We briefly mentioned the Cork Workers Club in relation to the British and Irish Communist Organisation.
A very useful introduction to the Club and its background can be found here on the ever useful Cedar Lounge site- look for the comment by Fintan Lane.
To summarise, sometime after 1972 the Cork branch of the Irish Communist Organisation left to form the Cork Communist Organisation.
This made up largely of the Saor Eire people (publishers of ‘People’s Voice’ and distinct from the Dublin based organisation of the same name), who had earlier merged with the ICO. Their politics were a mixture of Marxist-Leninism (Maoism) and republicanism.
They eventually abandoned the ICO, partly because of the drift towards a ‘two-nationist’ position, and became the Cork Workers Club, which survived into the late 1970s as a real group and, afterwards, as a sort of publishing house.
More information can also be found here.
The CCO’s critique of the ICO is to be found in the pamphlet: On The Resignation of the Cork Branch of the Irish Communist Organisation
We also lifted three pamphlets from the Irish Left Archive!
The Cork Workers’ Club were prolific publishers of left materials, particularly their reprints of historical texts.
“It is our intention to republish a series of pamphlets and booklets which, in our opinion, are of historical value to the study of the development of the Socialist Movement in Ireland. All publication will be unabridged, and we would like to stress that in publishing them we do not necessarily agree with all the sentiments expressed.”
We have scanned three pamphlets (no’s 3, 4 and 11) from their Historical Reprints series and in the process of writing this have just discovered scans of several more on the Woodsmoke Blog. So, we now have ten out of at least eighteen.
We are sure other comrades will have a lot more of these on their bookshelves just waiting to be scanned…
Splits and Fusions 