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The Invisible
Republic
The Economics of Socialism
and Republicanism in the
21st Century
Robbie Smyth
The Invisible Republic
Robbie Smyth
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
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Preface
First some harsh words. Ireland today is a flawed society in a failing world.
The aspirations of the 1916 revolutionaries have not been met. The prom-
ises of the 1916 Proclamation and the 1919 Democratic Programme for
Government have been discarded, the UN Declaration of Human Rights
is flouted at home and abroad. Our freedom and rights as individuals and
communities are subject to a growing number of coercive constraints.
In our world today people are still hungry and homeless, people still go
to war and some people still attempt to rule and exploit others and most
importantly people still rebel against all of this. It seems that there are
some elements of life that are unchanging.
As a republican activist in Sinn Fein and writing in An Phoblacht rebel-
lion was and is the driving force of the republican pulse, the reason we
entered the political arena in Ireland. We, I, believe the Ireland of today is
not the ideal one, not the perfect one and that there is still a struggle for
basic freedoms and justice. The sites and places of that struggle might have
changed in the years since the 1994 IRA cessation and the 1998 Good
Friday agreement, but the need to take a stand, and to take action, is as
necessary, as relevant as ever.
Part of the problem of comprehending this state of coercion is that any
attempt to even think about describing or quantifying the scale of eco-
nomic and political change in the world over the last ten or even 20 years
seems an intractable task. The transformations are so vast and so complex.
For example, there are the technological and societal impacts of com-
puter technology, the internet, mobile and now ‘smart’ phones, the digital
communication technologies that drive these products and the
v
vi PREFACE
This book offers a view on the battleground now in the long road to
freedom of the people from subjugation, exploitation, whether it was the
feudal imperialisms of Europe or the oligopolistic capitalism that sprung
from the industrial revolution. It is a road with detours and at present
what seems an impasse as a new Dickensian society threatens to emerge.
I felt a need to write this, a compulsion at times. So maybe give it 15 to
20 minutes and if that goes well, maybe another 15.
A start could be to read my conclusions outlined below in the form of
nine principles. It might seem foolish or strange to give away the ending!
However, this gives an insight into my approach, and how my thinking
emerges in the accompanying text. In a small way the opening pages of
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus influenced me, and I prob-
ably deserve to be made fun of because of this. However, I sincerely believe
that we need in this century be able to explain our key ideas simply and
clearly, and that is what I have tried to do here.
This book couldn’t have come to me without the road map, the historical
trail created by the lineage of republican thinkers, who over the years
informed my thinking. Theobald Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Thomas
Davis, Fintan Lalor, Padraig Pearse and James Connolly are the giants that
deserve acknowledgement and also to be much more widely read today. It
was writers and thinkers like Ernie O’Malley, Constance Markievicz, Liam
Mellows, Peadar O’Donnell, Sean Cronin, Bernadette Devlin and Gerry
Adams who initially introduced these thinkers to me. Any mistakes in my
interpretation of these giants is entirely my own responsibility.
On a personal level I want to acknowledge Kevin Gill for support at the
earliest of days, Micheal McDonnacha who saw a writer in me and gave me
a desk in An Phoblacht. Seosamh MacCarthaigh introduced me to so
many ideas and concepts and many more ideas in the years that this book
was simmering away.
Lastly to Jane, Sorcha and Diarmuid for unerring support, belief and
always thinking that writing while sitting at the kitchen table or on the
couch was the most natural thing to do.
ix
Contents
xi
xii Contents
3 Market Systems 55
The Market System an Introduction 55
The Key Questions Are 55
The Great Recession and Ireland 57
The NAMA Example 58
Markets and the Environment 60
The Consumption Problem 61
The Power of the Market 62
The Question of Infrastructure 63
What the Market System Actually Delivers 65
Threats to Market Efficiency 66
Prices and Demand 69
The Real Power of Information in the Market System 70
Conclusions 72
References 73
7 Business Theologies151
Introduction: Business Heresies 151
Why We Might Need Firms 152
Firms: A Short History 153
Powers of Firms 154
The Power of the Firm and the Individual 158
xiv Contents
An Environmental Example 161
The Privatisation Example 162
Is There an Alternative to Firms? 170
Sinn Fein, the Media and Business 172
State Banks 172
Sinn Fein and Privatisation 174
Public Spending 176
Back to the Question of an Alternative to Firms 177
Oligopoly and Size in Retail Markets 178
What’s Wrong with Below Cost Selling? 179
Co-Operatives and Alliances 180
Innovation and Responding to Social Change 180
The Value of Firms 181
References 181
8 Conclusions183
Economic Coercion 184
Illusion of Consumption Freedom 186
Wrong Career Choice 188
Wrong Economy 189
Solution of Good Government 190
The Markets Made Me Do It 191
Democracy Has Been Kidnapped 193
Final Themes 197
The Problem of Complexity 199
Competitive, Collaborative Creative? 200
Searching for Solutions 200
Helping the Invisible Republic Become Real 201
The Principles of Socialist Republicanism in the Twenty-first
Century 201
References 202
Index203
CHAPTER 1
We are not free in Ireland today. We often have the illusion of freedom,
but our guarantees of this are entirely conditional and often arbitrary.
Money, status, wealth, social class and power might bestow an illusion of
untested freedom on us, a perception of freedom, but in reality we are in
an imperfect world and state.
The ideas, propositions and arguments in this book come from a drive
to comment on the world as it appears to me today and the concept of
seeing that world as a battle of ideas. This is one way to characterise this
experience. Viewing Irish history over the past 250 years as a battle of
ideas is at first at difficult task. It is easier or perhaps more comfortable to
view conflict in Ireland as one of geography, territory or control of
resources. This vista creates a history of disagreement and violent clashes
where we have the planter in a sixteenth and seventeenth century standoff
with the dispossessed natives, or as an eighteenth century competition for
arable land in a subsistence based agri-economy or as a twentieth century
dispute over partition. In the emerging twenty-first century it is not yet
clear where the battle lines are drawn but there are a myriad of areas of
disagreement between the political establishment on one hand and those
who seek to defy and rebel against it on another. It would not be right to
dismiss these aspects of the conflict in Ireland, but what is more important
is to site them in another context.
That being said it should be noted that perhaps the most annoying
perception of the conflict in Ireland over the last 50 years is that of it being
a religious one, but this raises the question as to who benefits by having
the conflict portrayed in such perpetually antagonistic loaded terms.
The New York Times in this era stands out as one of the great papers in
English, but they still persist in using this twisted viewpoint in its termi-
nology and makes you wonder what hope there is for the other media if
this is the standard being set. Have a look at the Times in 2006 where
Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are described as leaders of the
“main Roman Catholic party” (Quinn, 2006). Or more recently in 2017
after the death of Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, the New York Times
wrote of “bombings and killings that raged from the 1960s to the 1990s
between Protestant and Roman Catholic forces” (McFadden, 2017).
For republicans it is possibly the most exasperating representation of
modern Irish culture, particularly as inter religious conflicts are probably
the shortest chapter in Irish history and modern Irish society’s rush
towards secular archetypes in the late twentieth century is unparalleled in
the world today. That such a transformation was effected in the Irish
psyche undermines any claim that religion was a tangible reason for long
term conflict. Yes, there was wholesale sectarianism perpetrated by the
British in Ireland and the failed attempt in the twentieth century to create
a Catholic theocracy in the 26 Counties showed again an elite in power
willing to use religion as a means to maintain influence and control, but in
both cases religious issues were fostered by elites, by the political establish-
ment, to hold power unjustly and not because of any deep seated religious
beliefs held by the actual population.
There were in fact other more deeply held and believed ideologies in
conflict in Ireland and my aim in this text is to look on history for this
context as being about these competing, conflicting ideologies and beliefs
in an economic context. In this case the perspective proposed is to con-
sider past eras as a battleground of competing ideas and in particular to
look on the last 250 years plus from the era of Swift, Grattan and Burke
through to the present day.
First there were the British monarchists, with their feudal agricultural
oligarchy on one side replaced by a capitalist plutocracy in later years.
Alongside this you had the Irish oligarchs and plutocrats of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries who were and still are more than willing to rec-
reate the British capitalist hegemony years later on their own terms.
1 THE INVISIBLE REPUBLIC: AN INTRODUCTION 3
Then you had those who resisted and at various junctures drove the
country to revolution. Central to the resisters’ side was and still is the ide-
ology of republicanism; however there was a packed opposition and other
political movements many of them republican in nature also filled out the
revolutionary ranks particularly as the pace of economic and social change
quickened in the late nineteenth century. Not only were republicans resist-
ing but they were also part of a much larger movement campaigning for
cultural and national rights, the equality of women and workers, as well as
a just democracy on the island. There are also in every era pseudo false
revolutionaries, but more on that later.
This process is repeated in many other societies whether it is the USA
of the 1770s, the French Revolution, the Levellers and the Chartists in
Britain, the Indian National Congress, Cuba in the 1960s, South Africa in
the twentieth century, Central and South America in any decade you care
to pick, North Africa and parts of the Middle East in the twenty-first cen-
tury Arab Spring. The drive towards a real process of liberation is part of
the base essence of positive humanity.
There was and still is also the reality of people who have been pushed
too far, exploited and abused, who rebelled because the harshness of their
economic and political reality meant that this course of action could be no
worse from the dire circumstances they already found themselves in. The
pictures in 2010 of Mohammed Bouazizi, a street vendor in the Tunisian
town of Sidi Bouzid, who set himself on fire in a protest at the harassment
and exploitation he endured on a daily basis is an apt example for the
power of rebellion. His actions were the catalyst for the Arab Spring
(Abouzeid, 2011).
In my years as a republican activist I have always taken strength and
inspiration from the simple experience of sitting and listening to the strug-
gles and campaigning plans of local groups and their strategies to grow
Sinn Fein in their area. There is no glamour to these meetings, the chairs
hard, the halls often cold, the time always late and pressing. Yet the people
moved on driven to take action again the wrongs and injustices they
believed filled the world around them.
independence and the resulting partitioned Ireland. The good news is that
it is also a battle without end, so there is always a chance to return to com-
bat. The battle of ideology was just as important as the physical conflict in
the streets and across rural Ireland and though it was fought in these are-
nas it was also a conflict with widely differing settings.
It was fought in the parliament in Dublin and London, as well as
through public meetings, street speeches and other political forums, but
also through books, pamphlets and newspapers. In the twentieth century,
broadcast radio and TV media were added to these existing avenues and
the censorship of this message from radio and television in Britain and
Ireland shows how important the channels of communication are to airing
struggling conflicting competing ideas and views about what is happening
in society. Now in a new century the internet and other new so called
‘social’ media join the fray as sites of struggle in the competition for whose
reality, whose interpretation of what was true and untrue will be believed
by the general public and more importantly—who would get to take the
important political decisions that give structure and meaning to every-
day life.
Victory in the battle of ideas means simple things like deciding what
constitutes a crime, who builds the roads and the schools, how do our
hospitals work, how will our housing be planned and built, what will our
workplace be like, what relationships will our society, our island, forge
with the other societies surrounding it, where do the rights of an individ-
ual citizen begin and end.
We know republicans lost the battle as the statelets on the island today
have few of the characteristics and values that republicans would include in
their vision of a free Ireland. The positive interpretation of this state of
play is that the republican ideals still endure and despite all attempts to
undermine, isolate and dilute these principles, they spring back, as new
generations have over the years embraced the core values underpinning
what a just equal Ireland would be.
And now republicans on the island are in a stronger position today
politically than at any other time since the months after the 1916 rising,
their ideological rationale is once again potent and never more relevant to
the political and economic environment of the day. Hopefully, if you read
this text in 50 or 100 years, you would find republican ideas still active and
still relevant to how a society decides how to live. Proving this rationale of
the enduring logic of republican struggle is a core theme of this text.
1 THE INVISIBLE REPUBLIC: AN INTRODUCTION 5
There must have been political voices and opinion opposed to Grattan.
It was they who eventually won the battles of the day. He lost. It seems
too expedient that their names are not that easily remembered and that in
the following decades as the republican struggle evolved we often seem to
know more about those who failed than the British elite that vanquished
the generations of republican activists.
Innovative Republicans
Getting access to the means of communication became a priority for
republicans in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were
quick to use the new mediums and the nineteenth century in particular is
littered with newspapers, pamphlets and books which were widely read.
For example in Tone’s time the Belfast based Northern Star, 1792 to
1797, had a circulation of 4000 copies (Bigger, 1894) and a cheap
abridged version of Paine’s rights of man was circulating again by the
thousand in book form and in lengthy extracts printed in newspapers of
the time (Smyth, 1998, pp. 92–93). It is estimated that the reach of the
Northern Star was far wider than the circulation as the paper’s articles
were read aloud at United Irishmen meetings with some putting a figure
of at least six readers to every copy sold (Smyth, 1998, p. 29).
The success of The Nation, a weekly newspaper founded by Thomas
Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy and James Blake Dillon (O’Sullivan, 1944) is
another example of early republican media innovators. Its first edition had
12,000 copies printed and at its height had an estimated weekly readership
of 250,000 (O’Sullivan, 1944, p. 44). The creation of reading rooms by
the Young Irelanders and the Repeal Association was another facet of
republican innovation in creating channels of communication to their
activist base, along with spinoff publications and imprints such as the Spirit
of the Nation, the Library of Ireland and The Voice of Ireland.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century republicans were prolific
writers and printers of news, fiction, literature and a lot of rhetoric. Pearse
and some of the other executed 1916 leaders were good examples of these
versatile writers whose interests moved from politics to philosophy to lit-
erature. One example is that of James Connolly who was not just a politi-
cal activist but also a writer, a newspaper founder and an orator of renown,
Another random document with
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kirurgia vallan lohduttomana sentähden ettei hän ollut saanut leikata
päivän suurimpia kuuluisuuksia Saksan keisaria, joka oli antanut
professori Hilmacherin poistaa itsestään jonkun visvarakon, ja
ihmenäyttelyn kääpiönaista, joka nieltyään noin satasen naulaa ei
tahtonut antaa avata vatsaansa, vaan joi itsepintaisesti risiiniöljyä.
— Te ette puhuisi noin, hyvä herra, väitti Tuliaivo, jos teillä olisi
kauniita paheita, jaloja, ylpeitä, ruhtinaallisia, pilvenkorkuisia ja
todellakin hyveellisiä paheita. Mutta teillä ei ole muuta kuin
häpeällisiä, pelokkaita ja naurettavia paheita. Te ette ole, herraseni,
mikään suuri jumalien halveksija.
Kirkkoherra Puolikinnas.
*****
Oli kuitenkin yksi mies näillä vuorilla, jonka muoto kaikkien noiden
huolestuneiden otsien ja nyreiden kasvojen keskellä paistoi
vaivatonta hymyä. Hän ei osannut muokata maata eikä paimentaa
eläimiä; hän ei osannut mitään siitä, mitä ihmiset tavallisesti osaavat,
hän puheli asioita, joissa ei ollut mitään järkeä, ja lauleskeli pitkin
päivää jotakin pikku sävelmää, jota hän ei koskaan laulanut loppuun.
Kaikki ihastutti häntä. Hän oli aina kuin taivaassa. Hänen nuttunsa oli
kursittu kokoon kaiken värisistä ja omituisesti yhteenliitetyistä
kankaanpalasista. Lapset juoksivat pilkaten hänen kintereillään,
mutta kun hänen luultiin tuovan onnea mukanaan, ei hänelle tehty
pahaa, ja hänelle annettiin se vähä, mitä hän tarvitsi. Tämä mies oli
Piki-Pietari, sielultaan pikkulapseksi jäänyt. Hän söi töllien ovilla
pikku koirien kanssa ja nukkui kehdossa.
Ulrik ei vastannut.
— Onnettomuusko? Puhu!
Onnellinen ihminen.