Pincer politics squeeze Hanoi

THE VIETNAMESE "H F VIETNA MECE revolution is being threatened by a diplomatic pincer movement from Washington, Moscow and Peking.

The decision to resume the Paris peace talks, announced on his return from Hanoi by President Nikolai Podgorny, is being taken as an indication that the North Vietnamese are willing to undertake 'meaningful negotiations' The Nixon administration founced out of the talks on May 4 saying they would not return until the North Vietnamese and the NLF agreed to such talks.

But 'meaningful negotiations' means talking on American terms. As Prince Sihanouk of the Cambodian liberation movement put it in Peking recently, it means the partition of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and the preparation of the third Indo-China war.

Instead of aiding in every way WHAT WE THINK THE BLIND ALLEY OF REPUBLICANISM IF RADICAL talk and revolutionary posturing could win wars, then there seems little doubt that the Official IRA would have swept the British army out of Ulster before you could say Sinn Fein. id if Wolfe Tone could speak from his grave, there is even less doubt that he would denounce these same leaders of the Gardiner Place faction as a bunch of unprincipled Republican charlatans, using his revered name to cover up their shameful capitulation to the heirs of the regime against which the United Irishmen fought so heroically. hatever mistakes Wolfe Tone made and whatever political vices he may have had, unprincipled compromise and equivocation were certainly not included among them. It this can hardly be said of Sean Garland's commemoration speech at Bodenstown on Sunday. Garland is no ordinary bog-trotting Republican. He prides himself on being some kind of a 'Marxist', • representative of the extreme socialist wing of Republicanism and articulating the demands of Irish workers. • claims to represent the tradition of Connolly and Wolfe Tone. He is a member of the Ard Comhairle of Sinn Fein. His speech therefore merits close scrutiny and sharp comment-because his demagogy helps to conceal the plans of the Republican petty bourgeoisie to betray the working class not only to Whitelaw but also to Lynch-for a price. He called for the creation of an all-Irish revolutionary party embracing Protestant and Catholic workers.

Such a party could be a fine and commendable idea if it were informed by a programme and leadership which uncompromisingly expressed the historical interests of the Irish working class. bis, however, lacking the military overthrow of the US imperialists and their puppets in Saigon, the Soviet leaders are pursuing the aim of peaceful co-existence' with Nixon at the expense of the Vietnamese.

On his return from Hanoi, Podgorny told reporters in Calcutta: The Soviet Union will do everything possible for a de-escalation of the Vietnam Kremlin mouthpiece Victor Louis of the 'Evening News' wrote last Friday that Podgorny was seeking a ceasefire on all fronts 'so that new negotiations can get under way' The Kremlin appears to have accepted at its face value Nixon's assurance that the US is eager to get out of Vietnam completely. This assurance is not worth a light, as the Soviet Stalinists must be well aware.

In fact, US aid to the Saigon the Vietnamizationpped up on puppets is being "You supply the blood, we put up the money.' In addition the US navy and air force are active in the tradition, programme and composition of the Sinn rein - Omcial IRA. By proclaiming a unilateral 'truce' by participating in the 'talks' fraud of Whitelaw and by failing to prepare the Irish Catholic workers for the trap of direct rule, the Officials have betrayed their revolutionary pretensions and deserted their supporters.

oreover the bureaucratic military set-up of the IRA, which has more in common with the ecumenical council than with revolutionary organization, effectively precludes the selection of a revolutionary leadership or a change of strategy.

an Garland is not a representative of democraticallyelected leadership subject to recall, but a self-perpetuating clique of army council nationalists. Democratic centralism is totally alien to these people. In this way and through the unique IRA constitution the domination of the petty-bourgeoisie is assured over any critical and working-class Far from elements being revolutionary, cremenls.

the programme and ideologyMr Garland notwithstanding— is reformist and petty-bourgeois and expresses the interests (and the political backwardness) of the shopkeeper and small farmer, the student and the unorganized backward worker whose head is full of national and religious prejudices.

This reformism was cogently expressed by Garland in an article in the May 1971 issue of the 'United Irishman': "The central point of any revolution and particularly in socialist revolution, is that the key positions in the state, in government, army, police, civil service, judiciary, unions, any national TV, radio and press should pass out of the hands of those who are loyal to the Establishment and into the hands of those who represent as never before in Vietnam.

Soviet 'good offices' in • Vietnam are the price for Nixon's agreement to a European Security Conference, increased trade with the USSR and strategic arms limitation.

It. is now clear that Nixon's decision to blockade North Vietnamese ports and step up the bombardment of supply lines was not a desperate gamble. It had the tacit approval of the Moscow leaders, as the summit meeting with Nixon demonstrated conclusively.

Far from making the Kremlin's task more difficult, the blockade has considerably eased Moscow's treacherous role. It has undoubtedly slowed down the pace of the offensive in the South at the same time as the lives ivesbing raids threaten the millions in the North.

Moscow's task has also been eased by the Chinese Stalinists' refusal to allow Soviet vessels to birth in Chinese ports. This decision has given a further twist to the tourniquet around the vast majority people. .

This extract denotes an appalling ignorance-or worse still—a conscious perversion of the revolutionary doctrines of Marx and Lenin on the state.

Contrary to Garland the central point of a revolution is the smashing of the capitalist state power and the creation of qualitatively new organs of power embodying the dictatorship of the working class over the expropriated capitalist class.

In socialist revolution there will be no 'passing out of key positions'. Neither in the Paris Commune nor in the Ocrob:• Revolution did the revolu ionaries reallocate jobs. Instead they smashed the institutions of bourgeoisie rule and replaced them with Soviets, or communes.

Irland's conception, despite incidental references to workers' committees, etc., is a thoroughly bureaucratic conception which expresses clearly the petty-bourgeois hatred of the workers and its mental and economic dependence on the big bourgeoisie.

• lead a socialist revolution, the working class needs party of professional revolutionaries guided by a scientific — dialectical - materialist — theory of socialism and based on the organizational principle of democratic centralism.

is characteristic of Garland that in his compass of writings on Ireland his rejection of a scientific theory of knowledge is exceeded only by his contempt for democratic centralism.

is no accident therefore that his speech should demand that a revolutionary party be based on the Republican movement and not on Marxism and the working class.

lis promiscuous mixing of Republicanism and socialism is throughly reactionary and is responsible for the decline the life-line of the the life-line liberation Peking is now acting as host to the sinister Dr Henry Kissinger, Nixon's playboy adviser, for the ostensible purpose of 'concrete consultations ... to further the nationalization relations' between China and the US.

But there is no doubt that here too the key to 'normalization' is on the battlefields of Vietnam. The pursuit of their own bureaucratic ends by the Moscow and Peking stalinists 1S the biggest threat to the victory of the Vietnamese revolution.

President Thieu of Saigon claimed yesterday that the liberation forces were defeated and announced that all territory lost to the communists would be regained in three months.

This statement is quite absurd given the failure of Thieu's armies to win a single decisive battle in the whole offensive.

The danger to the Vietnamese revolution does not lie on the battlefield, where the liberation forces have proved time and again their overwhelming superiority. It lies behind the smokescreen of secret diplomacy in the treachery of the Stalinist bureaucracy. and impotency of the Moreover it is a trap working class. is the product of an eclectic philosophy which tries to combine the methods of the epoch of the bourgeois revolution with the antithetical methods of the socialist revolution. The predictable result of this Official alchemy is political bankruptcy and betrayal. So it was in 1922-so it is today. r Garland correctly condemns the blind terror of the Provisionals which is counterproductive and says that violence is only sanctioned when all other means of achieving democratic change have failed. = even states that Republicans had been seriously in error when they thought they could achieve their objects by force without the backing of the majority of the Irish people. ut this recognition does not arise from a serious theoretical analysis of and reflection on the experiences of the movement. As Garland wrote in May 1971:

I was only when we were beaten to the wall and almost annihilated as a political force that the true meaning of revolution began to dawn on us.' :cause of this empiricist and subjective reaction-devoid of any theory-the 'true meaning revolution' was never grasped by Garland or anyone else in the Republican leadership.

Now the wheel has turned full circle and yesterday's terrorists have become today's constitutional allies of Whitelaw. In this sense Wolfe Tone's commemoration has served an important purpose. It has shown that Republicanism is bankrupt and an ideological fetter and, infinitely more important, that there is no substitute for Marxist revolutionary leadefship in Ireland or anywhere else.