Contribution of Workers Party of Ireland

Contribution of the Workers Party of Ireland to the teleconference of European Communist Action (2nd May 2026)

“The tasks of the communists in organising the party in workplaces and working-class neighbourhoods”

 

Dear comrades,

The Workers Party of Ireland conveys greetings to all our comrade parties in European Communist Action and conveys its thanks to the Communist Party of the Workers of Spain (PCTE) for organising this event.

It is a core task of a communist party to organise in workplaces and working-class neighbourhoods, establishing a clear, principled and consistent presence in workplaces and communities which are the cauldron of class struggles. This involves an understanding of the social base, addressing concerns about wages, housing, childcare, transport, health, social security, workers’ rights, discrimination, and both localised and wider general issues. It will also require a detailed knowledge of trade union activities, tenants’ groups, youth clubs and community centres and working to assist workers to analyse their own conditions and articulate their demands while using every opportunity to place those demands within the context of our ideological positions.

This work requires high Party visibility in workplaces and communities, a consistent presence at industrial action, including strikes, community and public events, constantly emphasising the inherent link between these daily struggles confronting workers and their families and the class struggle to overthrow a rotten system which cannot yield lasting solutions.

It is imperative to relate workplace and neighbourhood issues to broader political questions reinforcing the necessity for social and political change and transforming everyday struggles into class struggles.

Workers’ daily grievances are expressions of the contradictions of capitalism. It is the task of communists to raise class consciousness by articulating the problems facing the working class as systemic rather than individual difficulties and to connect everyday struggles to the existential conflict between labour and capital. 

This work requires building a stable presence in workplaces, unions, tenants’ groups, youth associations, women’s groups, community centres and places of education ensuring that the Party reflects the composition, culture, and contemporary needs of the working class and develops leaders from within the working class.

Everyday struggles become transformative only when linked to political power. Lenin insisted that the party must be present wherever workers live and struggle. He demonstrated that the working class becomes a political force only through organisation and that a revolutionary party must be rooted in the working class. While workers’ everyday struggles produce trade-union consciousness this does not necessarily create a broader understanding of capitalism as a system of exploitation and oppression. It is necessary to take a further step, and this is the task of the communists – to create socialist consciousness by linking immediate grievances to structural causes, to transform spontaneous struggle into conscious political struggle, to create a disciplined, politically educated vanguard of trained and committed cadres well-versed in the Party’s programme and strategy and capable of providing leadership to the working class.

Lenin placed enormous importance on newspapers, pamphlets, and political education circles. Accordingly, the task for communists involves creating media which explains events from a working-class perspective and offers an alternative to the ideological narrative provided by the capitalist class and the bourgeois press. 

It is the task of the communists to develop political consciousness among the working class, to unify struggles across workplaces and communities. 

In Ireland, and in Northern Ireland in particular, the political landscape is shaped by a history of partition and sectarian division, the existence of conflicting “national identities”, the historical influence of church institutions in Irish society, a working class divided by geography, religion, and political and constitutional issues which complicate and impede the necessity for working class unity.

Our Party, however, does not regard these as permanent obstacles to class consciousness and class unity but rather as material conditions which affect the circumstances of our struggle which are temporary and which must be addressed.

Our Party, on a daily basis, confronts the sectarian and divisive narratives which attempt to divide workers and pit them against one another, whether on sectarian or racist grounds, identifying shared material interests on a class basis and promotes solidarity on the basis of common struggles. It is for this reason that the WP Ireland actively supports struggles both in the workplaces, at strikes and on picket lines and solidarity campaigns in local working-class communities in which our Party is based.

Last year, in its contribution to the ECA meeting in Paris, our Party described how in the Republic of Ireland from 1987 to 2009, unions, employers and governments in Ireland engaged in a series of seven social partnership programmes built around a centralized pay agreement. This format quickly ended with the global capitalist crisis in 2008. From 1997 onwards Irish trade unions also sponsored a series of national framework agreements intended to foster ‘workplace partnership’ and to institutionalize at workplace level the kind of cooperative engagement with employers although even these met with employer hostility.

This approach failed to promote union revival. It had the opposite effect. Union density levels decreased significantly. Employers continued to resist union recognition, reluctant to engage in collective bargaining within workplaces. Bargaining activity at workplace level was marginal. Social partnership which undermined class struggle actually weakened unions in workplaces and led to a decline in membership in trade unions.

The reactionary role of the European Union has had a significant impact on the trade union movement and workers’ rights. The deregulation of labour markets, the so-called “flexibility” or casualisation of labour has massively increased job insecurity, under-employment, low pay and low-quality employment. Work in the public sector had been severely eroded by privatisation and sub-contracting work to private employers. The development of workfare as a mechanism to enforce acceptance of low-quality jobs has
been a planned strategy of the European Union and its Member States. The communists must be at the forefront exposing social compromise and the EU attack on social and political rights.

Lenin stated that communists must work in the trade unions. There are currently few countries in capitalist society where a labour organisation exists as a genuinely revolutionary class-oriented pole.

The task of the communists within the trade union movement is to use every opportunity to raise class consciousness, to enable workers to develop a sense of their power as a class, to underline and emphasise the nature, basis and importance of class struggle,
facilitating the organisation of mass campaigns and simultaneously demanding measures to improve conditions for working people. It is also vital to reach and organise those workers who remain outside organised trade union structures, often women and those in precarious work. It is also the task of our parties to clearly identify the positions of the party on all important issues and win workers to our programme.

As communists we understand that reforms won through the struggle of workers is insufficient. It is our task to provide the political guidance to enable workers build collective power to defend their interests, challenge exploitation, and transform society through the overthrow of the capitalist system and the creation of a socialist-communist society. In our work in the workplaces and working-class neighbourhoods it will be necessary to present a clear, structured and accessible introduction to our ideological positions and programme. This may involve reading groups, education workshops, study circles and cultural activity but also active engagement in principled political action guided by our revolutionary principles. The object is to win workers to a revolutionary consciousness and to a realisation that only through a rupture with the old system, the overthrow of capitalism, can the working-class give birth to a new society.

The working class cannot, without a revolutionary theory and led by a revolutionary party, develop the political consciousness necessary for socialist revolution. It remains the task of the communists through the work of a disciplined, theoretically grounded vanguard party to lead, guide and coordinate that struggle in the workplaces and in every area where workers reside.

Gerry Grainger
International Secretary
Workers Party of Ireland