the virtues of a third way between capitalism and communism was, in the early
1990s, eagerly distributed by the British National Front (2000: 10). The point about
political violence is that the use of violence by the left in conditions of liberal
democracy can easily become linked to political violence of the right, as in the
‘critical support’ which some Trotskyite groups gave to the Iranian leader, Ayatollah
Khomeini and the reactionary Taliban.
What are more difficult to categorise are movements like the Irish Republican
Army (IRA) that (unlike the Red Brigades of Italy) enjoy (or once enjoyed) a real
base of popular support. Why? O’Day warns against the danger of forcing Irish
political violence into a straitjacket (1979: 122). In Northern Ireland, the whole
nature of the state has been problematic in liberal terms, and it is difficult, if not
impossible, to envisage a minority becoming a majority, because of the nationalist
divide. A liberal society can only operate to isolate extremists and advocates of
violence if it offers meaningful political rights and the prospect of constitutional
change. If this does not occur, then we have a classic ‘tyranny of the majority’
scenario that promotes illiberal values and institutions, as Northern Ireland
dramatically demonstrated particularly before 1972 when the police force was
partisan and unionists won seats in local elections through manipulating the electoral
boundaries. Writing in 1979, O’Day can still speak of the ‘deep-seated Catholic
grievances’ of the nationalist minority in the north (1979: 129). The fact that the
Provisional IRA called a ceasefire with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and
its political wing has become more preoccupied with simply propagating republican
values, suggests that its political violence was complicated by the popular support
it enjoyed and the fact that it did not operate in a conventional liberal state.
O’Day comments that popular support ‘may be passive, but it is, nonetheless,
real and important’ (1979: 124). The 1921 Treaty that partitioned Ireland was seen
by republicans as a cynical exercise by the British that created, in the place of the
historic nine-county Ulster, a six-county statelet with a contrived Protestant majority.
O’Day speaks of the IRA as having ‘enduring appeal’. In O’Day’s judgement, much
of the Irish activity is ‘less properly described as terrorism than a particularly
unpleasant form of violence springing directly from the grievances of an oppressed
minority or the frustration of the young and unemployed’ (1979: 126–7, 132).Marx on the problem of political violence
We have characterised Marxism as a mixture of post-liberal and anti-liberal views;
views that build on liberalism and views that are authoritarian in character. The
question of what counts as violence is all-important here, since if capitalism itself
is seen as a form of violence, then Marxists would appear to condone counter-
violence even in a liberal society, and this, in our argument, would make Marxism
sympathetic to political violence.
Some argue that for Marx, death caused by indifference and neglect ‘are as much
a part of human violence as the violent acts of revolutionaries’ (Harris, 1973–74:
192). Now there is no doubt that Marxist violence can be readily justified in
conditions where workers either do not have a vote, or the franchise is fraudulent,452 Part 4 Contemporary ideas