A Portrait
of James Connolly II: Connolly as Nationalist and Internationalist
James T Farrell, New International No. 14, 1948
Connolly was not only a brave and bold fighting man, he was also a bold and
stimulating thinker. One of the reasons which helps to explain why many American
Marxists have often been rigid and schematic is that they have not sufficiently
grasped the problems of capitalism from the standpoint of a backward country
with an undeveloped economy, in contrast to those of an advanced country
with a modern economy. Because of this, I think that Connolly should have
an especial interest and significance for Americans. He was a Marxist who
came from the depressed working class of a backward country, a nation which
had not won national sovereignty.
Once we realize this fact, seeming contradictions in his work and his beliefs
can be explained. Connolly, besides being a Marxist and a revolutionary leader
who came from the working class, was also a nationalist and a believing Roman
Catholic. He was born amidst conditions of life which feed discontent: the
alternative to discontent in conditions such as those of his childhood is
an attitude of submissiveness. Rebellion and discontent became for Connolly
the road for the development of his own personality, his individuality.
He was but one of a mass oppressed by capitalism; at the same time, this
mass bore most heavily the burden which was imposed as a result of English
control of Ireland. As Connolly studied and matured, he came to see that
a complicated series of burdens lay on the back of the common people of Ireland:
there was more than one oppressor. He was able to understand with lucidity
the complicated nature of the problems which were involved in the Irish problem.
Reading his work, or the accounts of his life, one is struck by the fact
that there was little subjective blockage in Connolly's nature. He was direct
and simple. He was capable of drawing clear and warranted correlations. He
was able to measure actions, large and small, in terms of his ultimate aim – the
aim of a democratic and socialist world. His own personal experiences and
observations were drawn into his thought; and on the basis of these he was
able to grasp facts from his studies with amazing lucidity and to arrive
at firm theoretical conclusions.
There was considerable variety of experiences in his own life. He saw at
first hand the conditions of life of workers in Ireland, in Scotland, in
America. He was clearly aware of differences between Ireland and America.
Even before he came to the United States he had studied economics by himself
and had written about the differences in methods of agricultural production
in Ireland and in the United States. Thus he wrote:
‘The
agriculture of Ireland can no longer compete with the scientifically
equipped farmers of America, therefore the only hope that now
remains is to abandon competition altogether as a rule of life,
to organize agriculture as a public service under the control
of boards of management elected by the agricultural population
(no longer composed of farmers and laborers, but of free citizens
with equal responsibility and equal honor), and responsible to
them and the nation at large, and with all the mechanical and
scientific aids to agriculture the entire resources of the nation
can place at their disposal. Let the produce of Irish soil go
first to feed the Irish people, and after a sufficient store
has been retained to insure of that being accomplished, let the
surplus be exchanged with other countries in return for those
manufactured goods Ireland needs but does not herself produce.
‘Thus we will abolish at one stroke the dread of foreign competition and
render perfectly needless any attempt to create an industrial hell in Ireland
under the specious pretext of ‘developing our resources.’
‘Apply to manufacture the same
social principle. Let the cooperative organization of
the workers replace the war of the classes under capitalism
and transform the capitalist himself from an irresponsible
hunter after profit into a public servant, fulfilling
a public function and under public control. 1
And speaking
along the same line, he discussed the proposal to create peasant
proprietors instead of a landlord class. He wrote:
‘Have
our advocates of peasant proprietary really considered the economic
tendencies of the time, and the development of the mechanical
arts in the agricultural world? The world is progressive, and
peasant proprietary, which a hundred years ago might have been
a boon, would now be power-less to save from ruin the agriculture
of Ireland.’ 2
The small farmers
could no longer compete with the mammoth farms of America and
Australia, and he continued by pointing out how the American
farmer, with his thousands of acres and his machinery could outsell
the Irish farmer in the English market.
Economic backwardness is a phenomenon which needs to be evaluated relativistically.
It must be gauged from the standpoint of the world market. At the present
time the phenomenon of backwardness is more complicated than it ever was
in the past. Advanced countries such as England are being placed in a position
that is at least remotely analogous to that of the Irish farmers in Connolly's
time. British workers must work harder and get less than the American workers.
This is a consequence of competition on the world market. It is to Connolly's
merit that he grasped this fact and stated it simply and clearly in his very
first years as a socialist.
Without the formal academic training of many economists, Connolly saw the
relationship of the Irish problem to the problems of the world market. In
simple language he was able to state the nature of the impact which the world
market made on Ireland, on its farmers and also on its workers. His political
nationalism was not turned into an excuse for ‘economic’ nationalism.
He wanted Irishmen to be free men, free and proud and dignified: he did not
believe in the development of national resources in a backward country at
the expense of the moral and social development of the people of that country.
In this sense he may be contrasted
with Joseph Stalin. Connolly advocated democratic
collectivization as a means of feeding the Irish
people and of organizing Irish economy in a rational
and just manner. Stalin's forced collectivization
was diametrically opposite to that pro-posed by
the young Connolly. 3 Connolly
here had a very clear insight, one which should
be carefully considered by those who have argued
that he was too nationalistic to be a socialist.
His nationalism was, in reality, consistent with
his internationalism. And both were consistently
developed not only in political but also in economic
terms. 4
Connolly absorbed the democratic national tradition of Ireland. When he released
the first issue of his paper, The Workers Republic, in Dublin on
August 13, 1898, he stated:
‘We
are Socialists because we see in socialism not only the modern
application of the social principle which underlay the Brehon
laws of our ancestors, but because we recognize in it the only
principle by which the working class can in their turn emerge
in the divinity of FREEMEN, with the right to live as men and
not as mere profit-making machines for the service of others. We
are Republicans because we are Socialists, and therefore enemies
to all privileges; and because we would have the Irish people
complete masters of their own destinies, nationally and internationally,
fully competent to work for their own salvation.’ 5
Spiritually
or intellectually, he was a product of the great French Revolution,
of the Irish tradition of rebellion, of the Marxist international
movement, and also of the Catholic Church. And, as we have noted,
he himself lived the hard life of the workers. He arrived at
his ideas by patient and methodical study. And the aim of his
thought and activity was to work for genuine freedom. Once when
a lady was disturbed by a speech he had delivered, he answered
her remarks by declaring: ‘Revolution is my business.’ His
total life experience led him forward to revolutionary action.
He saw this action as taking place in Ireland. But he linked
it with the idea of an international struggle for socialism and
democracy.
When away from Ireland he participated in the socialist movement in Scotland
and in America. When the First World War broke out, he called for action
not only in Ireland but elsewhere. He saluted Karl Liebknecht. And when there
was a false rumor that Liebknecht had died, he wrote:
‘We
cannot draw upon the future for a draft to pay our present duties.
There is no moratorium to postpone the payment of the debt the
Socialists owe to the cause; it can only be paid now. Paid it
may well be in martyrdom. ... If our German comrade, Liebknecht,
has paid the price, perhaps the others may yet nerve themselves
for that sacrifice.... All hail, then, to our continental comrade,
who, in a world of imperial and financial brigands and cowardly
trimmers and compromisers, showed mankind that men still know
how to die for the holiest of all causes – the sanctity
of the human soul, the practical brotherhood of the human race.’ 6
Connolly worked
on Labour in Irish History for many years. During this
period he was also engaged in many other activities, editing,
lecturing, organizing, leading strikes, participating in anti-British
demonstrations, traveling from Ireland to America and back to
Ireland, and at the same time earning a modest living for himself
and his family. This work, along with The Re-Conquest of
Ireland, offers an economic and social history of Ireland.
Connolly claimed that capitalism was a foreign importation brought
to Ireland by the English. With capitalism, feudalism was also
introduced into Ireland. The life of the Gaelic clans, where
property was owned by the clans, was in consequence broken up.
In clan life a rudimentary form of democracy had been practiced.
Then he traced the course of the development of capitalism in
Ireland, a subject nation. He related this development to the
successive struggles for national independence. These struggles
he evaluated and interpreted from a socialist standpoint. Early
in Labour in Irish History, he quoted, as a premise,
the following passage from Marx:
‘That
in every historical epoch the prevailing method of economic production
and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following
from it, forms the basis upon which alone can be explained the
political and intellectual history of that epoch.' 7
He traces the
alterations in the prevailing method of production in Ireland
through feudalism to capitalism, and he describes the class character
of every movement which struggled for Irish freedom. The tradition
of social struggle in the Irish national movement is here outlined
step by step, generalized, evaluated and in this way ordered
in terms of a coherent analysis and doctrine. The lesson which
he persistently draws from the analysis of Irish struggle is
that the social question is inseparable from the political question.
He reveals that one of the factors involved in the failure of Irish rebellion
is the fact that there was always more than one class. This lesson is presented
in his first chapter, and it is then illustrated by a series of lucid analyses
which are concerned with every important movement for liberation in Irish
history. He wrote:
‘During
the last hundred years every generation in Ireland has witnessed
an attempted rebellion against English rule. Every such conspiracy
or rebellion had drawn the majority of its adherents from the
lower orders in town and country, yet under the inspiration of
a few middle class doctrinaires the social question has been
rigorously excluded from the field of action to be covered by
the rebellion if successful; in hopes that by each exclusion
it would be possible to conciliate the upper class and enlist
them in the struggle for freedom.... The result has been in nearly
every case the same. The workers, though furnishing the greatest
proportion of recruits to the ranks of the revolutionists, and
consequently of victims to the prison and the scaffold, could
not be imbued en masse with the revolutionary fire necessary
to seriously imperil a dominion rooted for 700 years in the heart
of their country. They were all anxious enough for freedom, but
realizing the enormous odds against them, and being explicitly
told by their leaders that they must not expect any change
in their conditions of social subjection, even if successful,
they as a body shrank from the contest, and left only the purest
minded and most chivalrous of their class to face the odds and
glut the vengeance of the tyrant – a warning to those in
all countries who neglect the vital truth that successful revolutions
are not the product of our brains, but of ripe material conditions. 8
Connolly's
conclusion to his study affirms the view that labor must take
the lead in the liberation of Ireland. It must be the most forward,
the most daring champion of both national liberation and social
justice in Ireland; it must assemble all discontented Irishmen
around it. This is the road to the re-conquest of Ireland. Thus:
‘As
we have again and again pointed out, the Irish question is a
social question, the whole age-long fight of the Irish people
against their oppressors resolves itself in the last analysis
into a fight for the mastery of the means of life, the sources
of production, in Ireland. Who would own and control the land?
The people or the invaders?’ 9
Here in Connolly's
view was ‘the bottom question of Irish politics.’ But:
‘It
is undeniable that for two hundred years at least all Irish political
movements ignored this fact, and were conducted by men who did
not look below the political surface. These men to arouse the
passions of the people invoked the memory of social wrongs, such
as evictions and famines. but for these wrongs proposed only
political remedies, such as changes in taxation or transferences
of the seat of government (class rule) from one country to another....
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 it will 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.' 10
Connolly's
basic lines of thought were continued from Labour in Irish
History to The Re-Conquest of Ireland. The first
sentence of the foreword to this volume expresses its guiding
thought:
‘The
underlying idea of this work is that the labor movement of Ireland
must set itself the re-conquest of Ireland as its final aim,
that their re-conquest involves taking possession of the entire
country, all its powers and wealth-production and all its natural
resources, and organizing these on a co-operative basis for the
good of all.’ 11
Following
a historical account of the conquest of Ireland, Connolly describes
the conditions of life of the Irish masses in the early twentieth
century, in Dublin and Belfast; he discusses problems and questions
of democracy and of political morale and of morality, quotes
statistics and otherwise reveals in a voice of eloquent and passionate
indignation the moral and physical consequences of exploitation;
he deals with the problems of education, describes the position
and fate of women, and analyzes the value and the possibility
of the cooperative movement. His book embodies vision and idealism,
and at the same time no detail concerning the misery and wretchedness
of the masses is too small for his attention. At one point in
the book, he states: ‘For the only true prophets are they
who carve out the future which they announce.’ 12
Connolly here announced a future for Ireland. This ideal future – a
socialist commonwealth – was the standard by which he measured the
Irish present, and it was the basis of his political faith. In action, he
sought to lead Ireland toward the realization of that ideal; in his writing,
he sought to implant this faith and this ideal in the minds of Irishmen.
He wrote:
‘A
people are not to be judged by the performance of their great
men, nor to be estimated spiritually by the intellectual conquests
of their geniuses. A truer standard by which the spiritual and
mental measurement of a people can be taken in modern times is
by that picture drawn of itself by itself when it, at the ballot-box,
surrenders the care of its collective destiny into the hands
of its elected representatives.
‘The question whether such elected persons have or have not the power to
realize the desires of their constituents scarcely enters into the matter. It
is not by its power to realize high ideals a people will and must be judged,
but by the standard of the ideals themselves.’ 13
This quotation
furnishes a suggestive insight into the thought of Connolly.
His thinking was both practical and visionary; it gave energy
and direction to a fighting faith and a concept of a free future.
1 Quotation from Connolly’s Erin’s Hope:
The End and the Means (1901) in Fox, James Connolly: The Forerunner,
p.231 Back
2 Ibid., p.232 Back
3 Farrell's Note: As Manya Gordon demonstrates factually
in her book Workers Before and After Lenin (New York: EP Dutton,
1941), the Russian people as a whole got less food after collectivization
that they did before it. Collectivization provided Stalin with a labor supply
needed for industrialization. The development of natural resources was implicit
in the implementation of the theory of 'socialism in one country'; but all
this, we know, was done at the expense of the Russian people. Back
4 Farrell’s Note: A good way of testing Connolly's
clarity would be to contrast his ideas – such as those quoted above – with
the ideas of the Irish Stalinist, Brian O'Neill, in The War for the Land
in Ireland. Both here and in his book Easter Week, O'Neill pays tribute
to Connolly.
Writing in the 1930s, O'Neill dealt with the world agrarian crisis, and he
had no trouble demonstrating that the Irish farmer was the victim of the
world market and produced at a grave disadvantage in competition because
of the development of farming in advanced countries. Attempting to point
the way out, O'Neill quoted the passage of Connolly which I have cited above. And
the way out proposed by O'Neill is described as that taken by the Soviet
Union, with planned economy and collectivized agriculture. As part of his
proof O'Neill offered culled statistics from the various Soviet sources,
but he did not compare and evaluate them. He may well have been sincere,
but from the standpoint of the present it is clear that he depended on the
usual bureaucratic generalities and abstractions. The Irish problem was treated
as though it were the Russian problem: win a ‘third-period’ revolution
on paper and then Ireland could be modeled after the Soviet Union. Without
any real relevance to his argument, O'Neill insisted that the increase in
the number of tractors and harvesters in the United States from 1910 to 1930
should have permitted American agriculture to double its sowing. This did
not happen; American agricultural production increased by only 13.5 percent
during this period. Needless to say, I am not an economist or a statistician.
But I can see the utter shabbiness of arguments of this kind.
I mention this fact because, when I originally read O'Neill's book in 1936,
it fooled me. And the way that Stalinism fools persons untrained in economics
and statistics can thus be suggested. Isolated statistics are used falsely.
By a meaningless comparison of abstracted statistics, a false conception
of production in the Soviet Union relative to the United States is indicated.
We now know that the Irish workers and farmers, bad as was their lot, fared
better than did the Russian workers and farmers during the period of forced
collectivization. After the famine in Russia in the early 1930s, the Russian
government was forced to make concessions: it permitted a certain portion
of the agricultural product produced on collective farms to be sold directly
on the market. Here is the way O'Neill described this: ‘The produce
of farms is disposed of in two ways. It can be handed over entirely at a
fixed price to the cooperative organizations, to be distributed by them to
the consumers, or twenty percent can be sold direct (a method introduced
in 1932 to induce the collectives to market more of their produce). The advantages
of this latter modification are that larger supplies are available at lower
prices due to the more direct path from the producer to the consumer, while
the collectives are often able to receive more for their produce. Vegetables
grown in the garden may also be sold direct to the consumer, but no middleman
is permitted to step into the transaction.’ (Brian O'Neill, The
War for the Land in Ireland [New York: International Publishers, 1933],
p.173.)
This last sentence is further suggestive. O'Neill introduced this reference
to the middleman as an obvious appeal to prejudice and as a rationalization.
In general, he gave no clear picture of Soviet agriculture; at the same time
he stressed the chaos of capitalist agriculture. He threatened to outdistance
American agricultural production with a mini-mum of percentages. And here
is a sample of his general style and method of Stalinizing the tradition
of Connolly: ‘By 1926 it could be said that agriculture had been saved
[in the Soviet Union].... But hand in hand with this development, there was
not only an increased prosperity for small and middle farmers; the wealthiest
peasants and the kulaks – the hated gombeen men of the village, who
worked their farms by hired laborers and who were often, in addition, shopkeepers,
money-lenders or publicans – had their position strengthened, with
a corresponding hardening of their capitalisy psychology. And while agriculture
had been restored, it had not developed on the new social basis, in the sense
that while in the towns the means of production were long since socialized,
agriculture, in which the ownership of the land and the implements was not
centralized, was relatively much more backward.' IIbid., pp.171, 172.) The
reader can learn about the real situation which was masked by this double
talk by reading Manya Gordon's study cited above [n. 3].
A contrast between Connolly and O'Neill will show the difference between
a real socialist and a Stalinized intellectual. In Connolly's heated passages,
there is indignation, indignation over the condition of the Irish masses.
Contrast this with the way that O'Neill uses phrases like gombeen men, money-lenders
and publicans in order to create Irish enthusiasm for Stalinism, which drove
the gombeen men out of Russia just as truly as St Patrick drove the snakes
out of Ireland. Also, Connolly studied conditions outside of Ireland in a
critical spirit, and in order to draw a lesson from them; O'Neill merely
applied Russian solutions to Irish conditions in a literal-minded manner. Back
5 Quoted in Fox, James Connolly: The Forerunner,
p.46 Back
6 Ibid., p.239 Back
7 Connolly, Labour in Ireland, p.15 Back
8 Ibid., p.214 Back
9 Ibid., p.214 Back
10 Ibid., pp.215-16 Back
11 Ibid., pp.219 Back
12 Ibid. Back
13 Ibid., p.251 Back
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