseudo gangs” (Kitson) followed internment, curfews and State provocations; loyalist gutter proletarians proved to be willing helpers.

Outside the North, internal exile to the habitats of the gutter proletarians of Dublin is one of the most favoured tactics of Southern police and military functionaries who make repression a livelihood. In these dens, the couple of hundred army provocateurs in Dublin disturb the sleep of the police ‘target’.  This involves constant auditory disturbances.  These begin ten minutes after the ‘target’ retires for the night.  They follow a standard pattern and proceed with military timing.  Targeting lasts from three to six months. 

Doctors are the first to step forward with an explanation – these auditory disturbances are sensed by the ‘target’ alone and are a ‘symptom’ of mental illness.  ‘Schizophrenia’ or manic depression is ‘diagnosed’.  After all, the doctors, police and soldiers have the same paymaster – the State.  Police surveillance is replaced by coercive medicine.  The inmate of a sanatorium has no right to be brought before a court on a charge (nabeas corpus) or examine the ‘evidence’ against him.

Constant displacement by the police sergeant acting together with the landlord –rentier class (Vertriebung) is likewise practised in Dublin.  A call to a uniformed officer of the constabulary or a visit to a desk officer may result in the recovery of the ‘targets’ property. 

The main preparation for these “active measures” (Massnahmen) is the impoverishment of the rebel.  In the professions, universities and civil bureaucracy, the word goes out to potential employers (Berufsverbot).  A ban on salaried employment for the revolutionary operates in all the capitalist countries.  Only menial or manual employment for a definite period is permitted.  The ‘target’ is forced back on to his own reserves and his family.  Otherwise, he must take the road out of his native country as an asylum seeker.  

There is one defence! Show the attacker that you are not isolated.  In the 1870’s, the French military bureaucratic caste did the bidding of the landowners and capitalists by shooting down 30,000 Communards.  However, just a few years later the authorities admitted defeat in the struggle against the working class because they were organised in their trades unions. 

When the chill winds of state terror blow, a union represents the best (often only) defence.  Join today!

SOME COMMON ILLUSIONS ABOUT THE SPY SYSTEM

Three decades of insurgency have given rise to widespread illusions about the ‘omniscience’ of the police.  In fact, the police know little about the Socialist movement except where we tell them explicitly what is going on and, then, they have no interest in politics.  Police surveillance focuses on individual socialists, their movements and activities.  The police are unable to see beyond trivial concerns to the class system.  They imagine that there will always be a need for the police and army and never foresee their downfall from their position above society.  Their main activity is to project an image of omniscience – an all-knowing , ever vigilant armed body of men – to deter the revolutionary socialists and punish them individually when they act.

In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the police represent “the best” that the state can throw at the socialist and trade union movement in the service of private property.  The army is drawn from the riffraff or that strata which overlaps with the dangerous class.

At a practical level, the police attempt to spread misinformation e.g. the toleration and propaganda of “sexual freedom” and the “terrorist” nature of political activity and strikes.  The shopkeepers , tradesmen and big farmers provide the personnel of the police and shape its illusions.  Against wrong-headed fancies and attitudes, the socialist party educates the thinking worker to reflect soberly on his position in society and prepare him for action – not premature or terrorist outbursts but open and carefully prepared economic and political strikes.

For their part, the police and military endeavour to pre-empt the workers.  They stoke up unreal fears and a climate of fear through malicious insinuations and provocation.  In their service they draw in the ex-soldiers, literary boheme, thieves etc. and pay them from small change and benefits in kind e.g. cheap loan rescheduling, tax avoidance measures, ‘doing the double’, running a small business, advice on government deals and so on.  The criminal lawyers vainly try to classify the helpers of the ruling class as political agents of influence (who try to discredit the movement in the eyes of the working class), agents provocateurs, informers and casual informants.  Political ‘authority’ figures, managers, civil servants, foremen, chargehands, criminals, pederasts and layabouts are expected to play their part.

The first workers’ revolution in 1871 put on its banner “ morts aux voleurs” and shot the scum who were in the service of the state.  In 1921, the Russian revolution shot down thousands of counter-revolution armies and saboteurs and, in the end, triumphed against almost insuperable odds.  The Bolsheviks understood that a workers’ leader who enlists the gutter proletarians as support or guards betrays the movement.  In the Civil War, this rabble were dispersed with a ‘whiff of grapeshot’ and Soviet Power was consolidated.

In the North, we have long seen the more subtle yet brutal efforts of the police.  This is the reflection of Britain’s greater experience in organising show – trials and judicial executions of the republican democrats and the most courageous, ruthless and determined revolutionaries, the armed workers.  And yet, the English have still failed to strike a mortal blow at the democratic movement.  England batters on with a beaten docket in its hand.

Pernicious doctrinaires would have us believe that socialists have nothing in common with republicans.  Far from it, we must extract the best from those under the spell of those “captivating impressions” of the nineties and the decay of the movement of systematic extermination of the police with the open support and assistance of the Catholic masses – into “media spectaculars” which were no more that bargaining chips for Adams.

The socialist movement is an international movement against private property.  It holds no illusions about ‘ The Politics of Irish Freedom’ or ‘the national road to socialism’.  There are no appeals to ‘the British people’ or to “the Irish people” in our propaganda.  Sober reflection on the old revolutionary outbursts in Ireland and the international movement has removed the scales from our eyes.  Today, we see an anti-imperialist movement in the oppressor countries that is counted in the hundreds of thousands and the open defiance of the dependent, backward nations. 

The police do not know everything we say, every movement or everyone we talk to or greet.  Our movement is too numerous to count by tele-camera, our agents are not even known to us and we have no need to fear the police or the thieves.  Parting with illusions is a step out of the shadows and into the crowd of demonstrators. 

POLITICAL DISCRIMINATION IN THE UNIVERSITIES

As a part of its window-dressing for capital, the lower middle class introduced free, universal education to third level in Britian in 1948.  In 1964, the Stormont administration introduced grants for workers’ children at third level.  In the North, grants were capped in 1986.  Only the poorest students qualify for the full grant from the education and library boards.  In 1997, Blair introduced tuition fees for all students which are set at the level charged by the individual universities.  The Student Loans Corporation offers low interest loans to students for their subsistence expenses at university.  Recently Blair has been trying to sell this corporation to the banks but no bidders have come forward. 

Lenin emphasised the need to understand the students and intelligentsia in their background and conditions of life in his argument for exposures in What Is To Be Done? (1902).  The students had participated in every democratic movement in Russia since the 1870’s and had, on more than occasion, been drafted into the army as punishment.

Since the 1980’s, the student population of Queen’s University Belfast has doubled.  Clashes with armed police have become a feature of the Spring in Belfast’s university quarter.

In the 1980’s, the republican magazine, Iris, published a survey of the religion and national background of the professors of Queen’s.  Over ninety percent were English or Protestant.  In the Law Faculty, there was no employment for a single Irish Catholic of a staff of professors and tutors of fifty.  This practice was in keeping with the core philosophy of the University Commission of 1848 which ordained that Queen’s would be a Presbyterian University, Trinity College Dublin an Anglican University and the Irish Catholics would have University College Dublin.  In 1908, University College, Cork and University College, Galway were established as small Catholic universities.  In the 1980’s, only the Department of Celtic Studies and the Chair of Scholastic Philosophy at Queen’s were held by Catholics.  The latter position was funded by the Catholic Diocese of Down and Connor.  In the 1980’s a majority of the students were Catholic.  Their strength was manifested in elections to the Students Union.  In 1980-1, the hatred of the Catholic students for the university authorities and British rule was manifested in well-attended meetings organised by the Student Campaign Against Repression and hundreds – strong marches against the brutalisation of Republican prisoners in the H Blocks.  Some of these students took up arms against the state and were jailed.  An academic – cum - politician was shot for his advocacy of the supergrass system.

Before this assassination, the Faculty of Law professors and tutors had proved their loyalty to the British authorities by baiting and casting out republican students.  Four students of the 1980 intake were not allowed to graduate before 1986 and 1987.  The course was of four years duration in those days. 

Twelve to fourteen hours of study per day earned the democratic students only third-rate degrees from the faculty of Law.  This measure crippled them in their search for employment and places as Bar students or in the Institute of Professional Legal Studies as trainee solicitors.  Third-rate degrees were thrown at students who intended to go overseas since the authorities were resolved that international mobility and languages ability would not allow the Northern Republicans to escape the ‘eternal damnation’ of police government.  There was to be no escape from the long reach of the political police in Europe’s last colony.

Dialectical reasoning in examinations i.e. the characterisation of legal points in their interconnection earned students a ‘failure’.

The Faculty of Law was dominated by the sons and daughters of the unionist nomewklatura.

The mechanics’ and workers’ siblings were sent limping back to the building sites from whence they had arrived.

Outside the universities, these graduates born of the lower orders faced the big guns of the police authorities as soon as they stepped out of the relative safety of the student milieu.  What little hope for a career their degrees had inspired was quickly blown away by the chill winds of police bans on anything other than casual, manual labour( Berufsverbot).  The Irish Republicans inspired such hatred and fear that Hurd and Thatcher drew the Western European countries into the web of international policing with the Trevi Pact.  The English determined that there should be no escape for those who inspired resistance.  There was no respite for the graduates deemed to be “a threat to the security of the state”.  They were met with traps (“accidents”) on the building sites of London, psychological warfare and constant surveillance wherever they went.  Finally, they were given directions to Dublin from whence thirty thousand of the sixty thousand young people coming  onto the labour market every year were emigrating to escape unemployment.  There they remained before the political ‘thaw’ initiated by the Hume-Adams dialogue.

The experiences of students’ lives were a preparation for the ‘real’ world of capitalist social relations.  (It is also the task of the police to vet and, if necessary, ‘weed out’ the academics).  On occasion, they will even ‘set up’ students for assassination by the Protestant lumpen proletariat.  Drawing in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation for the deployment of ‘active measures’ against armed students began in late 1984 when the police were the targets for a campaign of extermination which reached its high point in the attack on Newry RUC Station in February 1985.

Today the steadfast belief in the use of force has been replaced by the demoralisation of the republican militants and by replica firearms rather than automatic rifles.  The international movement has, on the other hand, taken off from the ground like an aerodynamically perfectly-designed rocket.  It is proceeding steadily and irreversibly onward and upward and it is in this movement that the hopes and dreams of national liberation and socialist revolution for Irish students and workers alike are carried.  No number of ‘agents of influence’ in the intelligentsia and in the universities or acid-eating FBI agents can halt the relentless progress of the anti-capitalist, democratic movement.  The secret diplomacy of England and the United States will avail their rulers naught when they fall within the sights of the armed workers.

EUROS PLEASE!

It is not inconceivable that the economy of the twenty six counties will produce more commodities than England.  The economy of England is Kaputt, ausgelastet, fertig.

In Ireland’s interests is it wise to accept in payment for the products of Irish industry and agriculture and for essential services, such as electricity maintenance?

On 28 August 2003, the electricity network of London and southern England collapsed as the network of North-East America collapsed two weeks beforehand.  Millions of English homes and fifty million American homes were left without a light because of the capitalisation of a vital modern industry.  In November 2002, the European Social Forum discussed ‘privatisation’ of public utilities.  Ten to twelve thousand delegates attended the two meetings.  Blair, Bush and Sutherland paid no attention.  The electricity networks collapsed because of inadequate maintenance.  The loan sharks and banks do not pay for maintenance, they hate organised labour.  The German network has not collapsed.  The French network has not collapsed.  Maintenance is paid for and the banks get nothing.

The Yorkshire water network was privatised and consequently the functionaries became private operators.  Within a few years maintenance ceased and one half of the water leaked out.  In a wet year, water supplies almost ceased.  Shareholders in France were happy, the managers got huge payouts and Ofwaat functionaries made money from monitoring but there was a danger of drought.

Volkswagen manufactures 2,000,000 cars, Opel/General Motors about a million and brands some of them Vauxhall Motors and Ford Europe manufactures about a million in total – about 4 million, all German.  Britain manufactures a few thousand Rolls Royce Cars, Jaguar a few thousand luxury cars and Rover less than two hundred thousand.  Yet Britain punches above its weight and claims to produce goods and services at three quarters of the German level.

Really/ Britain is punching well above its weight.  In all departments, it is a consumer nation ruined by high interest rates aimed at poorer countries desperate to buy drugs and food traded through Britain.  In the world division of labour, only weapons of war are coming from Britain to smash the legs of five and six –year-old Iraqi children.

Britain’s pieces of paper are worthless.  Its air force terrorises the poor of the world.  Its currency has no value in real terms.  Sterling, no thanks.  Goods must be paid for with hard currency, dollars or euros.  Iran and the oil-producing countries decided to go on the euro months ago.  Iran led the way.  It is threatened with invasion by the U.S.  Not only valueless sterling but valuable dollars are threatened with illiquidity.

Its time to get real.  Sterling, no thanks.  Dollars, suspect.  Euros please!

BIBLIOGRAGHY

Marx and Engels Selected Works in three volumes, Moscow, London 1968-72 Marx and Engels Collected Works 1968, New York, London and Moscow

The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C Tucker, Norton, New York and London, 1973.

Marx Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1982.

Karl Marx, Captial, Volumes 1-3, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1983–1986

August Bebel, Society of the Future, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976

August Bebel, Aus Meinem Leben, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1964

Lenin, Selected Works (in one volume), Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977

Lenin, Selected Works (in three volumes) Progrees Publishers, Moscow, 1977

Lenin, Collected Works (44 volumes) 5^th edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1958-1972.

The Lenin Anthology, edited by Robert C. Tucker, Norton, New York and London 1975.

COMMENTARIES

The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx by Alex Callinicos, Bookmarks, London, 1995.

Leninism and Western Socialism by Roy Medvedev, Verso, London

Let History Judge by Roy Medvedev, Macmillan, London 1972.