Crossakiel 2009
speech at Jim Connell Memorial
by Helena Sheehan
Jim Connell spoke here in Crossakiel to a crowd of 600 in 1918. I am proud to be following in his footsteps here so many decades later.
It makes me think about the world then and the world now.
1918 saw the end of a world war. Lest we forget it, it was an imperialist war, despite the recent rebranding of it as ‘our war’. That war split the socialist international and seemed to put class struggle on hold. After the war, it flared again fiercely. The October revolution created an expectation that it would be the first of many, where those who ruled the world would tumble from their thrones and those who did the work of the world would rise up to expropriate the expropriators and to run the world in a new way.
Red flags flew over Europe. Uprisings spread from east to west and soviets sprang up in Poland, Hungary, Germany, Ireland and many places in between. It is one of the great untold stories of European history and of Irish history too. Students are amazed when I mention soviets in Limerick and Tipperary and the red flag flying over the Rotunda in Dublin. It is good to see the Limerick soviet being remembered and honoured after 90 years. The soviets in Hungary and Bavaria were serious revolutions and their people began to see themselves as citizens of a new world, until power was brutally seized from them again.
Such a long time ago. So much has changed. Was is the difference between those who stood here and elsewhere in those years and those of us standing here now? They were poorer, I would guess, but also more hopeful. They didn’t have so many shoes, such a variety of food, such opportunities to go to university, to travel the world, to google their queries, to blog their thoughts, to text and twitter their friends. They would have thought our lives amazing.
The rising tide has lifted many, but not all, boats, although the ebbing tide is washing up much debris beneath the gleaming surfaces. Our times have brought us rising levels of nutrition, education, exploration. But have they also brought dissipation and confusion and complacency? Do we lack something that those who stood here before us might have had?
These generations that we remember when we sing The Red Flag, our matryred dead, perhaps had a clarity about who had power and wealth in the world and hope that it might be possible to face it down and turn things upside down, something that eludes us in our time.
In our time, the faces of power and wealth are more distant, more hidden. We are getting more of a look into the lives of the masters of the universe these days, but there is much still hidden from our eyes. There is much revealed, but much still concealed. Vox pops, phone-ins, union meetings, everyday conversations do show a rising clarity and anger.
We know that there is something deeply wrong when the A&E situation, which was disgraceful even in the heady days of the tearing tiger, will deteriorate further, while our taxes, now levies, channel hard earned income earmarked for mortgages for family homes to buy luxury properties in Dubai. Why? This money that workers in SR Technics and Waterford Glass paid into their pension funds all these years – where exactly did it go? Has anyone really explained that to us, to them?
The public discourse is a welter of confusion over sub-prime loans, building bubbles, credit crunches, toxic assets, sharing the pain. I am not an economist. I wish that I could trust more of our economists to tell a more basic truth than they ever do tell. That is that the source of this crisis, underneath all the particulars of it, is in the very nature of a system that has created a burgeoning sector that is totally and stunningly parasitic, a financial sector that drains massive wealth from the productive sector. Hedge funds and such produce nothing of value in the world but channel massive value created by others from productive to unproductive purposes. These obscene salaries and bonuses and dividends – these represent the power to take what other people have produced – and for doing what?
Amazingly in our time it has spiralled so far out of control that this system that has drawn so much of its power from concealment has begun to reveal itself in a new way. The strength of capitalism has been to obscure the nature of the system. Our politicians, our economists, our journalists have tended not to think systemically, which is why they are stumbling about as they are. Yet lately - from the heights of power – voices from Wall St, from the New York Times, from the Economist – have spoken of a crisis of capitalism. Throughout the world, Marx’s Das Kapital has started flying off the bookshelves again.
Yet there is no widespread sense of a real alternative to capitalism. What should come out of this crisis is a sense of new possibilities – a demand to restructure the relations of production, distribution and exchange, an examination of our patterns of thought , our ways of living, our patterns of consumption. That is not what is happening. What is happening is a restructuring of capitalism to restore profitability. There is real class struggle going on here and it is not our side that is winning. What is happening is an intensified redistribution from below to above. What is happening is protecting the privatisation of profits while increasing the socialisation of losses.
It is intolerable. Why are we tolerating it?
We might be still be better off than those who went before us, despite everything that is now being taken from us, but the world is in a worse state than ever it was in their days. The expropriators are expropriating on a grander scale than ever before, yet we are not rising up to expropriate the expropriators.
What does it take for people to rise up?
We need to engage in clear and clever class struggle. I am open to the possibility that this can take place in partnership talks, although I am not very impressed by it a the moment. I have seen unprecedented attendance and militancy and resolve at union meetings in my own place of work. We were ready to go out on 30 March and then engage in stepped up activity in support of the ICTU 10 point plan. All that energy has been dissipated and they have taken more from us since then. We need to get that momentum back again and take it even further.
We need to struggle on all fronts – not only in our unions. We need to make the long march through all the institutions of our society. We need to win hearts and minds over to a realisation of the nature of the system and exploration of an alternative. In the words of a great left song Avanti Populo:
from farm and factory, from school and college
with force of suffering and source of knowledge
The other forces, for sure, are making this long march and they are winning. Our public universities move further and further in the direction of the commercialisation of knowledge. Our public service broadcaster sometimes seems to be IBEC PR.
What do we do? We need to assert at every turn that the world belongs to those who labour. In the words of another great labour song Solidarity Forever:
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power
We need to rise up. The generations that went before us knew this better. We have to know it in a way that draws strength from their insights and their struggles, but we have to know it and do it in a way that is astute about own times.
For so many years I sang with such fervour the words of that great song that has brought us here today:
Come dungeons dark or gallows grim
but I was not imprisoned (not for more than 24 hours at a time anyway). I was not executed. Nor were you.
We need to honour those who were imprisoned and executed, those who struggled in other times, by doing what is needed of us in our times: to analyse, to speak up, to organise, to contest elections, to go into partnership talks when we can advance and come out of them when we can’t, to go on to the streets, to let them know that without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn. The world can do without hedge fund managers and pr consultants and life coaches, but it cannot do without farmers, carpenters, plumbers, teachers, doctors, nurses, police, scientists, engineers – even honest intellectuals, especially good economists.
So let us sing this
song that has brought us here under the red flag
of Crossakiel, this song that has lived for 120 years, this song that
has
witnessed many a deed and vow. Let it witness our deeds and vows to
come
to terms with our own times.
E-mail: helena.sheehan@dcu.ie
Helena
Sheehan website
Jim Connell Festival website