> However, his political and artistic limitations ultimately restrict
> every one of his ventures. The Wind That Shakes the Barley, like other
> Loach films, seems to hanker after traditional workers' organisations
> that have collapsed, and betrays a lack of critical insight into the
> programmatic basis for these failures. Their collapse, including the
> end of the Soviet Union and the devastating degeneration of the labour
> movement internationally, has presented every filmmaker on the "left"
> with a new and complicated situation.
>
> Loach may have responded better than most, but a film like this one
> exposes all that has not been worked through. Without this, sincerity
> and sympathy for the working class is not enough to carry him through
> to artistic success.
A fairly typical Trot analysis of matters to do with the Anglo-Irish conflict. Bond wants the film to boil down to the socio-economic context in which the Tan and Civil Wars took place because he wants the wars themselves to boil down to that context. They didn't. Here in Ireland (where the film was widely praised, including by leftist historians) the fact that those issues were addressed at all was, in fact, one of its major talking points.
Essentially Loach has made a film about a struggle for national sovereignty in which some, but not all, of the combatants also understood the need for the class struggle. That pretty much sums up what actually happened here in 1919-23. A film focusing primarily on the latter would be an interesting film, but it would overlook the main reason why the wars occurred in the first place. Although given the extreme discomfort that much of today's far left has with the Irish national question, it's not really surprising that Bond would prefer to see that aspect ignored.