Comrades, Brothers and Sisters,
It is with great pleasure that I come here today to
speak on ‘The Legacy of George Brown’, because I
have fond memories of the events surrounding the
inaugural George Brown Memorial Lecture on June 27th
2008.
His legacy is by no means uncontested on either the
left or the right of the political spectrum, any more
than the climactic events in which he participated.
However one thing we can unequivocally state that has
enormous resonance here in Kilkenny and across this
island today, is that he was the son of emigrants,
forced to leave their homeland because it was
governed by a social, economic and political elite for
whom ordinary working people served no purpose
except as objects from which to extract the last morsel
of energy as employees, and from whom to extract the
last penny as consumers in order to meet their basic
need for shelter, food, fuel and the other necessities of
life. The individuals and institutions that comprise
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today’s elite may have changed, but the fundamental
political and economic equation underlying the human
condition is stronger than ever.
It is clear from their family history that George Brown’s
parents had no wish to emigrate. His mother, Mary
Lackey, was the first to go, to find work in Manchester
and her boyfriend, Francis Brown, a blacksmith from
nearby Inistiogue, followed so that they could set up a
home together. This was something that was not
possible in their native Kilkenny. The fact that Mary
returned so that each of her first three children could
be born in her old family home at Ballyneale, is proof
of the bitter parting she must have experienced from
family and friends, as did millions of other young Irish
women and men who were forced to emigrate.
We are witnessing a return of compulsory mass
emigration today. I have no doubt that many of these
young, and not so young, people hope one day to
return for good, and sadly, like Francis Brown and
Mary Lacky, many may never be able to do so. There
is a well known tale of an exchange between veteran
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republican socialist Peadar O’Donnell and Eamon de
Valera, in which the latter, in response to O’Donnell’s
critique of Fianna Fail’s economic policy protested that
hundreds of thousands of people would have had to
emigrate if O’Donnell had been in power; to which
O’Donnell gave the crushing reply, ‘Yes, but they would
not have been the same people’.
One wonders what young George Brown’s life might
have been like if his family had been able to stay in
Ireland. He would have been a teenager during the
War of Independence and no doubt would have felt
compelled to play his part in the fight for freedom. A
keen sportsman, he is likely to have joined the GAA
and, if he is unlikely to have matched the
achievements of his cousin, Eddie Keher, he would
almost certainly have played for Tullagher.
It is almost equally certain that he would not have
joined Ireland’s small Communist Party, although he
would have gravitated to the left and might, quite
possibly have gone to Spain, as over 300 other
Irishmen, many of them IRA veterans did, to join the
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fight to save another Republic that represented the
democratically expressed will of its citizens.
George Brown was politicised instead through the
trade union movement in Britain, and particularly
through his involvement in the General Strike of 1926,
when he realised that the objectives of the labour
movement could only be achieved by a combination of
economic and political action. His outstanding ability
was clearly recognised by his comrades, and by the
time the Spanish Civil War broke out he was the
Communist Party District Organiser for the Manchester
area and had been elected to the Central Committee of
the Party. When the Spanish Civil War broke out he
turned his organising talents to mobilising support for
Spain, including the recruitment of International
Brigade volunteers.
As his old comrade and fellow Civil War veteran Jack
Jones recalled, it was not in George Brown’s nature to
send other men out to risk their lives in a cause he
believed in, without being willing to do so himself.
Even though he was about to be married and could
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look forward to a challenging and rewarding life at
home if he so chose, he went to Spain. Initially, his
organising talents were once more put to work behind
the lines, but he insisted on playing his full part on the
field of battle and died doing so, fighting at Brunete in
July 1937.
In many ways his choices were matters of chance.
What was not an accident was his total commitment to
the cause of labour and human progress. Just like
today, progressively minded people in the 1930s faced
difficult and complex choices. Often it could lead to
friends and comrades taking opposite sides. The
political crisis caused by competing imperialisms was
aggravated rather than resolved by the First World
War and its most significant single outcome, the
Russian Revolution, raised the stakes in the
international class struggle dramatically. Today that
revolution is widely regarded as an expensive political
cul-de-sac for the left, but at the time it appeared to
offer new hope to workers throughout the world.
Indeed, when the Bolsheviks seized power they did so
in the hope that, to use James Connolly’s famous
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phrase, they would - ‘set the torch of a European
conflagration that will not burn out until the last
throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture
will be shrivelled up on the funeral pyre of the
last war lord’. Their main concern was not world
domination, as their detractors claimed, but whether
they could hold out until the German revolution
liberated the rest of Europe.
Of course the German revolution did no such thing. It
saw the old regime of the Hohenzollerns replaced by
an increasingly unstable state where power was
contested between the left and the right and in which
the left suffered from the crippling disadvantage of
disunity between social democrats and communists.
What is important for us is not the historical minutiae
or who was most to blame for this state of affairs, but
to note the consequences of the division between
them. In a world where the old economic order had
collapsed and had fallen into chaos in the defeated
powers of central Europe, the rich and powerful in
those societies preferred to make a pact with the devil
than abide by the democratic process and face the
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prospect of losing much of their traditional power and
influence.
Most of the damage to the German economy had been
inflicted well before Hitler came to power, precipitated
ironically by the terms imposed by the victorious allies
at the end of World War I. Then, on October 29th
1929, came the Wall Street Crash, internationalising
the crisis of capitalism, fostering protectionism,
economic nationalism and creating a climate of fear
that broadened and deepened the appeal of the far
right. Hitler’s accession to power was the most
spectacular and important demonstration of the
consequences.
There are eerily familiar parallels with the events of
September 2008. Indeed the similarities are so
striking that the late J K Galbraith could use his history
of the Great Crash to predict the current crisis before
he died. The recent rise of far right parties in the
Czech and Slovak republics, in the Netherlands and
Belgium, along with the revival of Le Pen’s National
Front in France, is a reminder of the potency of
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primitive appeals to race fuelled by a false folk
memory and the perceived threats of the outside
world. It is also the driving force behind the Tea Party
movement in the United States of America which, like
all such movements, attempts to appropriate its
country’s proud and revolutionary past to promote a
deeply reactionary agenda.
In the 1930s, the right, having learnt its lesson well in
Germany, sought to repeat the exercise in Spain.
There was not even a masquerade of subverting
democracy by political means but a naked grab for
power by the military. In many ways Spain was
similar to Russia, an outlying underdeveloped
European economy, traditionally dominated by a
corrupt and incompetent ruling class that had
generated a small but vigorously militant and highly
politicised working class that also championed land
reform for the peasants.
The European left too had learnt a valuable, if
expensive, lesson about the importance of unity and
the need to identify and agree its priorities. People
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needed little persuasion in 1936 and 1937 that the
priority was the defeat of fascism. Bourgeois
democracy, for all its faults, was the essential precondition for building any civilised society that
cherished all of its children equally. It still is.
How George Brown would have responded to our
present challenges I do not know, but I do know that
he would certainly have recognised the threat posed by
an even more powerful and insidious global capitalism
that has now broken free of most of the traditional
restraints imposed by nation states, or even
federations of nation states. While its champions, and
those on the right generally, are quick to ridicule
socialist ideas and thinkers as ‘old fashioned’, they
have no hesitation in accepting blindly the precepts of
a book, The Wealth of Nations, which was published in
1776 - although in fairness to its author, Adam Smith,
he did produce a number of revised editions before his
death in 1790.
His fundamental concepts certainly show their age. His
guiding principle was that the ‘invisible hand’ of the
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market would lead humanity to prosperity and even
happiness, ‘by directing ... industry in such a
manner as its produce may be of the greatest
value’ to all. The agency for this was the market,
which ‘allows buyers and sellers to exchange ...
goods, services and information’. However, he
failed to calculate for the effects of the herd mentality
and he was writing far too early to understand the
phenomenon of boom and bust. …………… As anyone
who bought shares in the ill-fated Eircom privatisation
well remembers, in reality markets only benefit large
scale buyers and sellers with inside information.
Of course the term “capitalism” was not current in
Smith’s day. Instead he refers to ‘a system of perfect
liberty’ or ‘natural liberty’ to describe his economic
model. Such sentiments were laudable in an era when
individual liberties and many forms of economic
activity were hobbled by royal prerogatives and feudal
privilege. Today, in our much more complex society
they are anachronisms providing an ideological fig leaf
for the new economic world order which places all of
our futures in the hands of a small number of people at
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the top of global investment banks and hedge funds
and, ironically, sovereign wealth funds which, in many
instances, are controlled by the rulers of oil rich feudal
monarchies.
Adam Smith was writing at the dawn of the American
and French revolutions. ** It is no accident that it was
20 years ago, after the collapse of the Soviet Union
that the adherents of ‘the end of history’ gloatingly
celebrated the victory of capital over labour and
declared as an absolute truth that ‘socialism doesn’t
work’. The dictatorship of the market, so favoured by
the Chicago School, had displaced the dictatorship of
the proletariat. In the words of the great
environmentalist, George Monbiot, writing about the
consequences for the future of the planet - ‘the
socially destructive notions of a small group of
extremists have come to look like common
sense’.
These events have not led to the ‘system of perfect
liberty’ envisaged by Adam Smith but to a place where
the entire future of humanity turns on the frailties of a
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relatively small group of people who control the
investment strategies of near infinite amounts of
material and human capital on a scale that belittles the
wildest fantasies of any eighteenth century absolute
monarch. They are accountable to noone, they have
marginalised parliamentary democracy and rendered
democratically-elected government subject to their
whims, with enormous implications for all of humanity.
Anyone who doubts this has only to look at how
effectively one of the most politically and morally
bankrupt politicians in Europe, Silvio Berlusconi, has
managed to mould domestic public opinion so that he
is immune from censure.
Whatever about socialism not working, one thing is
absolutely clear, the current paradigm certainly doesn’t
work and its continuance threatens the very survival of
the human species and the very existence of the
planet. The threats we face are therefore even greater
than those faced by George Brown and his generation
and the tasks we face are at least as hard. And, like
his generation, we must rise to the challenge, both at
the national and the international level.
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George Brown was a working class leader of integrity,
vision and commitment. He dedicated the last few
months of his short life to fighting in defence of
democracy in Spain because he knew that basic human
rights are indivisible – that the consequences of defeat
in Madrid would be felt, sooner rather than later, by
workers in Manchester and here in Inistioge as well.
The decision by over 45,000 Volunteers to serve in the
International Brigades was one of the most striking
affirmations of the human spirit in the modern era,
where former opponents of the left sealed their
newfound unity in blood.
We live in a world where the communications
revolution has made contact across continents a fact of
every day life but we have yet to match the
internationalist commitment of George Brown and his
comrades. This is not to dismiss the many important
initiatives and projects in which we engage. For
instance, I very much welcome your decision to hold a
debate on the Palestinian Question here this weekend.
May I add that in a small gesture of solidarity SIPTU,
through Ken Fleming, who is on secondment as an
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inspector to the International Transport Workers
Federation, was instrumental in facilitating the
acquisition of the MV Rachel Corrie (formerly the MV
Linda) by the Friends of Gaza movement. As you know
it took a prominent part in last month’s attempt to
break the blockade of the strip and bring urgently
needed aid to the 1.5 million people besieged there by
Israel.
But if we are to be true to the legacy of George Brown
and true to ourselves we must realise the urgency of
the need for unity and to resist the temptation to
retreat into a variation of petty nationalism or regional
protectionism with a rhetorical red garnish. There has
been much debate about whether we should have
joined the Euro and the €750 billion emergency fund
has been rightly condemned as a bail out for German
and French bankers rather than the people of
beleaguered member states.
Nor has EU policy produced the convergence of
economies that would raise everyone’s living standards
to a new, higher plane, as originally proposed. Instead
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states and their citizens have been forced to compete
for the favour of those who control global capital.
Indeed, the recent lurch towards austerity and the
“paradox of thrift” across Europe presents the spectre
of prolonged depression.
Unfortunately there are no simple or easy options
available to address these flaws, but to allow the break
up of the EU or the Euro, would simply leave us even
more at the mercy of this new international elite of the
super rich. Instead we must challenge the conventional
mindset that the markets must be appeased at all
costs, even when they are wrong, that cuts in public
spending are inherently good, even when inflicting
economic as well as social damage and rebuild
confidence in our capacity to create a social market
economy.
This was succinctly put by the French Marxist
economist, Etienne Balibar, in an article in the
Guardian newspaper:
“But the breaking of the EU would inevitably abandon
its people to the hazards of globalisation to an even
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greater degree. Conversely, a new foundation of
Europe does not guarantee any success, but at least it
gives her a chance of gaining some geopolitical
leverage. With one condition, however: that all the
challenges involved in the idea of an original form of
post-national federation are seriously and
courageously met. These involve setting up a common
public authority, which is neither a state nor a simple
“governance” of politicians and experts; securing
genuine equality among the nations, thus fighting
against reactionary nationalisms; and above all
reviving democracy in the European space, thus
resisting the current processes of “de-democratisation”
or “statism without a State”, produced by
neoliberalism.”
In other words, we must lead the fight to save the
Euro and the European project by making them
vehicles of international solidarity rather than of
international capital. This is the internationalist project
that this generation of European socialists must face
up to, and while Europe’s role in the world may not be
as central as it was in George Brown’s day, it is still the
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cockpit where the battle between free marketers and
socialists will be decided. We in Ireland are a part of
that conflict and our peripherality is no excuse for not
playing our full part, just as George Brown, his brother
Michael and fellow Kilkenny men Michael Brennan and
Sean (Jack) Dowling from Castlecomer, played their
full part.
It also places an obligation on us to develop intelligent
strategies that avoid tilting at windmills or squandering
resources and credibility on fighting absolutely
unwinnable battles. Without wishing to introduce a
note of disharmony, and while respecting everyone
else’s analysis, that is why we in SIPTU supported the
recent Croke Park Agreement. We did not believe it
was wise to pitch public service workers (one seventh
of the workforce), against the Government in a context
where they would have been portrayed as a privileged
group defending narrow sectoral interests against the
rest of society. Consequently we chose instead to
advocate the Agreement as a medium-term strategy
towards the achievement of our objectives. The
struggle we are involved in is a marathon, not a sprint.
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Good people in our movement whom I greatly respect,
argued the other way, advocating instead what they
contended was a “radical strategy”. If 2008 bore
alarming similarities to 1929 on the financial markets
then I believe such a campaign would have borne a
similar resemblance to the ‘winter of discontent’ in
Britain that discredited the TUC and ushered in the
reign of Margaret Thatcher, with a clear mandate to
‘take out’ the unions. There is nothing radical about
suicide.
We saw the Croke Park Agreement as the radical
strategy needed to counter the right. It has created
space for the trade union movement and provides the
means to ensure the transformation programme in the
public services does not become a synonym for
privatisation and outsourcing. It can also increase our
capacity for building alliances, not just within the
public service but with the public it serves. In fact, if
we want to be truly radical in trade union terms we
must look beyond merely being militant in defence of
our own narrow sectoral interests (IBEC or the CIF can
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be equally militant on that basis), and champion the
wider public interest.
The same basic principle applies in the wider political
sphere. We must resist the retreat into narrow
sectarianism that facilitated the rise of Hitler and
fascism in the 1930s. It can be very tempting for
people to retreat into the false security of the sect
where everyone is in agreement. It is far harder to
reach out to those with whom we have differences,
often substantial differences, in order to find common
ground on the major threats and challenges we face.
A major weakness for the left and for all those opposed
to the new financial elite generally is a paucity of
resources in firstly analysing and understanding what
is happening, and then being able to communicate that
to our members and the wider public. Without these
tools it is very difficult to be heard against the
continuing chorus of approval for economic
programmes that have patently failed and will continue
to fail, but will nevertheless continue to be applied with
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ever more catastrophic results in the absence of a
viable alternative.
Unfortunately, the heroism of George Brown and his
comrades was not sufficient to halt the onward march
of fascism in Spain, but it was sufficient to arouse
progressive democratic forces throughout Europe and
the wider world to confront and eventually destroy the
beast in its lair after the most devastating conflict in
human history.
We may not be as fortunate. The forces of global
capitalism are even more powerful today and have the
capacity to decide the course of events in every
country in their relentless quest for profit. In many
ways they are the new Huns, using their mobility and
political firepower to exact tribute in every conceivable
form, from lower corporation tax to slave wage rates,
on the settled communities on which they prey.
I do not believe it is possible to overstate the threat we
face to our survival as a species if this new breed of
free booters are allowed to continue their triumphal
march across the globe. Albert Einstein, who lived
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through two world wars, and who was one of the
greatest intellects of this or any age, was once asked,
in the light of the Cold War, what weapons the Third
World War would be fought with. He replied, ‘I do not
know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can
tell you what they will use in the Fourth – sticks and
stones!’
Notwithstanding the catastrophic threat of the trend in
current events, I have to say that I have never been as
optimistic about the prospects for the future. The old
certainties of orthodoxy have been teetering on the
brink. We are living in a most dangerous period but
one which offers the greatest potential in my lifetime
for shifting the balance significantly in favour of
working people and those who depend on public
services, in favour of citizens and in favour of hope.
However, realising that potential entails embracing the
international solidarity that is central to the legacy of
Comrade George Brown, applying the lessons of
history and developing the capacity very quickly to
build a powerful intelligent movement. Ireland is a
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small country on the periphery of Europe but we must
make our own history in our own place.
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