James
Connolly and the Partition of Ireland
by Günter Minnerup, 1979
No problem has bedevilled the socialist movement in Ireland more than the
division between Catholic and Protestant workers, between those sections
of the working class identifying themselves with the national struggle for
freedom and independence from British domination and those militantly opposed
to it. But although the antagonism between Protestant colonisers and the
native Catholics dispossessed by them dates back well into the 17th century
with the battles of that century still providing most of the themes for today's
sectarian folklore the emergence of the conflict between the Orange and the
Green in its contemporary form coincided with the industrialisation of Ireland
and the emergence of an Irish labour movement. Until the end of the 18th
century, religious conflicts between Presbyterian rank-and-file and Anglican
establishment, and social antagonisms between Protestant tenant and Protestant
landlord always made a broad alliance of Irish democracy against the Anglican
ascendancy seem a real possibility. This was shown by the participation of
many Protestant dissenters in the United Irishmen movement. But once the
Act of Union was passed in 1801, once the religious discrimination against
non-Anglican Protestants had been removed, and once the industrial revolution
saw Belfast expand rapidly 'as an offshoot of the south-west Scotland industrial
complex',[1] identifying the interests of the Ulster Protestant bourgeoisie
with maintenance of the Union and pitting Protestant and Catholic workers
in competition with each other for work and housing,[2] the sectarian antagonisms
acquired a new quality. An inter-class bloc of 'loyalist' workers, petit-bourgeois,
industrial capitalists and landowners, organised and held together along
religious lines by the omnipresent Orange Order, saw its mortal enemy in
the dark forces of 'papism', the Catholic Irish and their national movement.
'By the 1850s sectarian riots were a regular feature of Belfast life. Owenism
and Chartism passed Belfast by',[3] and the threat of the first Home Rule
Bill in 1886 finally persuaded the Tory and Liberal establishment 'to play
the Orange card' (Randolph Churchill), to mobilise the Protestant mob and
religious bigotry against every democratic and nationalist mass movement.
It is not surprising then, that independent working-class politics found
it hard to gain a foothold in this sectarian climate. The first Labour candidate
to stand in a municipal election in Belfast, the Protestant secretary of
Belfast Trades Council,[4] Alexander Bowman, had his house wrecked by an
Orange mob in 1885.[5] In 1893, the first public demonstration of the newly-founded
Belfast Independent Labour Party branch, at which Keir Hardie and John Burns
MP were to speak, was attacked by 'shipyard men, many of whom were members
of the Orange Order . . . furious when they learned that a Labour procession
was to pass by their houses'.[6] When the local ILP leader, William Walker,
and six other Labour candidates were finally elected to Belfast Corporation,
it was at the price of capitulation by most Belfast socialists to the pressure
of Orangeism: Walker's 'municipal socialism' was only concerned with economic
issues and openly proclaimed itself hostile to the national aspirations of
the vast majority of the Irish people, including, of course, the Catholic
Irish proletariat. Socialism in Belfast developed as an ideological and organisational
appendage to British socialism, as, from an Irish standpoint, 'social imperialism'.
As such it was attacked by James Connolly in the famous 'Connolly-Walker
Controversy' [7] – carried out in the pages of the
Glasgow socialist journal Forward – after the Irish Trades
Union Congress had narrowly rejected his motion to set up a separate Irish
Labour Party:
'The
ILP in Belfast believes that the Socialist movement in Ireland
must perforce remain a dues-paying organic part of the British
Socialist movement . . . whereas the SPI [Socialist Party of
Ireland, founded by Connolly's friend William O'Brien in 1909,
GM] maintain that the relations between Socialism in Ireland
and in Great Britain should be fraternal and not organic, and
should operate by exchange of literature and speakers rather
than by attempts to treat as one, two peoples of whom one has
for 700 years nurtured an unending martyrdom rather than admit
the unity or surrender its national identity. The Socialist Party
of Ireland considers itself the only International Party in Ireland,
since its conception of Internationalism is that of a free federation
of free peoples, whereas that of the Belfast branches of the
ILP seems scarcely distinguishable from imperialism, the merging
of subjugated peoples in the political system of their conquerors.'
[8]
James Connolly
was the chief representative of the Republican as opposed to
the pro-imperialist labour movement in Ireland, and his insistence
that the socialist workers' movement had to take up the national
liberation struggle as its own ('The cause of Labour is the cause
of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of Labour. They
cannot be dissevered')[9] is a constant theme of his propaganda
from the beginning of his political activity in Ireland in 1896
until his participation in the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916.
'The juxtaposition of two ideas, socialism and national independence,
is', in the words of his biographer C. Desmond Greaves,[10] 'at
the heart of Connolly's contribution to Irish history', and Connolly's
success 'in effecting a junction between revolutionary Labour
and revolutionary National forces as represented respectively
by the Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers'[11] in 1916 is
hailed by nationalist and socialist historians alike.
Within the spectrum of contemporary socialist thought, his views on the general
relationship between socialism and nationalism were closest to those of Lenin
and the Bolsheviks. Where Lenin spoke of the right of oppressed nations to
national self-determination, Connolly asserted against the Walkerites that
'the internationalism of the future will be based upon the free federation
of free peoples and cannot be realised through the subjugation of the smaller
by the larger political unit'.[12] There are even echoes of Trotsky's theory
of the Permanent Revolution in Connolly's insistence that not Redmond's bourgeois
parliamentary nationalists, but 'only the Irish working class remain as the
incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland'.[13] The outbreak
of the First World War found Connolly ('The signal of war ought also to have
been the signal for rebellion'[14]) firmly in the camp of the anti-war left
of the international socialist movement.
Connolly's Contradictions and Inconsistencies
Yet, underlying the basic consistency of his general approach to the problem
of nationalism and socialism were some important inconsistencies and contradictions.
The treatment of the – from the socialist point of view – rather
crucial problem of the Protestant workers of North-East Ulster is clearly
one of these, and nowhere in Connolly's writings is this clearer than in
his best-known and in many ways most important work, Labour in Irish
History,
written during his years of exile in the United States (1903-1910).
The purpose of Connolly's historical writings was to popularise socialism
and to prove the identity of purpose of the national and social revolutionary
movements. 'This question of presenting socialism so that it will appeal
to the particular hereditary instincts and character of the people amongst
whom you are operating is one of the first importance to the Socialist and
Labour movement. A position, theoretically sound, may fail if expressed in
terms unsuited to the apprehensions of those to whom you are appealing'.[17] But the 'hereditary instincts' of Connolly's audience were largely the nationalist
instincts of the Catholic Irish working class. As Conor Cruise O'Brien pointed
out, Labour in Irish History fails to explain the development of the Protestant
working class of Ulster in the crucial period of the formation of the anti-nationalist
Orange/Unionist alliance:
'The
astonishing and ominous absence in Labour in Irish History is
nineteenth-century Belfast. The story of labour in Ireland's
only large industrial city during the high period of the industrial
revolution is simply left out . . . It is hard to resist the
conclusion that the Protestant workers of Belfast, as they actually
were and with the feelings and loyalties they actually had, were
not consistently felt by Connolly to be part of Irish History,
or the record of labour, of the working class, or of the masses.'
[18]
Of course,
Connolly could not and did not ignore the Protestant problem
altogether. Both his historical and his more directly agitational
writings contain countless passages in which he seeks to explain
the sectarian divisions as a result of skilful manipulation by
the ruling classes and appeals for both Protestant and Catholic
masses to unite in a common struggle against their exploiters
and oppressors:
'.
. . the Protestant common soldier or settler, now that the need
of his sword was past, found himself upon the lands of the Catholic,
it is true, but solely as a tenant and dependant. The ownership
of the province was not in his hands, but in the hands of the
companies of London merchants who had supplied the sinews of
war for the English armies, or, in the hands of the greedy aristocrats
and legal cormorants who had schemed and intrigued while he had
fought. The end of the Cromwellian settlement then found the
'commonality', to use a good old word, dispossessed and defrauded
of all hold upon the soil of Ireland – the Catholic dispossessed
by force, the Protestant dispossessed by fraud. Each hating and
blaming the other, a situation which the dominant aristocracy
knew well how, as their descendants know today, to profit by
to their own advantage.' [19]
'Modern Irish history properly understood may be said to start with the close
of the Williamite Wars in the year 1691. All the political life of Ireland
during the next 200 years draws its colouring from, and can only be understood
in the light of that conflict between King James of England and the claimant
for his throne, William, Prince of Orange. Our Irish politics even to this
day and generation have been and are largely determined by the light in which
the different sections of the Irish people regarded the prolonged conflict
which closed with the surrender of Sarsfield and the garrison of Limerick
to the investing forces of the Williamite party.' [20]
'The revolutionists of the past were wiser, the Irish socialists are wiser
today. in their movement the North and South will again clasp hands, again
will it be demonstrated, as in '98, that the pressure of a common exploitation
can make enthusiastic rebels out of a Protestant working class, earnest champions
of civil and religious liberty out of Catholics, and out of both a united
social democracy.' [21]
But a combination
of historical didactic and appeals to an objectively common class
position of Protestant and Catholic workers was clearly inadequate
in the face of the sectarian reality of Belfast. Connolly's propaganda
was equated with the hated 'Fenianism' by the overwhelming majority
of Protestants. The national question continued to overshadow
the class struggle, and independent labour politics (whether
of Connolly's or Walker's variety) were constantly in danger
of being crushed by the two hegemonic forces of Orange Unionism
and bourgeois Green Nationalism. It will be argued in this essay
that Connolly's evasiveness on this problem in Labour in
Irish History reflected an as yet incomplete integration of the disparate
elements in his thought into a definite political project, and
that the latent tension between his syndicalist socialism and
his revolutionary nationalism in Connolly, the propagandist,
was only to be overcome under the twin impact of the Home Rule
crisis and the outbreak of World War One by Connolly, the
organiser of revolution.
The Impact of the Home Rule Crisis . . .
The conflict over the national question reached a climax after the introduction
of the Home Rule for Ireland Bill in the House of Commons in April 1912.
Fearing the loss of their traditional hegemony in Ireland (the Ulster Protestant
bourgeoisie and landowners, led by James Craig) and the disintegration of
the British empire (the Westminster Tory opposition of Edward Carson and
Andrew Bonar Law), the Unionist alliance began to 'play the Orange Card'
more ruthlessly and determinedly than ever before. More than 500,000 Ulstermen
signed a 'Solemn League and Covenant' pledging themselves to 'using all means
which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a
Home Rule parliament in Ireland';[22] an armed militia, the 'Ulster Volunteer
Force', was raised through the organisation of the Orange Lodges; and the
worst sectarian riots in the history of Belfast occurred when after the traditional
Orange July 12th procession over 2,000 Catholic workers were driven from
the Belfast shipyards. Civil war appeared to be imminent, and the tenuous
links that had been established between sections of the Protestant and Catholic
working class through Larkin's and Connolly's unionising work among the semi-skilled
and unskilled labourers of Belfast [23] were submerged in the flood of violent
bigotry now engulfing Ulster. No further progress could be made by the socialist
movement unless the national question was settled. 'Neither Mr Connolly nor
any other socialist can now hold outdoor meetings in an exclusively Orange
district; even those Belfast socialists who 'will not have Home Rule' in
their programme, cannot hold open-air meetings in any exclusively Orange
district. Socialist meetings in Belfast can only be held in the business
centre of the town where the passing crowd is of a mixed or uncertain nature
. . . It means the propagation of twentieth-century revolutionism amidst
the mental atmosphere of the early seventeenth century.' [24]
Connolly could have been forgiven for watering down the national aspect in
his propaganda and following the Walkerite example in concentrating on purely
social and economic issues under this tremendous pressure. Yet the impact
of the Home Rule crisis served only to increase his determination not to
leave the national question to the bourgeois nationalists:
'When
striving to induce my Belfast comrades to adopt this policy we
are now propagating in our meetings, I was asked did I think
it would make our propaganda easier. I answered that I did not,
that on the contrary it would arouse passions immensely more
bitter than had even been met here by the Socialist movement
in the past, but that it would make our propaganda more fruitful
and our organisation more enduring. To this I still adhere. A
real Socialist movement cannot be built by temporising in front
of a dying cause such as that of the Orange ascendancy, even
although in the paroxysms of its death struggle it assumes the
appearance of an energy like unto that of health . . . Therefore,
we declare to the Orange workers of Belfast that we stand for
the right of the people of Ireland to rule as well as to own
Ireland, and cannot conceive of a separation of the two ideas,
and to all and sundry we announce that as Socialists we are Home
Rulers, but that on the day the Home Rule Government goes into
power the Socialist movement in Ireland will go into opposition.
[25]
In 1913 Connolly
still firmly believed that Home Rule for Ireland would soon be
reality, and that as a result of Home Rule the way would be open
to forging lasting class unity between Catholic and Protestant
workers. [26] Two events, however, were to force him to reassess
the situation, and to reorientate his strategy from the long-term
one of patiently assembling and organising the foundations for
a strong socialist opposition to a bourgeois Home Rule government
to a strategy of insurrection in the immediate future: the threat
of partition and the outbreak of the First World War.
The exclusion of Ulster or at least the predominantly Unionist parts of Ulster
had been considered by the Liberal cabinet right from the drafting stage
of the Home Rule Bill,[27] and the threat of civil war – not only in
Ireland – 'if Ulster was coerced' was used by Asquith to persuade Redmond's
Nationalist MPs to acquiesce in the supposedly 'temporary' partition of Ireland.
To Connolly, however, it was clear that such an exclusion of Ulster could
not remain temporary, and that the creation of two separate political entities
in Ireland would perpetuate the division of the Irish working class along
sectarian lines:
'Such
a scheme as that agreed to by Redmond and Devlin, the betrayal
of the national democracy of industrial Ulster, would mean a
carnival of reaction both North and South, would set back the
wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish
Labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements whilst it
endured.' [28]
'Belfast is bad enough as it is; what it would be under such rule the wildest
imagination cannot conceive. Filled with the belief that they were after
defeating the Imperial Government and the Nationalists combined, the Orangemen
would have scant regards for the rights of the minority left at their mercy.
Such a scheme would destroy the Labour movement by disrupting it. It would
perpetuate in a form aggravated in evil the discords now prevalent, and help
the Home Rule and Orange capitalists and clerics to keep their rallying cries
before the public as the political watchwords of the day. In short, it would
make division more intense and confusion of ideas and parties more confounded.
[29]
The impending
partition cannot be overestimated in its effect on Connolly's
thinking. Popular belief has it that Connolly's insurrectionist
orientation after 1914 was primarily an application of the traditional
Republican 'England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity', an
attempt to exploit the war for Ireland's national liberation.
But in fact it was the threat of partition, the collapse of the
hope that the imminent introduction of Home Rule for all of Ireland
would enable the socialist movement to take root in both the
northern and southern masses that forced Connolly to stake everything
on bringing about an alliance between the labour movement and
the radical wing of the nationalist movement that would, by use
of force, prevent the dismemberment of Ireland from taking place.
All his writings in this crucial period before the outbreak of
the war are consistent on this point:
'To
it [partition, GM] Labour should give the bitterest opposition,
against it Labour in Ulster should fight even to the death, if
necessary, as our fathers fought before us.' [30]
'It is felt that the proposal to leave the Home Rule minority at the mercy
of an ignorant majority with the evil record of the Orange party is a proposal
that should never have been made, and that the establishment of such a scheme
should be resisted with armed force if necessary. Personally I entirely agree
with those who think so.' [31]
'I am not speaking without due knowledge of the sentiments of the organised
Labour movement in Ireland when I say that we would much rather see the Home
Rule Bill defeated than see it carried with Ulster or any part of Ulster
left out. . . ' [32]
. .
. And the War
What Connolly would have done if the war had not broken out in 1914 is a
matter for speculation. But from August 1914 onwards his attention shifted
from the advocacy of armed resistance to an imposed partition of Ireland
to seizing the opportunity for a general, nationwide uprising against British
rule. Nationalism, the conquest of national liberty for Ireland, and internationalism,
the striking of a blow against the imperialist war for the European working
class as a whole, merged into one rallying call for the Irish to rise:
'What
ought to be the attitude of the working-class democracy of Ireland
in face of the present crisis? In the first place, then, we ought
to clear our minds of all the political cant which would tell
us that we have either 'natural enemies' or 'natural allies'
in any of the powers now warring . . . I know of no foreign enemy
of this country except the British Government . . . Should a
German army land in Ireland tomorrow we should be perfectly justified
in joining it if by doing so we could rid this country once and
for all from its connection with the Brigand Empire that drags
us unwillingly into this war . . . Ireland will starve . . .
that the British army and navy and jingoes may be fed . . . Let
us not shrink from the consequences. This may mean more than
a transport strike, it may mean armed battling in the streets
to keep in this country the food for our people . . . Starting
thus, Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration
that will not bum out until the last throne and the last capitalist
bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of
the last war-lord.' [33]
'Is it not clear as the fact of life itself that no insurrection of the working
class; no general strike; no general uprising of the forces of labour in
Europe, could possibly carry with it, or entail a greater slaughter of Socialists,
than will their participation as soldiers in the campaigns of the armies
of their respective countries? . . . If these men must die, would it not
be better to die in their own country fighting for freedom for their class,
and for the abolition of war, than to go forth to strange countries and die
slaughtering and slaughtered by their brothers that tyrants and profiteers
might live?' [34]
'A resurrection! Aye, out of the grave of the first Irish man or woman murdered
for protesting against Ireland's participation in this thrice-accursed war
there will arise anew the spirit of Irish revolution . . . Yes, my lords
and gentlemen, our cards are on the table! If you leave us at liberty we
will kill your recruiting, save our poor boys from your slaughterhouse, and
blast your hopes of Empire. If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of
our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you,
and, mayhap, raise a force that will destroy you.
'We defy you! Do your worst!' [35]
The dice were
now cast. From now on Connolly would relentlessly pursue the
course of an insurrection before the war was over, and in this
he was met by the Republican wing of the Irish Volunteers, who
split from Redmond's leadership in 1914 over the issue of recruitment
for the British war effort. Operating as a faction within the
Volunteers was the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was also
planning an uprising against British colonial rule and some of
whose leaders – Pearse in particular – had been deeply
impressed by the militant spirit of the labour movement during
the 1913 lockout in Dublin.[36] They became increasingly concerned
over Connolly's agitation, fearing that he and his Citizen Army
might strike before the Volunteers. Connolly was co-opted onto
the IRB's Military Council and appointed military commander of
the insurgent forces in the now jointly-planned uprising.
The Home Rule crisis, and particularly the agreement between Redmond and
Asquith to exclude Ulster from Home Rule, thus marked a decisive turning
point in the evolution of Connolly's thought. While his views on the general
relationship between nationalism and socialism were remarkably consistent
throughout his political life, his concrete approach to the strategic problems
posed in Ireland did change. From 1896, when he settled in Dublin and founded
the Irish Socialist Republican Party, until the advent of the Home Rule crisis
in 1912, he saw as his basic task the organisation of the Irish proletariat
along syndicalist lines in opposition to the bourgeois Home Rulers, but on
firm national foundations. Nationalism and socialism were virtually identified,
the lines of division in the class struggle congruent with the lines of division
in the national struggle:
'When
you talk of freeing Ireland, do you only mean the chemical elements
which compose the soil of Ireland? Or is it the Irish people
you mean? If the latter, from what do you propose to free them?
From the rule of England? . . . If you remove the English army
tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless
you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your
efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would
rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through
her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist
institutions she has planted in this country and watered with
the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.' [37]
Connolly's
political philosophy as it had taken shape then consisted of
three clearly distinguishable elements: 1) a historical materialism
with a dominant economic-determinist streak in it, rather typical
of the Marxism of the Second International (although, in Connolly's
case, thoroughly revolutionary in spirit);[38] 2) the syndicalism
inherited from the British socialist movement in the era of 'new
unionism' and reinforced during his American exile with the 'Wobblies'
and de Leon's Socialist Labour Party,[39] and 3) an assimilation
of the social-revolutionary traditions of Irish republicanism,
of Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Fintan Lalor, John Mitchel, the
Fenians and Michael Davitt. But these three elements were not
really integrated into one coherent theory of revolution, they
always remained slightly disjointed. Connolly, in those years,
was more of a trade-union organiser and socialist propagandist
than the organiser of a revolution.
It is in this context that his curious vagueness on the crucial problem of
the Protestant working class must be understood. As a historical materialist
and syndicalist trade union organiser, he obviously hoped that inter-denominational
class unity would be brought about on the basis of common class interests
and through the economic struggle against both Catholic and Protestant employers.
But his Republicanism did not allow him to drop the aim of national liberation
from his programme in the interests of trade-union unity and join forces
with the Walkerites. The contradictions Connolly found himself entangled
in are clearly illustrated by excerpts from one and the same article, written
in 1909:
'.
. . the workers in the towns of North-East Ulster have been
weaned by Socialist ideas and industrial disputes from the leadership
of Tory and Orange landlords and capitalists; but as they are
offered practical measures of relief from capitalist oppression
by the English Independent Labour Party, and offered nothing
but a green flag by Irish Nationalism, they naturally go where
they imagine relief will come from. Thus their social discontent
is lost to the Irish cause . . . when the Sinn Féiner
speaks to men who are fighting against low wages and tells them
that the Sinn Féin body has promised lots of Irish labour
at low wages to any foreign capitalist who wishes to establish
in Ireland, what wonder if they come to believe that a change
from Toryism to Sinn Féinism would simply be a change
from the devil they do know to the devil they do not know! .
. . Now the problem is to find a basis of union on which all
these sections who owe allegiance to one or other conception
of Socialism may unite. My position is that this union, or rapprochement,
cannot be arrived at by discussing our differences. Let us rather
find out and unite upon the things upon which we agree. Once
we get together, we will find that our differences are not so
insuperable as they appear whilst we are separated. What is necessary
first is a simple platform around which to gather, with the understanding
that as much as possible shall be left to future conditions to
dictate and as little as possible settled now by rules or theories
. . . With mutual toleration on both sides, the Protestant worker
may learn that the co-operation of the Catholic who works, suffers
votes and fights alongside him is more immediately vital to his
cause and victory day by day than the co-operation of workers
on the other side of the Channel . . . And the Catholic Sinn
Féiners may learn that love of freedom beats strongly
in the breasts of Protestant peasants and workmen who, because
they have approached it from a different historical standpoint,
regard the Nationalist conception with suspicion or even hostility.'
[40]
The
Primacy of the National Question
After his return from America, through his activity as trade union organiser
in Belfast, Connolly gained a more intimate understanding of the sectarian
reality there, a reality that grew even worse with the outbreak of the Home
Rule crisis. And although optimistic appeals to Catholic-Protestant unity
would continue to be an occasional feature in his historical writings,[41] much of his day-to-day journalism is now devoted to explaining the lack of
class consciousness among the Protestant workers and warning against the
illusion that patient economic agitation and socialist propaganda could bring
them alongside the Catholic workers:
'According
to all Socialist theories North-East Ulster, being the most developed
industrially, ought to be the quarter in which class lines of
cleavage, politically and industrially, should be the most pronounced
and class rebellion the most common. As a cold matter of fact,
it is the happy hunting ground of the slave-driver and the home
of the least rebellious slaves in the industrial world . . .
But as no good can come of blaming it, so also no good, but infinite
evil, can come of truckling to it. Let the truth be told, however
ugly. Here, the Orange working class are slaves in spirit because
they have been reared up among a people whose conditions of servitude
were more slavish than their own . . . the doctrine that because
the workers of Belfast live under the same industrial conditions
as do those of Great Britain, they are therefore subject to the
same passions and to be influenced by the same methods of propaganda,
is a doctrine almost screamingly funny in its absurdity.' [42]
The relative
weight of the different elements in Connolly's thought had changed.
If the Protestant workers were ever to be won, then this could
only be after the obstacle of the national question had been
removed.[43] But given the militantly anti-national consciousness
of the Protestant workers and the impossibility of gradually
breaking this down, Connolly had to face the possibility of imposing Home Rule on Ulster: 'You are not frightened by the mock heroics
of a pantomime army'.[44] The threat of partition, under which
'through North and South the issue of Home Rule will be still
used to cover the iniquities of the capitalist and landlord class'
and once and for all, 'all hopes of uniting the workers, irrespective
of religion or old political battle cries will be shattered',
only reinforced the primacy of the national question over all
else if any progress was to be made for the socialist movement.
The latent tensions between his syndicalism and his nationalism in
Connolly's writings before the Home Rule crisis could now be
resolved. The concrete project of a political revolution, of
an insurrection based on an alliance between the Catholic Irish
labour movement and the revolutionary wing of the nationalist
movement enabled him to abandon the often sterile, propagandist
abstractions of the earlier period.
Connolly's execution by a British firing squad robbed the Irish labour movement
of its greatest thinker, and abruptly ended the development of an indigenous
Marxist tradition in Ireland. The Irish labour movement relapsed into syndicalism
and later reformism, Ireland was partitioned and all progressive movements
in the North were paralysed by sectarianism, as Connolly had prophesied.
Certainly some of the unresolved contradictions and ambiguities in Connolly's thought,
particularly its incomplete emancipation from the syndicalist tradition,
played a part in the disorientation of the Irish labour movement after 1916.
It remains a matter of speculation what further evolution Connolly's political
ideas would have undergone, had he survived 1916 and been able to witness
the Russian Revolution and the reorganisation of the revolutionary marxist
wing of socialism – to which he had always been so close in spirit – in
the Communist International, and whether Irish history would subsequently
have taken a different course. Connolly's greatness was not that he left
an established Irish Marxist orthodoxy – 'Connollyism' – but
that he had been able to acknowledge and face up even to the unorthodox consequences
of the peculiarities of Irish society. The primacy of the national question
over abstract notions of 'class unity' was the quintessence of his mature
political analysis. The recent new interest in Connolly's writings on the
part of a new generation of Irish republicans and socialists are a tribute
to their continued relevance today.
Notes
[1] DR O'Connor Lysaght, The Republic of Ireland, The Mercier Press, Cork
1970, p.17. Between 1813 and 1851 the population of Belfast increased from
30,000 to over 100,000. Cf. Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town, Penguin,
Harmondsworth 1974, p.132.
[2] 'The industrial growth of Belfast coincided with the rural depopulation
of Ireland which reached its peak in the famine years of the late 1840s.
They were not town folk who struggled into Belfast from the west and south;
on foot, by road and later by rail, to find relief from hunger; they were
country folk, and the majority came from Catholic areas.' Emrys Jones, A
Social Geography of Belfast, London 1960, p.190.
[3] McCann, op.cit., p.133.
[4] Set up in 1881 as Belfast United Trades Council.
[5] Owen Dudley Edwards, The Sins of Our Fathers, Dublin 1970, p.145.
[6] Andrew Boyd, The Rise of the Irish Trade Unions, Tralee, Co. Kerry, 1972,
p.72.
[7] Reprinted by the Cork Workers Club in one pamphlet, as No.9 in its series
of 'Historical Reprints'.
[8] Forward, May 27, 1911.
[9] Workers' Republic, April 8, 1916.
[10] C. Desmond Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly, London 1961,
p.425.
[11] Nicholas Mansergh, The Irish Question 1840-1921, London 1965, p.260.
[12] Forward, May 27, 1911.
[13] Labour in Irish History, p.xxxii, Dublin 1971.
[14] International Socialist Review, March 1915; quoted by Greaves, op.cit.,
p.353.
[17] Forward,
April 18, 1914.
[18]
Conor Cruise O'Brien, States of Ireland,
St Albans, Herts, 1974, p.90-91.
[19] The Re-Conquest of Ireland,
Dublin and Belfast 1972,
p.6.
[20] Labour in Irish History,
p.6. One of Connolly's favourite
tactics with regard to Protestant
bigotry was to point out
how the Orange myths were
inconsistent
with historical reality; cf. among many others, his article 'July the 12th'
in Forward, July 12, 1913: 'When therefore, the war took place
in Ireland,
King William fought, aided by the arms, men, and treasures of his Allies
in the League of Augsburg, and part of his expenses at the Battle of the
Boyne was paid for by His Holiness, the Pope. Moreover, when news of King
Williams' victory reached Rome, a Te Deum was sung in celebration of his
victory over the Irish adherents of King James and King Louis. Therefore,
on Saturday the Orangemen of Ulster, led by King Carson, will be celebrating
the same victory as the Pope celebrated 223 years ago.'
[21] Labour in Irish History,
p.135.
[22]
For the full text of the
Covenant, see: Edmund Curtis
and RB McDowell, Irish Historical Documents 1172-1922,
New York/London 1968, p.304.
[23]
In 1907 James Larkin arrived
in Belfast from Liverpool
to organise the dockers into the British-based National
Dock Labourers' Union. In
1908 he led Protestant and Catholic workers together into a hard
struggle against
the Belfast shipping firms. His appeal 'Not as Catholics or as Protestants,
as Nationalists or as Unionists, but as Belfast men and workers stand together
and don't be misled by the employers' game of dividing Catholics and Protestants'
was cheered by a mass meeting waving both Orange and green banners on July
12th . . . A breakaway 'Independent Orange Order' collected money for the
strike fund during the day's Orange processions. After
disagreements with the English leadership of his union over his
militant tactics, Larkin founded the Irish
Transport and General Workers Union in 1909, of which Connolly became Ulster
district organiser in 1911 and later, after Larkin's departure to the USA
in October 1914, General Secretary.
[24] Forward,
August 23, 1913.
[25]
Ibid.
[26]
'But with the event of Home
Rule and the entrance of
Ireland upon the normal
level of civilised, self-governing
nations, the old relation
of Protestant
and Catholic begins to melt and dissolve, and with their dissolution will
come a new change in the relation of either faith to politics. The loss
of its privileged position
will mean for Protestantism
the possibility of an
immense spiritual uplifting.' Forward, May 3, 1913.
[27]
cf. Mansergh, op.cit., p.219.
[28] Irish Worker,
March 14, 1914.
[29] Forward,
March 21, 1914.
[30] Irish Worker,
March 14, 1914.
[31] Forward,
March 21, 1914.
[32] Forward,
April 11, 1914.
[33] Irish Worker,
August 8, 1914.
[34] Forward,
August 15, 1914.
[35] Irish Worker,
December 19, 1914.
[36]
Pearse wrote: 'My instinct
is with the landless men
against the lord of the
land, and with the breadless
man
against the master of millions.
I may be wrong but I do
hold it a most terrible sin
that there should be
landless men in this island
of waste yet fertile valleys,
that there should be breadless
men in this city where great fortunes are made and enjoyed.' Quoted in:
Seán
Cronin, The Revolutionaries, Dublin 1971, p.146.
[37] Shan Van Vocht,
January, 1897.
[38]
'In every case the social
condition of the mass of
the people was the determining
factor in political activity.
Where the mass of the people
find existing conditions
intolerable, and imagine
they see a way out, there
will be a great political
movement; where the social
conditions are not so abnormally
acute no amount of political oratory, nor yet co-operation of leaders,
can
produce a movement ... firmly grounded upon our knowledge of the economic
basis of all political action, we confidently await the day when the ever-increasing
pressure of capitalist society shall bring the workers into our ranks.' Erin's
Hope, The New Evangel, Dublin and Belfast 1972, p.34.
[39]
'The emancipation of the working-class
will function
more through the economic
power than through the political
state. The first act of the
workers
will be through their economic organisations seizing the organised industries;
the last act the conquest of political power ... The struggle for the conquest
of the political state of the capitalist is not the battle, it is only
the echo of the battle.' The Harp, April 1908.
[40] Irish Nation,
January 23, 1909.
[41]
In his Foreword to The Re-Conquest of Ireland,
published in 1915, he describes
the purpose of his book
as 'to explain what the Conquest
of Ireland
was, how it affected the Catholic natives and the Protestant settlers,
how the former were subjected
and despoiled by open force,
and how the latter were
despoiled by fraud, and when
they protested were also
subjected by force,
and how, out of this common spoliation and subjection there arises today
the necessity of common action to reverse the Conquest, in order that the
present population, descendants alike of the plebeian conquerors and the
conquered plebeians, may
enjoy in common fraternity
and goodwill that economic
security
and liberty for which their ancestors fought, or thought they fought.'
Op.cit., p.x.
[42] Forward,
August 2, 1913.
[43]
Cf. note 26.
[44] Irish Worker,
April 4, 1914.
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