The main element of the next election's outcome is already known. That is that Fine Gael will be the largest party in the Irish state. The party has served the capitalist class well and a large and prosperous layer of the capitalists and their supporters will ensure their return. 

However the Labour party, who promised to protect the workers from the worst excesses of the austerity and then led the charge against the working class, have committed electoral suicide and are widely hated. The collapse of their vote would make it difficult to form a stable government.  This mirrors many European societies, where major parties are being eaten away. Fianna Fail, once the party of government, has never recovered from their decimation. Now it is Labour's turn.

The strategy of capitalism is to try to save Labour in order to save the coalition. The Troika and ECB have authorized a special war chest to fund a limited giveaway budget. Labour have a voting pact with their right wing partners. They are begging for the election to be delayed for as long as possible. 

However their role is now clearly understood. They are no longer seen as a shield against the worst excesses of the right but as an appendage to Fine Gael rule. As a separate political movement they are finished.

The outcome of Labour's collapse will be a large vote for anti-government parties. Sinn Fein, the alliance of socialist groups, the wide variety of independents, will all benefit. The capitalists will be discomfited and the Irish political system will become more unstable.

This is not enough

An intervention in the election should put forward the interests of the working class as a whole, rather than sectional interests. It should advance the key points of a socialist programme offering an alternative to capitalist austerity. It should arise from the most through discussion by the workers who have mobilized against water charges and other elements of austerity. It should be aimed at using elections to build further mobilisations rather than using mobilisations to build electoral gains. Above all it should be an anti-imperialist programme, recognizing the necessity to fight against the continued rule of the Troika, ECB and IMF.

Failure

Against this measure the opposition groups have failed. The right wing of the union bureaucracy continues to support Labour and the austerity programme and hope that the inflated claims of recovery and the modest giveaway budget will be enough to ensure the survival of the current regime. The left union leaders, supported by the Communist Party, are not standing with their own party but advance a Right2Change programme. (see our critique at: http://bit.ly/1Kzz6HO)

This is presented as the culmination and further advancement of the Right2Water campaign, but any examination of the facts will show that it involved winding down the mass protest campaign in favour of an electoralist strategy that continues their policy of lobbying the capitalist government and demanding a better and fairer capitalism that will look after the workers. 

Car crash 

Almost immediately we saw a political car crash. The wheels have come off the vehicle constructed by the union bureaucracy. The sidecar assembled by the socialist groups has disintegrated. Sinn Fein stand centre stage, offering a comic impression of an anti-austerity policy.  

The crash is a disaster. However it is a necessary disaster - the collapse of a gimcrack vehicle travelling the wrong road to the wrong destination.

The Socialist Party has been blamed for sectarian dogmatism in refusing to sign up to a vote transfer system. However the main problem arose earlier, in mid-August.  Despite an Ard Fheis decision that positioned Sinn Fein as a party of the left and ruled out any right alliance, Gerry Adams announced that Sinn Fein was open for coalition with parties of both left and right. The problem of Sinn Fein’s leftism became much more pronounced when they agreed the reactionary “Fresh start” programme in the North. 

Clearly, a party likely to join a right coalition and in an austerity government is unlikely to build a robust party of the left. The Socialist Party withdrew on the grounds that they couldn't agree a vote transfer scheme with Sinn Fein. People Before Profit and independents stayed in but indicated that they would be unlikely to recommend transfers. Few believe that Sinn Fein will honour any transfer arrangement

This sort of speculation misses the point. The question at issue is not transfers.   

The idea of a new left party with Sinn Fein as the core party did not fail with Adams’ change of tack. The whole approach, the focus on elections and the Dail as opposed to organising on the streets, that ignored Sinn Fein imposition of austerity in the North and the Union leaderships support for austerity in the Lansdowne Road agreement, was wrong-headed and doomed from the start, so when the election comes the instability on the right will, at least at the time of writing, be matched by chaos and instability on the left.

This is hardly surprising. All the forces outside the traditional establishment parties claim to represent the mass mobilizations against water charges. Yet all have ignored calls for a national conference. No attempt has been made to bring all the different strands together in a single united movement.

The most convincing show came from the Right2Water union leaders. Their Right2Change programme was subject to online commentary and has since been toured around in town hall meetings. Yet the programme was drawn up behind closed doors by representatives of five unions and presented, without amendment, to a private conference.  The under 200 participants were selected by private invitation. The socialist groups have also held small meetings that were limited either in attendance or in what could be discussed.

Capitalist system

The Right2Change union leaders plot a strategy aimed at ameliorating the worst effects of an endless austerity within capitalism. The vast majority of left political currents privately consider a working class revival to be impossible. It is because they think this that they corner their own section of the protest movement and concentrate on winning Dail seats.

 Brendan Ogle summed up the problem very well, saying that the Socialist Party:

“…are disbarred by their ethos from entering Government within the capitalist system anyway, a principled position I personally respect but do not agree with.”

Just how useful that is can be seen by the collapse of workers’ rights over the period of the credit crunch.  The union’s negotiating partners, first Fianna Fail and then Labour, have been punished. The union bureaucracy, deeply unpopular because of their role in partnership, reinvent themselves as Right2Water and live on to construct another straw man, Right2Change, which will justify the ongoing collaboration.

The Right2Change strategy has left the socialist groups in disarray. They both agreed on the need to build a broad reformist "left" party but violently disagreed as to its nature. The Socialist Party looked to the trade union bureaucracy. The Socialist Workers Party looked a federation of the “left” based on "people power". Their immediate goals were a toehold in the Dail big enough to win money, resources and formal recognition.

Now both are dismasted. The union bureaucracy have produced a programme - but it is one that rules out any socialist demands. For the  SWP the "left" groups have moved further and further right as the crisis intensifies, leaving them in alliance with the unconvincing  figure of Sinn Fein, the authors of the “Fresh Start” austerity in the North.

Reformist road

We have reached the end of the reformist road. It is time to stop using the resistance to build electoral interventions and begin to use the elections to build the resistance.

The statement by the Anti Austerity Alliance is a formal statement of the socialist policy on elections and a rejection of alliance with the right. They are right to draw attention to Right2Water support for the Stormont assembly. In practice that means bowing down to sectarianism and accepting austerity in the North.  We support that statement, but it does not go far enough. We should reject not just the voting alliance, but the Right2Change policy, designed to allow a popular front and accommodation with Irish capitalism and the Troika. The task now is to build a 32 movement against austerity, popularise a socialist alternative and to demonstrate it in the streets and communities rather than continue a narrow focus on the Dail. 
 

• On water we should call for the immediate closure of Irish Water and on the Right2Water unions to return their members to their local authority contracts.

• We should mobilize on housing: demand housing for all and reinforce this with the prevention of evictions and the seizure of our property, held by NAMA.

• We should organize against repression. Trade Union leaders and political organizations are silent about the role of Garda in the physical repression of protest and the perversion of the criminal law to intimidate us.

• The reality of the next government is presented, not in election lies, but in the Lansdowne Road Agreement between government and ICTU. We should campaign against it and call on the many anti-agreement unions to turn opposition into resistance.

• Above all we should oppose Troika rule and turn the call to repudiate the debt from a slogan into an activist resistance that links with workers' resistance movements across Europe.

To those still fixated on the illusion of a 'left' government we have three questions:

What happened to the incomparably stronger Syriza parliamentary movement in Greece?

How much of the fight against water charges was fought in the Dail, how much on the streets and in the communities?  

How many votes are needed to deflect baton attacks from the Garda?