On 24 August, FRFI held a meeting in the Govanhill Neighbourhood Centre, Glasgow to celebrate the life and work of the Edinburgh-born, Irish Marxist James Connolly, revolutionary socialist and a leader of the Easter Rising of 1916. The well attended meeting highlighted the importance of James Connolly’s contribution to the anti-imperialist, trade union and socialist struggles of his day and the lessons for our own.
A lively discussion followed the introductory talk. Points were raised about links between the Irish rebellion and the class struggle on the Clydeside around the time of the First World War and the continuing refusal of the British labour movement to split with imperialism to this day through its funding of the Labour party. The role of Ireland as a testing ground for the British ruling-class in counter-insurgency was also highlighted. The Public Assemblies Bill recently proposed in the north of Ireland – restricting the right of citizens to hold protests and meetings of fifty people or more without receiving permission thirty-seven days prior – is but the latest example.
Connolly’s life was one of total commitment to the oppressed, from the worker exploited by the boss and the landlord, the peasant starved off his land, women workers (‘the slave of the slave’), the Irish nation and all others crushed by colonialism. Over ninety years on from his execution at the hands of the British army, the life and ideas of James Connolly remain as vital as ever.
An introduction to the life of James Connolly
How do you get from fighting for free speech in Dundee in 1889 to being shot in Dublin in 1916? Crudely, this was the life of our James Connolly but those 27 years were an incredible journey of revolutionary struggle for the rights of Ireland and the working class. Before his cruel execution Connolly told his distraught wife Lillie Reynolds:
Hasn’t it been a full life Lillie? And isn’t this a good end?
(Last conversation between James Connolly and Lillie Connolly, cited Nevin D, James Connolly, A Full Life: Dublin 2005 p. 667)
James Connolly’s life was indeed a full and good life in the moral sense, a life of determined study, relentless organisation and decisive action. Yet what are we to make of another comment made at the time of the Easter Rising of 1916:
The Socialists will never understand why I am here…They will all forget I am an Irishman
(…unattributed, cited Reed D, Ireland: The Key To The British Revolution London 1984 p.59)
In that remark, in that statement, we are presented with the central question which faces all progressives in the era of imperialism. Understanding that categorical remark is the purpose of this introduction. This is an attempt to salvage the reputation of a socialism which appeared for Connolly to have repudiated the anti-imperialist struggle.
As Bernadette McAliskey said in her contribution to the recent Celebration of Resistance event in Derry on 26 July, James Connolly is not here now to explain things. He’s dead. For us that expression of apparent rejection of socialism needs to be satisfactorily – it is critical! – understood or we might as well pack up now.
I recommend this comrades. When you’re landed with the responsibility of preparing these introductions there is a natural evasion, a hesitation, a doubt as to susceptibility of the subject to quick analysis and summation but then you are suddenly exposed to the abundance of all the already existing material on Connolly. And become aware of how rewarding it is to read that material.
As one of our comrades David Yaffe frequently points out, many, many questions confronting us have already been answered by earlier writers and we make no apology for the many references to these works.
In C Desmond Greaves biography of Connolly we come across these observations in the introduction:
Connolly entered political life just in time to witness the disappearance of the world in which he had been brought up…The hitherto accepted pillars of society, the landlord and the industrialist, gave way before the investor…Britain had ceased to be the workshop of the world…Instead came imperialism. The profits of empire were to perfume and spice British capitalism- and incidentally finance the bloodless liquidation of Irish landlords. Ireland became a financial colony.
(Greaves C D, The Life and Times of James Connolly London 1960 p.27)
James Connolly joined the Socialist League in Dundee in 1889 at the age of 21. His introduction to politics was familiar to our comrades: Magistrates in Dundee had banned the holding of open air political meetings in particular areas of the town. The Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League and Dundee Trades Council took up the challenge and called a protest meeting. With the right sort of numbers- 20,000 people- the crowd marched marched into the High Street to defy the bans. The socialist speakers were arrested but the campaign of defiance continued.
An indignation meeting held immediately afterwards does not appear to have been interfered with. The police were trying their strength…a few weeks later the magistrates climbed down…Meetings were resumed in the High Street.
(Greaves C D, op cit p.25)
In Donal Nevin’s biography, James Connolly, A Full Life, he has found an interesting picture of the young man, written by John Leslie of the Scottish Socialist Federation, the form of branches of the Social Democratic Federation in Scotland:
I noticed the young man as a very interested and constant attendant at the open air meetings. Once when a very sustained and virulent personal attack was being made upon me and when I was almost succumbing to it, Connolly sprung upon the stool and to say the least of it, retrieved the situation. I never forgot it. The following week, he joined our organisation and it is needless to say what an acquisition he was…
(Nevin D, op cit p.33)
Connolly was also coming into active politics just as the period of the 1890’s known as the “New Unionism” was beginning. Connolly actually had to postpone his wedding, like a certain Ernesto Che Guevara, due to the commitments of struggle! He and his brother John were the organisers of a proposed strike for reduced hours. The halls of the SSF in Dundee were to become organising centres of the “New Unionism” of the unskilled workers. As Greaves points out, there were so many strikes being organised in this period that it was impossible to distinguish between them.
A possible distinction that can be made is the emerging difference between the organisation and militancy of different sections of the working class. Between the unskilled and skilled workers. C Desmond Greaves makes the point that:
The heart of Scottish socialism was Edinburgh. Notwithstanding Glasgow’s superiority in the numbers and industrial concentration of its working class…socialism won more influence at the outset among the unskilled than the skilled workers…a large proportion of these were Irish and, of those who joined the SDF, many had been members of the Land League.
(Greaves C D, op cit p.28-29)
And it was to this Edinburgh- the city of his birth in 1868- that Connolly returned. Greaves is most useful in recognising and developing this central point about the different sections of the working class. In 1890 Connolly had secured – hardly the right term for casual, intermittent labour – work as a carter and their organisation and militancy was worrying the local Trades Council. This working class trade union organisation was to stand in direct opposition to the carter’s fight for an eight- hour day and it was down to Connolly’s organisation, the Scottish Socialist Federation, of which his brother John Connolly was secretary, to organise the demonstration on this issue for May Day in Edinburgh in 1893. The Trades Council did organise a speaker though, a “Labour” candidate from London who openly opposed the campaign for a reduction in hours and opposed Home Rule for Ireland. As Greaves states:
“The old guard wanted no action at all” (Greaves, op cit p. 36)
What we are trying to draw out here is a brief but important account of two sectors of the working class moving in opposite directions. A further wee example here of the perfidy of this trade union body: Connolly’s brother had been dismissed by the city council for speaking at the Edinburgh May Day demonstration. While the Trades Council did complain, they eventually gave up any fight and John Connolly stayed sacked. The Trades Council would have represented thousands of workers in various trade unions and a threatening sign from them would have saved John’s job but again “The old guard wanted no action at all”!
In one of his first articles for “Justice” James Connolly shows that he was alive to what was going on:
The population of Edinburgh…Even the working- class portion of the population seemed to have imbibed the snobbish would- be-respectable spirit of their betters and look with aversion upon every movement running counter to conventional ideas…Leith on the other hand is pre-eminently an industrial centre. The overwhelming majority of its population belong to the disinherited class…reasonably expected to develop socialistic sentiments much more readily than the Modern Athens. (ibid p. 39)
Connolly was plainly not interested then in trade union respectability and covering up injustice for the sake of “unity” in the labour movement. He denounced Glasgow Trades Council as happy to be associated with the Co-operative Society even though it paid less than union rates. Anything to keep the divie up! Divide and rule he fought against as well, exposing an attempt to split the workers according to nationality. The Master Bottlemakers’ Association had refused to meet strikers because there were foreigners amongst their number. Connolly railed against this racism:
It was all very well to employ a foreigner at starvation wages and so cut down the wages of the native – but to treat with the foreigner…Why it was preposterous!
(ibid p. 40)
And what of Ireland? The Irish constituted a fair proportion of the electorate in municipal areas and the issue of Home Rule for Ireland was calculated by respectable politicians as a means to secure votes. Posing as friends of Ireland and plotting secret electoral alliances with Labour candidates, the Liberal party endlessly connived to deliver this vote for themselves. Connolly was having none of it! An electoral article for his candidacy as a Socialist in 1894 in St. Giles in Edinburgh shows his fierce advocacy of the common class interests of Scottish and Irish workers:
Perhaps they will learn how foolish it is to denounce tyranny in Ireland then to vote for tyrants and instruments of tyranny at their own door. Perhaps they will see that the landlord who grinds his peasants on a Connemara estate and the landlord who rackrents them in a Cowgate slum, are brethren in fact and deed. Perhaps they will realise that the Irish worker who starves in an Irish cabin and the Scots worker who is poisoned in an Edinburgh garret are brothers with one hope and destiny. Perhaps they will see that the Liberal Government which supplies police to Irish landlords to aid them in their work of exterminating their Irish peasantry, also imports police into Scotland to aid Scots mineowners in their work of starving the Scottish miners
(Nevin D, op cit p. 39)
Coming third with 14% of the vote, Connolly’s analysis of the limits of the electoral contests is appropriate to today, he denounced the lack of difference between “the Liberal Tweedledee and the Tory Tweedledum” (Greaves C D, op cit p. 51).
In the year of 1894, Connolly had also been expressing views about the class character of the nationalist movement in Ireland:
As an Irishman who has always taken a keen interest in the advanced movements in Ireland…the Parnellites… (and)…the McCarthyites…are essentially middle-class parties interested in the progress of Ireland from a middle-class point of view
(Nevin D, op cit p. 38)
His comrade, John Leslie, who had brought Connolly into the socialist movement 5 years before, had delivered a series of lectures in 1893 which were eventually published in pamphlet form as The Present Position of the Irish Question. Nevin gives full coverage to its arguments and it is undoubtedly the case that Connolly, having served in the British Army for 7 years during the Land League agitation combined his experience there with the powerful thesis of Leslie’s that Ireland’s salvation lay in its working people. That this class struggle for social, economic and political emancipation would liberate itself and, in the national struggle would, end imperialist rule by Britain. Nevin suggests convincingly that this contention was the origin of Connolly’s Labour in Irish History. Published in 1910 and written during Connolly’s years in the USA, it is a Marxist treatment, a materialist treatment of class and national struggle in Ireland under British imperialism.
Connolly never wavered from this argument and eventually was to advance it in arms directly against British rule in the Easter Rising of 1916. Thousands of pages have been written, millions of words have been spoken on this subject, on the relationship between national struggle and class struggle, between nationalism and socialism. Is it really that difficult, who has a problem with it? Is it a practical question? Or a matter of abstract theory or debate? A distraction, a diversion from class struggle, from socialism? Reading Connolly, of his life, of his commitment and action for the working class, there can be no doubt that he advanced in absolute clarity- in word and deed- the combined struggle of that class in Ireland to win socialism and defeat imperialism. Yet his statement about the “socialists not understanding why” he was there still needs explanation. Some say Connolly had despaired of Socialism as an ideology, as a force, and embraced nationalism belatedly but this is an unsustainable argument given the abundant evidence of his long standing commitment to a free Ireland and the arguments he was to make about the central role of the Irish working class in this struggle right up literally to the dawn of Easter Monday:
We are out for Ireland for the Irish. But who are the Irish? Not the rack-renting, slum-owning landlord; not the sweating, profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman- the hired liars of the enemy. Not these are the Irish upon whom the future depends. Not these, but the Irish working class, the only secure foundation upon which a free nation can be reared.
The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered. Ireland seeks freedom. Labour seeks that an Ireland free should be the sole mistress of her own destiny, supreme owner of all material things within and upon her soil. Labour seeks to make the free Irish nation the guardian of the interests of the people of Ireland, and to secure that end would vest in that free Irish nation all property rights as against the claims of the individual, with the end in view that the individual may be enriched by the nation, and not by the spoiling of his fellows.
(Connolly, Selected Writings, London 1973 p. 145. Cited Reed D, op cit p. 52-53)
Clearly our comrade had not abandoned socialism or the working class, although there are many who would like to see it that way! As David Reed has argued in Ireland: The Key To The British Revolution, Connolly was anticipating the lack of support from the “Socialists” of the time and in this he was again right. All the major organisations of the European left rejected the Rising of 1916. Some on the spurious grounds that it had nothing to do with socialist or working class struggle, some on the grounds of its timing, some because it was an armed campaign.
The Scottish ILP weekly Forward uttered the empty abstraction, ‘a man can be a nationalist or an internationalist’…Socialist Review, journal of the ILP, announced in September 1916, ‘In no degree do we approve of the Sinn Fein rebellion. We do not approve of armed rebellion at all, any more than any other form of militarism or war’ (Reed D, op cit p. 59) .
In C Desmond Greaves’ account he suggests that a useful way of tackling Connolly’s life and works is to consider that his political life corresponded almost exactly to the period of the Second International, that is from 1889 to 1916. What does this mean, what was the Second International and why was it over by 1914?
We have to go back to the beginnings of the communist movement from 1848 with the publication of the Communist Manifesto in that year and the study and work of Marx and Engels on Ireland. We will shamelessly borrow from David Reed’s book, no accident that it was originally begun as chapters in our newspaper Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! entitled ‘The Communist Tradition on Ireland’. Cutting through the crap which the left, “The Socialists”, had continued to lay down about Ireland it was plain to see that Connolly was standing in a fine and principled position for socialism and national liberation right up to the Rising against British imperialism. The 1st International had been won to support for the cause of Ireland, huge demonstrations made up of working class English and Irish marched in 1869 for an amnesty for Irish political prisoners. Engels was to state later in 1888 that:
The masses are for the Irish. The organisations and the labour aristocracy in general, follow Gladstone…
(Marx K and Engels F, Ireland and the Irish Question (MEOI), Moscow 1978 p.57. Cited Reed D, op cit p.11)
He had earlier exclaimed in 1867:
…the London proletarians declare every day more and more openly for the Fenians and, hence – an unheard – of and splendid thing here – for, first, a violent and, secondly, an anti- English movement.
(MEOI p. 155. Cited Reed D, p.13)
These revolutionary developments, caused by imperialism, were undermined by imperialism. Britain’s colonial and industrial monopoly meant that the respectable sections of the working class: skilled, on relatively high wages, in secure trades grew in influence and power. Aye, they had their trade unions to fight for their wages and conditions but on matters of “colonial policy”- as Engels remarked, they thought no differently from their masters. And why should they? Empire was “sweetening and perfuming capitalism”. “Socialism” was still advocated as a means of securing the fruits of their labour, as they saw it, but freedom for the colonies was a step too far now! Safe, respectable, electoral campaigning would secure the rightful status of the working man. Across Europe these socialist and labour parties, social democratic parties, constituted themselves as the Second International and became in some cases mighty organisations. The German Social Democratic Party had a million members, huge trade union affiliates, offices, newspapers, journals, full time staff, parliamentary deputies, the works! The Socialists of the Second International considered that as all workers were deemed equal that expressions of nationalism undermined workers unity and encouraged national division. Opposition to imperialism and colonialism was not considered a priority, rather, the abstract “unity” of the working classes was advanced. Indeed socialists could not reject all colonial enterprises as certain” non- cultured peoples” need looking after!
Likewise with the issue of wars, of course the parties of the Second International opposed them. Resolution after resolution proved this. Yet by 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War those organisations had all run for their national flags. Having denounced nationalism as chauvinism and reactionary and divisive, here they were now on the recruiting platforms with the soldier and the priest and the trade unionist. Connolly challenged those who had derided Irish nationalism and who were now calling for the defence of their “nation”. Now it was he who properly asserted the unity of the working class and called for action to sabotage imperialist war.
Should the working classes of Europe, rather than slaughter each other for the benefit of kings and financiers, proceed tomorrow to erect barriers all over Europe, to break up bridges and destroy the transport service that war might be abolished, we should be perfectly justified in following such a glorious example, and contributing to the final dethronement of the vulture classes that rule and rob the world.
(Greaves D, op cit p. 284)
It was not to be and Connolly made the decision that “England’s difficulty” would be” Ireland’s opportunity.” The Rising against Britain was on. The workers of Dublin and the revolutionary wing of the nationalist movement were united in the battle to attempt to break the connection with Britain in 1916. In doing so Connolly was doing what Lenin was also to urge in this period: to “turn the imperialist war into a civil war” for class struggle, for socialism. In Russia by 1917, that direction had matured into the Bolshevik revolution of October and the world’s first socialist state was born. Lenin had immediately recognised the historical significance of the Rising and understood and supported the motives and forces behind it. For him the Second International had repudiated genuine socialist struggle, had become a “stinking corpse” and was an enemy of the working people, of the masses. We shall end here with a final quote from Lenin:
There is one, and only one, kind of real internationalism, and that is- working whole-heartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one’s own country, and supporting (by propaganda, sympathy and material aid) this struggle, this and only this, line, in every country without exception.
(James Connolly, Collected Works, Dublin 1987 Volume 1 pp. xiv)
James Connolly embodied this principle to the end. Long Live James Connolly!
