The Unorthodoxy of James Connolly
DR O’Connor Lysaght, 1970

Connolly the Bourgeois Nationalist?
Among Scientific Socialists, Connolly's prestige is immense. He is certainly the pre-eminent one in the British Isles and the Commonwealth countries, and his position ranks high vis-à-vis the American leaders. Any serious attempt at Socialist theory in Ireland must take into account Connolly's work in this field. It must also consider the reasons for his failure and for the continuing division of Ireland between two neo-colonial states.

Unfortunately too many of the writings on, and editions of Connolly have been produced less to help clarify the present situation or even to find the truth about the man than to justify the special sectarian position of their producers. By themselves, the new explorations about Connolly tend merely to increase the existing confusion in people's minds. The danger of this is that it will tend to neutralise the effect of our increased knowledge. Many will accept as gospel one or other of the simplifications. Worse still many will give up any attempt to consider Connolly at all and relapse into an unthinking admiration for him as ‘the Socialist leader of Easter Week’. Some of these may even come to accept the argument that Connolly, though great, is now irrelevant and that his real importance for us today begins and ends with his signature on the Proclamation of Irish Independence. But this cannot explain the most striking thing about Connolly; his continuing readership. In this he is practically unique amongst his contemporaries. Sinn Féin ignores the writings of its founder unless perhaps its members want to bone up on nineteenth century Hungarian history. George Russell (AE) and Horace Plunkett are remembered (inaccurately) as co-founders of the Irish co-operative movement. Their political writings are forgotten. MacSwiney's Principles of Freedom loomed out of the surrounding mists some years ago, and has since disappeared again. Only PH Pearse has anything like Connolly's survival, and the reason is as much for psychological as political interest. If Connolly is now irrelevant, then there are a lot of people who need to have the fact explained to them more analytically than is now the case.

But of course, this cannot be done. The teachings of Connolly are, in many cases, more relevant today than when he wrote them. That 'Nationalism without Socialism is national recreancy’ is even more evident now than when it was written. While the Irish experience of the state-sponsored bodies brings home to us the truth that ‘state ownership and control is not necessarily Socialism – if it were, then the Army, the Navy, the Police, the Judges, the Gaolers, the Informers, and the Hangmen, would all be Socialist functionaries’. The small farmers’ Predicament was prophesied by him seventy years ago as ‘the system of small farming crushed out by the competition of great farm and scientific cultivation of America and Australia’. This general development of world competition is leading Irish capitalists to agree with Connolly's conclusions in the Reconquest of Ireland that ‘the democracy of Ireland, amongst the first of the steps necessary to the regeneration of Ireland, must address itself to the extension of its ownership and administration to the schools of Érin’. Indeed they will probably find it necessary to do this on a basis less satisfactory to the Churches than he proposed. With all this, one finds in Connolly, a major development of Republican Internationalism, initiated by the United Irishmen. Connolly turns it into international Socialism, stating that revolutionary action in Ireland ‘may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the last warlord.’ None of these facts, however, are any more then the expression of Connolly's method and his application of it to Irish problems.

In Ireland itself one of the commonest distortions is that Connolly was an ‘orthodox’ theorist in the traditions of Plato and Aquinas, rather than an ‘unorthodox’ bum like Karl Marx. For example, Mr Thomas P O'Mahony, epigone of the Irish Press admits Connolly's Socialism but ‘Socialism’ means for him, no more than ‘stress on the social‚ aspect on society, on all its members’. This definition (which could include, in practice, romantic Conservatism or plain Fascism) includes Marxism but (obviously) does not coincide with it. For Mr O'Mahony, Marxism is an ‘intrinsically evil’ vanity for three reasons. It ‘envisages at some future point the appearance of a classless society and this is historically inevitable’. It ‘denies the existence of God, the reality of spirit, the immortality of the human soul’. It holds ‘that the basic and most important human activity is production, and that all other forms of activity are derived form, and ultimately related to it (in a dependent sense)’.

We may ignore the distortions in these descriptions. What concerns us is the fact that at least two of these distinguishing aspects of Marxism, are also aspects of Connolly's theory. The man wrote: ‘On the day that the political and economic forces of labour finally break with capitalist society and proclaim the Workers' Republic these shops and factories so manned by industrial Unionists will be taken charge of by the workers there employed and force and effectiveness thus given to that proclamation.’ That is not the statement of a man who failed ‘to envisage. ... the appearance of a classless society .... as historically inevitable', nor did he make any such statements. Labour in Irish History is centred on the very assumption 'that the basic and most important human activity is production, and that all other forms of activity are derived from and ultimately related to it. What is more in the July issue of Liberty, Mr O'Mahony is forced to recognise Connolly's acceptance of this principle in Labour, Nationality & Religion, which seems to cause him considerable annoyance. True (and despite some of his mere fanatical Marxist supporters), Connolly does not appear to have denied ‘the existence of Cod, the reality of spirit, the immortality of the human soul’. He accepted the sacraments when he was facing certain death, although Clarke and MacDiarmada (who could not be smeared as ‘Reds’) refused them; although he kept strictly to non-denominational forms in argument, he allowed himself in his dispute with Walker to refer to ‘our religion’. Even so, his attitude to that religion was his own: ‘If any special interpretation of the meanings of Scripture tends to influence human thought in the direction of Socialism or is found to be on a plane with the postulates of Socialist doctrine, then the scientific Socialist considers that the said interpretation is stronger because of its identity with the teachings of Socialism, but he does not necessarily believe that Socialism is stronger or its position more impregnable because of its theological ally’. To base a defence of Connolly's ‘Orthodoxy’ upon his non-Marxism appears, then, to be misinterpreting the concept's meaning.

But Mr O'Mahony himself, is forced to recognise this. In the August edition of Liberty, he solemnly declares that Connolly is ‘Orthodox' because, unlike Marx, he bases his Socialism on the concept of 'Justice’. This waters down the whole concept of Orthodoxy. ‘But it does more: it ignores the facts. Marx did know the ideal of 'Justice', one has only to read his early work the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to see this. What is more, he knew it better than Mr O'Mahony does, for he knew it well enough to recognise that, as a force for social change, it is quite inadequate, precisely because different people (generally corresponding to different classes) have different ideas of it. Thus Marx began his search for Scientific Socialism, and he found it. His discovery was accepted readily by Connolly as well as by others who had found out the utter uselessness of the primacy of ‘ethics’ over ‘politics’ in class society. As far as ‘Justice’ is concerned, Marx and Connolly could be interchangeable. Marx’ Capital contains many tortured denunciations of the injustice of capitalist society. Connolly's Labour, Nationality & Religion ends by putting in the boot on Fr Kane when the latter had taken the (very 'Orthodox') line of appealing for ‘pity for the poor’.

Mr O'Mahony however seems to feel that he has proved his point. He writes ‘it seems to me that in the light of what we have been discussing only a fool or a bigot would dare to call Connolly a Marxist’. Later he hopes he has ‘accomplished with some measure of success my primary task that of vindicating the name and ideals of Connolly from the pernicious charges that people are wont to raise’ .... it seems a pity that the man should have laboured so long in vain. Indeed he appears, now, less a dragon, than as another of those whose minds have been crippled by an early over-dose of Catholic scientology – sorry, social science. Instead of accepting Connolly, he feels he has to defend him from the smears of filthy Marxists and the like. He does not realise Connolly's value to Irish radical politics lies precisely in his acceptance of Marx's methods, and that to try to exclude or diminish the Marxism in Connolly's thought is merely to de-gut the thought itself and reduce its effectiveness in the struggle for the ‘Justice’ to which Mr O'Mahony pays lip service.

This does not mean that Connolly has nothing to offer the religious. On the contrary, his clarity, the firmness of his arguments, the wide range of his knowledge all make him the ideal guide for Christians towards Scientific Socialism. In this sphere, his writings, however, ‘Unorthodox' can only be faulted by invocation of the intellectual thuggery of clerical infallibility.

It is when we come to his orthodoxy as a scientific Socialist, that we find his position less tenable.

Connolly’s Ireland
The basis of Scientific Socialist theory (and thus, Connolly's theory) was summarised by Frederick Engels. In his introduction to the 1883 edition of the Communist Manifesto he writes as follows:

‘The basic thought running through the Manifesto, that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and the intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles – this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx’.

But this is only the basis of scientific Socialism. Between the writing of the Manifesto and Connolly's appearance as a Socialist activist, many additions were made to it. Marx and Engels’ economic and philosophical analyses had expanded their original discovery. Marx’ Capital and Eighteenth Brumaire and Engels’ Anti-Duhring developed the scientific Socialist viewpoint in economics, history and philosophy. New problems had arisen which had to be considered scientifically. The frontiers of Capitalism stretched financially and geographically so that it reached its highest stage – Imperialism. The Paris Commune provided grounds for a revolutionary analysis of the state whilst Ferdinand Lassalle developed another, reformist, outlook that harmonised with the needs of Labour bureaucrats in party and trade unions. All this means that Scientific Socialism as a whole could not, in Connolly's time, be restricted to the Manifesto of the Communist Party. In addition the writings of any Marxist are inevitably shaped to a greater or lesser extent, by the circumstances in which he wrote. Therefore if, for example, we wish to assess the view that Connolly was objectively a ‘bourgeois’ nationalist, then we must consider the background to Connolly's teachings. Without this, the science in Connolly's Socialism cannot be measured, since what is essentially scientific about such Socialism is precisely its basis on hard facts rather than utopian visions.

When we do this, we see that Connolly had to work under conditions, objective and subjective, that made a Socialist revolution in Ireland more of a hazard than in any other area on the North Atlantic seaboard.

In the first place, the relationships of the classes were undeveloped in connection both with external relationships and internal confrontations.

Ireland was placed as a colony of Britain, ruled directly by a foreign Parliament through a bureaucracy and constabulary appointed by the same. The bourgeoisie was divided between the so-called ‘national’ bourgeoisie and the straight collaborators (or, as they called themselves, ‘Unionists'). However, the difference between these groups was not the same as that existing under similar circumstances elsewhere. Due to the closeness of the British market, the exporters had acclimatised themselves to it and were now the most ardent Unionists. On the other hand, the ‘national’ bourgeoisie had an economic base that was usurious and mercantile (or, as the Irish term it, ‘gombeen'). Its interest in nationalism was in that aspect of the ideal that centred on the control of government patronage. Under the Union, certain lucrative areas of a very large and often sinecurist bureaucracy were given automatically to Unionists or even Englishmen. The gombeenmen were intent on cutting this wasteful expenditure and giving what remained to good Irish Catholics. ‘Home Rule’ meant no more than a state of affairs that would enable them to do this. By 1910, divisions as to the tactics of achieving such an ideal resulted in the formation of the breakaway ‘All For Ireland League', which had the backing of the larger Catholic businessmen, but this was secondary.

The real nationalist demands were put forward by the workers. But here there was another complication: During Connolly's first period in the Irish Labour Movement organised workers were only found among the artisans, a group of people with petty bourgeois aspirations (to run their own business, etc.). They were thus doubtful converts to any clear Socialist line and between 1905 and 1910 (when they were distracted by the immediate prospect of ‘Home Rule'), they made up the bulk of Griffith's Sinn Féin with its demands for the creation of a true ‘national' bourgeoisie by protection of industries. Until 1907 the unskilled workers were unorganised, but even after Larkin had founded the ITGWU, the prospects of Socialism among them remained uncertain. The main centres of factory production in Ireland were, for various reasons, difficult to organise; in Belfast, religious strife kept the workers divided: in Guinness’s brewery in Dublin, there was little definite for Larkin's agitational skill to use.

Outside the towns was the bulk of the population: the farmers (of different sizes, usually in inverse ratio to the quality of the land) and, south and east of the River Shannon and Lough Neagh, the labourers. The latter were simply the poor relations of the unskilled labourers of the towns and were to prove less easy to organise successfully. The farmers were in varying stages of transition from tenancy to property owning. For the largest (many of whom had never been tenants, and some of whom were landlords retrenching) the change enabled them to maintain their position amongst the rest of the bourgeoisie. For the smallest, it meant a new form of servitude to the local gombeenman, though the latter's use of credit, such as made the smallholder a potential ally for the worker. This possibility encouraged Connolly eventually to offer an alliance to the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, the leadership of the agricultural co-operative, movement of George Russell (AE) and Sir Horace Plunkett. But this movement was mainly centred amongst the developing petty bourgeoisie of the medium-sized dairy farmers of the south, and was significant, in fact, as a major means of strengthening their capitalist position. Only by attacking the property situation (the remnants of landlordism) could the small and medium farmers be united as a radical force. Fianna Fáil proved this in the 1920s. But Irish Labour developing later vis-à-vis its peasantry than Labour elsewhere, never developed policies that would win that class to Socialism.

Outside all these groups, yet affecting their outlook, were the Churches, of which the Catholic Church was by far the largest. But the centering of Protestantism, in the north east created divisions along the religious line such as aided the exploiters at the expense both of the exploited and of the national unity. For the rest of the country, the Catholic Church had its feet placed in the camps both of the ‘Unionist’ bureaucracy and of the bourgeois Nationalists working in the departments of the first and presiding at the meetings of the second. Its influence was thrown towards peaceful change in the political status quo, such as could not, in practice, change the class relations within it. However, its control of education strengthened the force of its propaganda in this direction.

These objective conditions, were magnified by subjective factors. More than any other European Socialist of his generation, Connolly was a pioneer, theoretically and organisationally. Marx and Engels had written much about Ireland, but little of their work had been translated. Branches of the First International had been established in Dublin, Belfast and Cork, but they had died with the parent organisation. What was more, there had been no follow-up Whereas Germany had had Bebel and Wilhelm Liebnecht to prepare Socialist Foundations for Rosa Luxemburg, and Russia had Plekhanov to carry out the same task for Lenin, Ireland had Michael Davitt with his organisational perspective bounded by the trade unions, and with an ultra-left viewpoint on the national issue that isolated him from the working class ideology of Fenianism whilst enabling him to remain an isolated figure amongst the parliamentary Nationalists. A Socialist movement could not be based on such an analysis, nor could it develop in such a sphere.

Personal problems added to Connolly's task. Not only did he have to earn his living as an unskilled labourer, but on the tiny wage he received, he had to support a wife and six children: a larger family than that of any other of the parents of European Socialism. On top of this, in his agitational tasks, he received much of the day-to-day organisation work. Indeed, towards the end, he appears to have developed such a belief in his own talents that he insisted on combining the two full-time jobs of Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Citizen Army and acting General Secretary of the Irish Transport & General Workers Union. But these facts, though they handicapped him could only have a quantitative effect on his work which had its own overwhelming problems.

When Connolly arrived to begin his political work in Dublin in early 1896, he had an immediate advantage. Both wings of the national movement were in disarray after the fall of Parnell. The Parliamentarians were still split, having been demoralised further by the defeat of Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill in 1893. The physical force IRB had placed its hopes in a misalliance with Parnell that was shattered after the latter's death and the succession of him as leader of his group by the genteel John Redmond. What was more, opportunities for national agitation were obvious, in 1897, ‘The Famine Queen', Victoria, would have been on the throne sixty years and, the next year, 1898, Would be the centenary of the United Irish Rising. In the face of these facts (and they would be repeated regularly during Connolly's Irish career), denunciations of Connolly's ‘compromise with Nationalism’ appear amazingly confused. Of course, the ideal thing would have been for Connolly to have joined an all-British Bolshevik-type Party with full recognition of the right to self-determination for national minorities, but where was such a party? (In 1896, where was it even in Russia?) What was more, could such a party have harnessed national feeling, as successfully as Connolly did, to staging any anti-imperialist revolt?

The Early Pamphlets
Connolly had to use what he had at his disposal if he was to have any hope of success in his struggle for Socialism. His whole task was to put the Socialist movement at the head of the National struggle, and, from this position, to expose theoretically and actively the limitations of the orthodox bourgeois national perspectives. Towards the end, it might be said that he compromised in practice with the bourgeois nationalists; we shall see, however, that this was not based on theoretical analysis.

What is certain is that the first period of Connolly's career is that where he is the most scientific. Here the party plays a major organisational role. Here, too, many of his less happy analyses of the Irish issues are less prominent than they afterwards became. This is well shown in the pamphlets he wrote at this time. His ‘Workshop Talks' (published in 1908 as the first part of Socialism Made Easy) his Érin's Hope (1897) and his New Evangel (1901).

In the last two of these publications, Connolly's attention is concentrated on the limitations of the capitalist approaches to Socialism and Nationalism. In his ‘Workshop Talks’ he opposes the scientific concept of the labour theory of value to capitalist wails about ‘Socialist confiscation’. Here, too, he points out the cosmopolitanism that exists behind the nationalism of the capitalist and gives a prophetic vision of how little the achievement of ‘pure’ nationalism would mean to the workers who had been fooled into limiting their sights to it.

In the New Evangel Connolly attacked five other aspects of the bourgeois nationalist viewpoint. His recognition of its essentially confused idealism are seen in his articles on the ‘Economic Basis of Politics’ and on ‘Father Finlay SV and Socialism’.

The three other articles need still more attention, as being signs of (admittedly small) his future development. His ‘State Monopoly versus Socialism’ shows us his recognition of the ‘Class State (as) repository of the political power of the Capitalist Class’ and that 'Socialism properly implies above all things the co-operative control by the workers of the machinery of production.’ However, there are hints here (as in articles elsewhere at this period) of what would be expanded by him, later on, into the self-sufficiency of the industrially (not politically) organised workers ‘to subvert, the class state and replace it with the Socialist State, representing organised society.’ Another contributive tendency to this Syndicalism is found in his last article ‘Socialism and Political Reform’ here ‘the Economic Basis’ of non-proletarian political parties is treated as non-existent, and their lives considered in an over-simplified manner. At the end of his career in America, Connolly would be reducing his class emphasis on any political party except as a propaganda force.

On the other hand, his article ‘Socialism and Religion', reveals Connolly in a sphere where correctness scarcely ever publicly left him. Although a practising Catholic and one who, in the dispute with Walker, allowed himself to denounce the latter's attack on ‘our religion', he was usually careful to prevent his faith from affecting the day-to-day struggle for Socialism. This article (a worthy introduction to his great Labour, Nationality & Religion) shows how he does this. He writes: ‘Socialism is based upon a series of facts requiring only unassisted human reason to grasp and master all their details whereas Religion of every kind is admittedly based on ‘faith’ in the occurrence in past ages of a series of phenomena inexplicable by any process of mere human reasoning’. His stand on religion compares very favourably with that of his most aggressive heirs, the Stalinists of the Irish Workers' Party. He kept his religion to himself and was, as a Socialist, determinedly non-sectarian (and a dedicated opponent of clerical management of schools).

However, it is in the earliest of those three pamphlets, Érin's Hope, the End and the Means, that Connolly mounted his most complete attack on the assumptions of the various schools of bourgeois Irish Nationalism. He would develop various aspects of it in later writings, but, never as a whole and never so correctly. In particular this pamphlet contains his clearest realisation that alliances between the working class and the bourgeoisie do not advance the struggle for national freedom, but on the contrary that this ‘alliance’ sabotages the struggle. He states clearly that, ‘No revolutionists can safely invite the co-operation‚ of men or classes whose ideals are not theirs and whom, therefore, they may be compelled to fight at some future critical stage of the journey to freedom’.

This position of course rejects ‘stages’ theories of the national struggle, i.e., views that hold that the struggle for national independence must be separated from the struggle of the working class for socialist revolution. This idea of Connolly's has, of course, proved to be too dangerous for Social Democrats and Stalinists of all persuasions and they have tried to soften the impact by contrasting the later remark of Connolly's that: ‘The true revolutionist should ever call into action on our side the entire sum of all the forces and factors of social and political discontent’. But, in the full text, there is no contrast; Connolly, being a scientific Socialist, linked the two statements with a programme of demands. These included an eight-hour day at a minimum wage for railwaymen and corporation employees, free school meals (and later a state free food distribution system) the end of the poor law, a graduated income tax and incomes over £400 p.a. and comfortable pensions for the aged, the infirm and widows and orphans. By linking these to the national issue Connolly thought to ‘call into action .... the entire sum of all the forces and factors of social and political discontent.’ But no one can say that he was thereby inviting ‘the co-operation of men or classes whose ideals were not those of the workers.'

Such critics tend to be less outspoken about other aspects of the pamphlet which they dislike. Unfortunately for them however these points are just as damaging to their case as Connolly's more explicit statements. For example, consider Connolly's attack on the various petty-bourgeois ideals that were being put forward by the left wing of the parliamentary Nationalists. Arthur Griffith took up some of his criticisms, but for Griffith the central point against these utopians was the desire for ‘the immediate establishment of manufactures and the opening up of mines, etc., in every part of Ireland’. It has been stated that Connolly's reaction to this ‘is the implied conclusion that industrialisation, under capitalism, was not to be welcomed especially for Ireland’. But Connolly's analysis is greater than such a limited implication (which is more notable in some of his later and ‘more mature’ works). Connolly points out, in fact, that capitalism is an international phenomenon running according to certain rules and that Ireland was unready to compete within it against England (and against England's existing competitors), because it did not have for industrial expansion ‘two things ... the possession of the wherewithal to purchase machinery and raw materials .... and .... customers to purchase the goods’. This statement was never disproved by Arthur Griffith or, indeed qualitiatively by the events of the last seventy years as the Irish capitalists have had to admit.

Connolly's other ‘controversial’ attack is on what later became known as ‘Distributism’. The idea that ‘we need not perhaps establish industry or try it, but we can at least establish peasant proprietary, and make every man the owner of his farm’. It is argued in defence of this idea ‘that small farms, privately owned, and allied to an efficient system of co-operatives, can be made viable.’ Connolly rightly rejected this type of view. (Where have small farms ‘privately owned, etc.’ been viable for any length of time?) Unfortunately however Connolly tended to be all at sea on the land question. He is utopian on the vital question: how to harness peasant discontent to the working class cause. An answer to this problem has been given by petty bourgeois politicians from PF Ruttledge to Seamus Costello. They have put to their use the demand closest to the hearts of the small farmers: that for more land. Connolly seems never to have been conscious of the differences amongst the farmers that those opportunists have used. Part of his ultra leftism on the question of the land flows from his invocation of the tribalism of Celtic Ireland. However, the significance of this had yet to be developed in 1897. In Érin's Hope, the historical analysis was balanced by his more scientific, attacks on the bourgeois assumption about the present-day situation.

Connolly's period in the Irish Socialist Republican Party was the period at once of his theoretical excellence and eventually of his practical frustration. Despite his leadership in the agitations against Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and in honour of the memory of the United Irishmen, his party had no secure economic basis and won no significant electoral backing. The reunion of the parliamentary Nationalists in the United Ireland League merely assured the futility of the ISRP Internal feuds developed within it. Finally in August 1903 Connolly set sail for the USA and Daniel de Leon's Socialist Labour Party which he was to declare the next year ‘the clearest and most revolutionary of the Socialist Parties in the world today’.

He is said to have remarked, years later, that this move was the greatest mistake of his life.

Connolly in the USA
James Connolly's period of activity in America was a turning point in his political career. This is admitted by all serious researchers, but different reasons are given. To the orthodox Stalinists, he learnt during it, for some unspecified cause, to trust the ‘national bourgeoisie' (whatever that was). To the Maoists, the change was not in him but in the objective conditions while he was away. The truth lies with neither of these.

Part of the difficulty in fixing what occurred lies at the very beginning of the task: in the simple problem of discovering the facts. The best outline is CD Greaves’ biography, but its American chapters suffer to a greater extent than the whole from the book's general defects. Most of all, we lack adequate record of Connolly's American writings. The Desmond Ryan – ITGWU (Irish Transport & General Workers Union) selected works are least satisfactory in their dealings with this period. Until these gaps are filled one has to grope in a twilight world.

All we can say for sure is that Connolly stayed in America from September 1903 to July 1910; that during this period, he broke with ‘the clear and revolutionary’ SLP and joined, instead, (it seems, on a purely emigrant basis) the looser, less homogeneous Socialist Party of America; that, in this period, he became a prominent organiser of the original ‘one big union', the Industrial Workers of the World, and that, in the last months of his stay he wrote his most continually relevant work, Labour, Nationality & Religion, and, perhaps his most famous work Labour in Irish History.

From this, certain facts are clear. Whereas his preaching of the Socialist message does develop in depth, what he preaches becomes less scientific. This is particularly clear in the field of organisation, where his experience with de Leon and his entrance to the IWW can be recognised easily as contributory factors to the Syndicalism of ‘The Axe to the Root’. But we shall see, too, that his American experiences had some unfortunate (though less decisive) results in the forms of his analyses of the national issue. Mr Greaves mentions, also, as contributory causes for Connolly's dispute with de Leon (the leader of the SLP), disagreements on religion, the family and the possibility of real increases in wages. (According to Mr Greaves, incidentally, the break did not come over de Leon's belief in the peaceful road to Socialism). On the last two issues, Connolly appears to have been correct. On the matter of religion, we have already seen that as a Marxist, he was unorthodox but that his private Catholicism failed to handicap his Socialist practice, and that he was able to put forward theory that is of decisive importance in leading Christians to Scientific Socialism.

‘The Axe to the Root’ was published as the second part of Socialism Made Easy immediately after Connolly had broken finally with de Leon to join the SPA. The present author has discussed this part of the pamphlet and its importance in Irish Socialist history in his introduction to the 1968 edition of Socialism Made Easy. Here it is enough to remember two aspects.

The more important is the downgrading of the role of the party. As a result of Connolly's experience in America, he learnt the value of industrial, unionism. But he learnt it too well. The results of the backwardness of the Irish working class that had forced him to go to the USA were misinterpreted by him as being entirely due to the absence of industrial unionism. In fact, this absence was itself a bye-product of the existing economic weakness which had been the overall reason for the failure of a potentially correct political strategy: the development of the ISRP On top of this experience, Connolly's disputes with the SLP (as, previously, with Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation) had further prejudiced him against the political party as such. The industrial Workers of the World provided the answer to the weaknesses of craft unionism. By subordinating to it the political party as its ‘committee', it appeared to offer the answer to the problems besetting the latter body.

The mistake was natural: it was, nonetheless, a mistake. Experience has taught since that if a Socialist political party is to achieve the replacement of the capitalist order, it should became what is termed ‘a vanguard party’. Such a body is primarily a school of united revolutionaries as Antonio Gramsci put it: ‘A Modern Prince’. The trade union, on the other hand, cannot exist only for the future revolution; it must work within society as it is, though it will depend on the revolutionary-minded amongst its members if it is not to degenerate swiftly into accepting that society. Thus many with excellent claims to be trade union officials must be excluded from membership of the vanguard party and the party, itself, may include many revolutionary people who are not trade union members but whose aims are to destroy capitalism. What happens when the functions of the two types of organisation are confused was shown clearly after Connolly's death when the ITGWU. grew as a trade union while its policies lost their former Scientific Socialism. Of course, it may not be impossible, for a trade union to combine its functions with those of a vanguard party. All one can say is that it has never been done yet and that to attempt such a task would seen, normally, to be handicapping oneself unduly.

But was ‘the nature’ of Connolly so different from Lenin on this matter? The Maoists of the Irish Communist Organisation do not seem to think so. In the ICO's interesting collection of articles, The Marxism of James Connolly we find it stated (p.33) ‘but before we deal with the question of the Party let us dispose of the idea that Connolly thought that the growing concentration of trade union organisation was enough to bring socialism:

‘Recently I have been complaining in this column and elsewhere of the tendency in the Labour movement to mistake mere concentration upon the industrial field for essentially revolutionary advance. My point was that the amalgamation or federation of unions, unless carried out by men and women with the proper revolutionary spirit was as likely to create new obstacles in the way of effective warfare as to make that warfare possible. The argument was reinforced by citations of what is taking place in the ranks of the railwaymen and in transport. There we find that amalgamations and federations are rapidly becoming engines for steamrolling or suppressing all manifestations of revolutionary activity or effective demonstrations of brotherhood. Every appeal to take industrial action on behalf of a union in distress is blocked by insisting upon the necessity of ‘first obtaining the sanction of the executive', and in practice it is found that the process of obtaining that sanction is so long, so cumbrous, and surrounded by so many rules and regulations that the union in distress is certain to be either disrupted or bankrupted before the executive can be moved. The greater Unionism is found in short to be forging greater fetters for the class ....’ (The Problem of Trade Union Organisation, Forward, May 1914: not republished since)

‘Concerning the party, he wrote:

‘There is only one remedy for this slavery of the working class, and that is a socialist republic .... there is only one way to attain that, and that way is for the working class to establish a political party of its own .... In claiming this we will only be following the example of our masters. Every political party is the party of a class (The Workers' Republic, p.45).

‘‘Ah yes‚’ it can be said, ‘so Connolly had an inkling of the need for an independent working class Party: but of course he had no conception of the Leninist Central Committee’. Well let's see.

‘ I have often thought that we of the working class are too slow, or too loath to take advantage of the experiences of our rulers ....

'In the modem State the capitalist class has evolved for its own purposes of offence what it calls a Cabinet. This Cabinet controls its fighting forces, which must obey it implicitly. If the Cabinet thinks the time and opportunity is ripe for war, it declares war at the most favourable moment, and explains its reasons in Parliament afterwards.

'Can we trust our members with such a weapon as the capitalist class trust theirs? I think so, (Forward, 23rd May, 1914: not republished since).

‘What is this if not a statement of the need for a Leninist Central Committee?'

This explanation does not convince. It is based too clearly on a set order of quotations, using as a link between two passages from a magazine published in 1914, sentences written eleven years previously (they are, as a matter of fact, taken from Connolly's election address for the Wood Quay Ward, Dublin, in January 1903, before he took up his agitational career in the USA). But even without this, there is nothing in the quotations to suggest that Connolly saw the party as being more than a ‘Political Committee’ of the Trade Union Congress. True, he objects to ‘amalgamation or federation of unions, unless carried out by men and women with the proper revolutionary spirit’. He suggests too, the need for a ‘cabinet’ to lead the working class movement (which, as we have seen, probably means, for him, the trade unions). What he does not ask, in these matters, is how the properly revolutionary men and women are to be discovered and encouraged to take their rightful places on the Workers' ‘cabinet’. Without this, the proposed body appears not as the ‘Leninist Central Committee’ but as the sort of bureaucratic grouping that William O'Brien did actually set over the ITGWU within three years of Connolly's death.

In any case, what is known of Connolly's years with the ITGWU and what has been republished of his writings (by all parties) gives the lie to the concept of his unconscious Leninism in this matter. Both the Irish Labour Party and the Irish Citizen Army were created after the fashion of committees of the trade union movement. The Socialist Party of Ireland was never encouraged to expand its activities or its organisation beyond the realm of a ‘pure propaganda’ body during Connolly's life-time. And, in 1914, when Larkin was going to America, Connolly insisted on combining with the post of Commander-in-Chief of the ICA, that of Acting General Secretary of the ITGWU, thus weakening his scope in the former office. From his republished writings, it is clear that the creation of a vanguard party was not of major importance to him. It seems likely too, that his confusion of the industrial and the political forces of the working class was a factor in his suggestion of a working alliance with George Russell (AE) and the rural co-operative movement (Reconquest of Ireland, Chapter VIII). These proposals involved an uncritical acceptance of Russell's claims for the co-operatives as small, rather than, as they were, medium, farmer bodies. They also showed a decline from the ultra-leftist collectivism of his ISRP period to a similar avoidance of the class issues in the countryside combined with acceptance of the existing land divisions.

The second significant aspect of The Axe to the Root is closely bound up with the conception of the trade union as being a vanguard party. We find him here taking a view that by itself means that the working class can take power peacefully when fully unionised. In practice, this viewpoint was taken in isolation by individuals already developing as bureaucrats and became an excuse for inaction and a readiness to play second fiddle to the political forces of Capitalism. However, it should be seen, more correctly, in the context of Connolly's other writings.

Just what Connolly's total theory was may not yet be fully known. Too many of his total writings (especially his American ones) have not been published since their first appearance. Their addition to our knowledge may yet make qualitative changes to one's understanding of Connolly. Nonetheless, a model of his theory should be created, however unfinished it may be. Such a model will serve at least, to protect one from the unscientific assumptions of others, especially on the national issue which so dominated his last years.

At the base of Connolly's theory was his Scientific Socialism. This led him to recognise the inadequacy of all the bourgeois theories of the Irish Question, both Carsonite and Walkerite, but also Redmondite and Republican. On the first he wrote ‘that the historical backgrounds of the (Labour) movement in England and Ireland are so essentially different that the Irish Socialist movement can only be truly served by a party indigenous to the soil and explained by a literature having the same source . ... (Forward, 2nd August 1913). On Redmondism, he remarked: ‘every succeeding year has seen the Parnellite party become more and more conservative and reactionary’ (Workers’ Republic, 8th October 1898). On the demand for a republic he was careful to differentiate between the idea of ‘a Republic as in France .... (or) .... as in the United States' and his ideal of a Socialist Republic. (Shan Van Vocht, January 1897). This ideal was, at first, to be achieved merely by means ‘nearest our hands’ (Workers' Republic, 5th August 1899). Later as Connolly grew in experience, the means became more certain. We have seen that his concept of the instrument that would achieve this Workers' Republic was the ‘one big union', with its political (and later, military) committee. How this would achieve the desired end was a matter, which varied according to circumstance. Thus, he was prepared to take a stand in general support of the principle of Home Rule (rather than denounce it, as such, as a bourgeois diversion), while the demand was still a living issue. Once home rule had been granted (and shelved) he put forward the call for a republic in alliance with people whose economic theory had not advanced beyond Tone. The fact is that Connolly never considered that bourgeois ‘Home Rulers whether in the shape of ‘Home Rule', of a Republic (or, certainly, of a ‘Free State') could, in itself smash imperialism in Ireland. Thus, while recognising Irish capitalism's subordination to the world system, he placed the organisations influenced by him (as he had placed the ISRP) in the forefront of the national struggle (never too far forward, of course) in order to help force a violent break with Britain. If such a revolution occurred, Connolly knew that it would develop in a manner now generally known to Scientific Socialists as that at ‘Permanent Revolution’. This covered several possibilities. One was that the Labour movement would take control of the national movement as the various national bourgeois leaders were driven by fear of it to compromise with Britain. Another was that ‘Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the last warlord’ (Irish Worker, 8th August 1914). A third was that the national demands of the bourgeoisie would be granted in full (or, at least, as at present, fully enough to effectively kill the remainder as an effective revolutionary force). In such an event, Connolly advised the Citizen Army to ‘hold on to your rifles’. In other words, to act as a nucleus of the force that must eventually take power for the working class from the collaborating capitalists. Such a concept of ‘Dual Power’ existed in Russia a year after Connolly's death, whilst the leadership of the Russian workers got ready to take full control. Once such a concept is understood, it becomes clear that Connolly's ideal of the unionised workers finally shrivelling the shell of the capitalist state merely clarifies certain details of that twilight period he envisaged to be another form of Soviet development within the Dual Power such as Russia would know in 1917.

From this, it is clear that there are a number of errors in the traditional analyses of Connolly's theory. One can clearly discount the extreme lunacies as to Connolly's surrender to bourgeois nationalism, or his acceptance of the method of Rerum Novarum. But one can also deny the more subtle misstatements. There is one, for example, that Connolly believed that something called ‘national freedom’ must come before social freedom (this is confusing because it accepts, as Connolly did not, the claims of bourgeois nationalism). Again it is said the ‘Dual Power’ of the years of the Tan War was qualitatively the same as that, put forward by him embryonically (this is misleading because it ignores the fact that none of the leaders of the then Irish Republic really wanted more than a reform of the national status within imperialism). And, finally, we have the defence of the slogan put forward by Thomas Johnson in 1919 and by Roddy Connolly (the son of James Connolly) and the CPI in 1921: that ‘First the Republic – then the Workers' Republic’ was qualitatively the same as ‘The Republic – but hold on to your guns’. In fact, of course, the first is merely a magical invocation: the second is a strategic directive.

But in fairness to Connolly's heirs, it must be said that they were handicapped by their scripts. Between 1916 and 1948 little of the total works of Connolly, and after 1923, none of his earliest writings were published. The Ryan–ITGWU selections, imperfect though they are, do provide for many what was inaccessible to the cadres of the Labour movement when they were most needed. In the struggle for independence, after Connolly's death, these could only go on their memories and on most (not all) of the pamphlets. Without adequate revolutionary training, their memories confused rather than enlightened them. As can be seen, the pamphlets, by themselves, lack much that is of value, especially on the national issue, the place of which in Connolly's last years we must now consider.

Connolly’s Final Views
Two points on this matter should be examined first of all. Mr Stewart Crehan, for example, accuses Connolly of a ‘compromise with nationalism' in a context that clearly implies a belief that an all-British vanguard party was a serious possibility (thus, he denounced Connolly for under-estimating the British workers). That this is utopian can be seen simply from comparison with the outstandingly successful revolutionary party: The Bolsheviks of Russia. Despite a line on national self-determination which gave more to the minorities than anything a contemporary British group could do, this supranational body could not hold Finland, Poland or the Baltic States. Nor was this due, simply, to the foreign invasions of the Russian Civil War, but due, as well, to the inadequacy of a supranational organisation, centred on Greater Russians, to appeal to nations as developed as these. Ireland was nationally as developed as Poland or Finland: more developed than any of the Baltic States. There is no reason to doubt that a Socialist revolution, centred on Britain, without an independent Irish party, would have merely encouraged an ‘anti-imperialist’ rising that would leave Ireland dependent on the imperialisms of France or of America.

But it is true that, in executing this strategy, Connolly made many mistakes such as resulted in an outcome equivalent to that of a real compromise with bourgeois nationalism. The ICO (Introduction to the New Evangel) tries to explain them away:

'It was implied in Connolly's writings (c1901) that nationalist organisations were not necessary and that national demands could be inscribed on the socialist banner making nationalist organisations superfluous by depriving them of their sole reason for existence. But there were powerful economic forces influencing political developments. The gombeen class of men was growing more powerful in the countryside and in the towns due to the effects of the land acts on all sections of the community. Their ambitions for greater economic and political power found expression in nationalism. Nationalist parties grew and expanded. Nationalist theoreticians like Arthur Griffith began to get a hearing.

‘By 1914 the nationalist movement was quite powerful. It had of course a right and left wing; but all sections had more influence than the working class organisation in which Connolly was involved.'

This statement is so misleading that one suspects that it was deliberately planned as such. One must concentrate attention on the final part: that ‘all sections (of the bourgeois national movement) had more influence than the working class organisations in which Connolly was involved’. This is too vague to be accepted. In 1914 (or even 1916) the ITGWU certainly had more influence on the people than such a ‘Nationalist theoretician’ as Griffith. However, we may assume that the ICO did not mean to refer to a trade union but to the independent vanguard party. However, to have used the term would have given away the fact of Connolly's disregard of that need: a fact which, as has been shown, the ICO denies. Further light on this matter is thrown by the IWP's publication in pamphlet form (the first ever) of Connolly's articles on Revolutionary Warfare. The present author must admit here to a mistake, in his introduction to Socialism Made Easy; he declared that Connolly's practice was better than his theory. Revolutionary Warfare reveals that his organisational Syndicalism weakened his practice despite his theory. In this valuable work, one sees just how aware Connolly was of the dangers of his course in 1916. Again and again the lessons are driven home: don’t rely on holding the metropolis alone: don’t trust the capitalists. Again and again, one remembers that this man was defeated because he relied on provincial battalions of the bourgeois Irish Volunteers to back the action spearheaded by his Irish Citizen Army. Such a failure to live up to his own theory can be justified by his belief in an early end to the war and his recognition of the need to act before this. But that does not explain the total absence of attempts to distribute any Citizen Army units over the country. These facts, show once again, Connolly's over-optimistic belief in the industrial union as a revolutionary force, capable to creating its Red Guard spontaneously.

That this mistake was fatal to Connolly's immediate hopes is now history. But what must be added is that the end of these immediate hopes meant the eclipse of the possibility of their revival. Connolly was executed. A vanguard of conscious Socialist revolutionaries was non-existent. Books that he left behind to became the most popular of his works were inadequate to break the petty bourgeois prejudices of most Irish revolutionaries.

One of them, Labour, Nationality & Religion gives its readers considerable feeling for Socialism, but is made less effective by the feeble nature of its opponent, Fr Kane. Future clerics would pay lip service to Connolly while opposing him, in fact, with the doctrine of Distributism, or the division of the capital wealth of the country amongst the individuals therein.

But Distributism itself flourished in a situation where Connolly's early pamphlets could be ignored and where his last pamphlets on the national question gained an extra popularity. In a land where industrialism had scarcely progressed, non-Socialist radicalism was a constant danger. There was nothing to protect against this except Connolly's writings. And, because of the pressures mentioned before, not one of the pamphlets (nobody thought, yet, of collecting the articles) could, by itself, explain his position.

All of them were written for specific purposes, to attack a hostile priest, to encourage industrial unionism or to teach Irish history on class lines. Of them the most impressive work, Labour in Irish History, was precisely that which was least likely to provide a scientific basis for apposition to the non-Socialist dreams of property-owning that have haunted the Irish workers. One should mention, too, that Connolly's very last pamphlet, The Reconquest of Ireland, gives the impression of being a summary of Connolly's thought, whereas it is simply another work written for an occasion: in this case, to ‘do’ both the Carsonite and Redmondite analyses of Ireland's needs. Were it not written by Connolly, it would be long forgotten.

But Labour in Irish History explains Irish historical development in class terms. It relates Irish national feeling to its agent's relations to their means of production and relates all to the international situation. Yet it fails to relate these facts scientifically to the problems of Connolly's time (except for a relatively brief description of the problems of the small farmer vis-à-vis the foreign rancher).

This ‘Historicism’ (or the emphasis on history rather than economics as a decisive factor) can be seen in three ways. In the first place, Connolly, in order to disprove the rubbish written (and still written) about the Irish natural respect for aristocracy exaggerates the significance of the tribal institutions of ancient Ireland. He admits that ‘Communal ownership of land would, undoubtedly, have given way to the privately owned system of capitalist-landlordism, even if Ireland remained an independent country', but ignores the fact that it was so doing even before 1171. Mare important is the conclusion he draws from his belief in Celtic institutions. There are times in his accounts of early Republicanism when one feels that one is asked to believe that its advocates not only wished to set up some form of Socialism (which might be arguable) but could have done so (which is not). And there is no reason to doubt that Connolly's expressed belief in the continuance of the tribal feeling served as an excuse for not making any explanation of the form in which national bourgeois (and, of course, national petty bourgeois, or ‘lower middle class') theory took in his time.

These latter facts must be examined in more detail. The uncritical accounts of the physical force movements, though correct in content, can be justified in form only when it is remembered that Connolly wrote the articles in America. In Ireland he had already criticised correctly the history of the national movement:

‘Ireland occupies a position among the nations of the earth unique in a great variety of its aspects, but in no one particularly is this singularity more marked than in the possession of what is known as a physical force party – a party, that is to say, whose members are united upon no one point, and agree upon no single principle, except upon the use of physical force as the sole means of settling the dispute – between the people of this country and the governing power of Great Britain.

‘Other countries and other peoples have, from time to time, appealed to what the first French Revolutionists picturesquely described as the 'sacred right of insurrection‚, but in so appealing they acted under the inspiration of, and combated for, some great governing principle agreement. The latterday highfalutin’ hillside‚ man, on the other hand, exalts into a principle that which the revolutionists of other countries have looked upon as a weapon, and in his gatherings prohibits all discussion of those principles which farmed the main strength of his prototypes elsewhere and made the successful use of that weapon possible. Our people have glided at different periods of the past century from moral force agitation, so called, into physical force rebellion, from constitutionalism into insurrectionism, meeting in each the same failure and the same disaster and yet seem as far as ever from learning the great truth that neither method is ever likely to be successful until they first insist that a perfect agreement upon the end to be attained should be arrived at as a starting-paint of all our efforts’. (Workers' Republic, 22nd July 1899).

The fact that, later in the article quoted, Connolly reveals an over-optimistic belief in parliamentary tactics, does not destroy the value of his historical analysis. It has, indeed been made less relevant for the last seventy years only in that the switches of tactic have found a third corner created by the policies of Connolly's social reformist heirs. But there is no trace of this in his accounts of the United Irishmen, the Young Irishmen or the Fenians. Thus, it is not surprising that many who came after him read the pamphlet but not the article. And these were duly convinced that they were following his teachings in fighting for social liberation in movements that had only a readiness to use physical force as a unifying factor. Thus, too, we find today, Fianna Fáil proclaiming its inheritance from Connolly and its Deputies speaking in honour of a man who would, were he alive, be denouncing them, correctly, as turncoats.

And this possibility was encouraged further by Connolly's studious vagueness in dealing with the last fifty years of his history. He is content to point out once again that ‘the Irish question is a social question’ and to leave it with a prophesy 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’. Only half the analyses of Érin's Hope are developed. He does not provide any programme for such a unity. Without that, the six counties were lost to the Republic of Ireland and, in the twenty-six counties, the petty bourgeois leaders of Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil appeared to fill the gap.

These criticisms of Labour in Irish History should be borne in mind while it is being read. The overriding fact is that it is a dangerous book for two reasons. Firstly its clear style makes it appear a work of elementary education for the layman, whereas it conceals truths that can be recognised only by the trained Marxist. Secondly if it is not to mislead the reader, he or she should read it in connection with all Connolly's other works.

This cannot yet be done. Though much has been re-published, much still remains to be discovered in the files of forgotten newspapers. It is to be hoped that the publication of the Collected Works of Connolly will be carried out as the work of all sections of the Irish Left and in a non-sectarian spirit.

Until such publication is made, or until new discoveries are produced, such as would alter existing knowledge of Connolly and his teachings, the present author suggests that his conception of Connolly is the correct one. This is of a major Scientific Socialist thinker (albeit with reservations as to the supernatural). He was handicapped by his lack of understanding as to the rural question and (decisively) as to the nature of the revolutionary organisation. On the credit side, Connolly understood the dynamics of revolution in their general working, if not in their details.

What is his relevance today? The aims of the bourgeois leaders of the national revolution have been achieved as far as they were practicable. State patronage is controlled within the limits of the island; formal ‘Home Rule’ has been granted. The peasants have the land, These achievements are now seen to be inadequate. The Irish nation is divided. Attempts to produce a new native capitalism through protection have had to be abandoned for the reasons anticipated in Érin's Hope. Now, the larger sectors of the ‘national’ bourgeoisie are welcoming foreign monopolies to encourage economic growth and this is being done at the expense of the petty bourgeoisie. The decline of the latter class is destroying the economic basis for the hopes that sustained Griffith's Sinn Féin; today, that party has to talk of a ‘Workers' Republic’. What Connolly expected to happen if the capitalists dominated the republic has been fulfilled. England still rules us to our ruin, even while our native rulers’ lips offer hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause they have betrayed.

To finalise the national revolution is a task now more clearly mixed into the achievement of the Socialist Revolution that it was in Connolly's time. Irish capitalism has no life except as agent for imperialism. Thus only a thirty-two county socialist revolution – an attack on the bosses and the ranchers, north and south – can either gain the needed support for and interest in the final national victory. Demands must be made to collectivise farms over a certain size, to nationalise (with full Workers' control) firms that have links of any kind with external interests, to guarantee minimums of wages, employment and pensions and to democratise education: to destroy the social order in the interests of workers and small farmers as well as the form of state power. But these demands must be backed by a revolutionary vanguard group, working, if necessary, with or even through other organisations, but without compromising its programme. As Connolly remarked, The Socialist must use the means ‘nearest our hands’.

He wrote, too, (Workers' Republic, 5th August 1899): We are told to imitate Wolfe Tone, but the greatness of Wolfe Tone lay in the fact that he imitated nobody’. And thus we can only equal James Connolly by excelling him: by learning from his career the better to achieve that for which he strove all his life.

Notes
According to the theories of Arthur Griffith the aim of the struggle in Ireland should be to achieve a similar relationship to Britain as existed between Hungary and Austria in the ‘dual-monarchy’ of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Griffith's books therefore deal at considerable length with the constitutional and other details of the founding of this dual monarchy.

George Russell, an Irish theorist of agrarian reform used the pen name of AE.

Connolly's book Labour, Nationality and Religion is cast in the form of a reply to a series of anti-socialist sermons by Fr Kane.

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