Update on the CPI response
Apart from the initial intemperate response from Eugene McCartan, the then General Secretary of the CPI, the Party has still not availed of the invitation to respond to the content of the Guerrilla Communists website.
It is interesting and revealing to analyse the responses and even more so the silence. Other than two other abusive one-liner responses, there has been no defence of the Party from any of its members. While we did not have contact details for the entire membership, we did reach a substantial number of members and we did reach the entire layers of leadership.
While it might be understandable that the Party or its members might not respond to opinion, it is an entirely different matter when specific factual issues remain unchallenged.
Even we accept the possibility that we may have got some issues wrong.
Similarly, when an expelled member circulated a letter complaining that he had been discriminated against – with specific information included – only a handful of members expressed any concern for the nature of the process that had taken place and for the serious errors that had emerged during the process.
However, that analysis must now reflect on the vast majority of the contacted members. The Party and its members claim to want to stand against oppression, to stand against the unfair stacking of the odds against workers, and to bring about a society where people live in an equal and dignified environment.
But, at the same time, the vast majority of the members couldn’t care less about injustice, or abuse of power within their own Party. How can this be?
Is this the level of revolutionary fervour that should be expected from members of the Party? Are they cowed into silence within their own Party or are they just as indifferent to reality as their seemingly revered leaders?
It must also be acknowledged that a handful of members stood out honourably from the crowd in their responses to both the letter and the content of the website.
As for the leadership, it has once again demonstrated its complete inability and lack of confidence to either defend its position or to challenge what it might consider to be incorrect or unfair claims made against it.
Throughout the world, communists and progressive people take enormous and personally dangerous positions against ruthless opponents. In Ireland, alleged communists cannot even stand up against a toothless leadership or against injustice or abuse of power within their own Party. And, when a member does challenge the leadership – on any issue – these alleged communists either openly oppose any such challenges or sit quietly as if it had nothing to do with them.
On top of all that the Party itself does not directly challenge anybody or anything except its own members.
Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the overall reality that is the Communist Party of Ireland?
One thing is sure: that position is unsustainable. Either the members of the Party take their responsibilities seriously to both the building of an effective party and to the furtherance of a socialist agenda or they will find themselves and their Party further side-lined and then replaced.
The sad reality is that that any of those tasks would not be difficult to achieve.
The thrust of the analysis in both that letter and the subsequent Guerrilla Communists website was that the leadership of the party was weak and incompetent. That the leadership has lost all sense of reality, all sense of direction and all sense of humanity and fairness. That the leadership had lost all sense of understanding how their actions and inactions might be viewed by the people they claim they want to attract to the Party or to others outside the Party.