On 3/4 March the Revolutionary Marxist Group (Irish supporters of the Fourth International) held its second national conference in Dublin. Since its founding conference in February of last year, the RMG has established branches outside Dublin; in Belfast, and in Limerick, the heart of the Shannon industrial complex. Its national paper, The Plough, and its theoretical journal, The Marxist Review have, in the first year of the group's existence, made important contributions to the analysis of the problems facing the Irish revolutionary movement, and to the development of a revolution: ary perspective for all of Ireland.
THE NATIONAL QUESTION The tasks of a revolutionary group in Ireland, and the primary orientation in its strategy, are determined by the needs of the objective situation in Irish society north and south. The objective situation in Ireland is dominated by the national question, the struggle against British imperialism in the six counties and against the pro-imperialist national bourgeoisie in the South. The recognition of the fundamental importance of the national question in a revolutionary strategy for Ireland distinguishes the RMG from the other major groups on the Irish left. Against the crude workerism of the SWM (Irish counterpart to the IS) and the Lambertist LWR (who see the national struggle as a hindrance to the pure class struggle) the RMG sees the national question as an integral part of the class struggle, the struggle for Permanent Revolution in all of Ireland. From the RMG's attitude to the national question flows its approach to Republicanism, the political ideology of the anti-imperialist struggle, and to the Republican Movement. Republicanism is, of course, a petit-bourgeois ideology, which must be transcended in the struggle for a workers' republic in Ireland. Republicanism arose in Ireland as the ideology of the struggle for "bourgeois independence". But the Irish national bourgeoisie are no longer capable of playing a progressive or revolutionary role and, as James Connolly said, "the Irish working class alone remains as the incorruptible inheritor of the fight for Irish freedom". It is this same working class which is the mass base of the Republican Movement, which is in the forefront of the struggle for national liberation.