James
Connolly was a marxist, a revolutionary socialist and an internationalist.
His whole life was one of unremitting struggle to advance the interests
of the working class and overthrow the existing social order. In 1910
he concluded his pamphlet, “Labour, Nationality and Religion”
in the simplest and most straightforward terms: “The day has passed
for patching up the capitalist system, it must go.”
Ninety years after his death it is unfortunately necessary to begin
any true account of his life with these reminders of what Connolly really
believed in, what he really fought for.
It is necessary because, with this year’s anniversary celebrations
of the 1916 Easter Rising, we are likely to witness the nauseating spectacle
of Irish government representatives, leaders of the establishment parties
in the south along with the main nationalist parties in the north, trying
to commemorate and venerate Connolly as though, somehow, they follow
in his tradition.
Connolly, were he alive today would be fighting as relentlessly against
these people and the system they represent as he fought against their
equivalents in Ireland and internationally in his own time. But he would
not be surprised that people who are the enemies of all that he stood
for would try to claim his political heritage.
After all, in the centenary year of the 1798 Rebellion, Connolly noted
the way the establishment of the time did much the same to the memory
of United Irish leader, Wolfe Tone. “Apostles of freedom”,
he wrote in the first edition of his newspaper, Workers Republic, “are
ever idolised when dead, but crucified when living.”
Connolly was born in the Cowgate district of Edinburgh in 1968, the
youngest of three sons. His father was a carter and the family lived
in extreme poverty. James had to work from the age of ten or eleven.
He worked in a printers, a bakery and a mosaic tiling factory.
His education was rudimentary and his formidable skills in writing -
not just his political and historical journalism but also his attempts
to get a message across through poetry and drama - were largely self
taught. Desmond Greaves, in his biography of Connolly surmises that
the young James had to read by the light of embers, “whose charred
sticks served him as pencils.” Hence his slight squint. Connolly
was also slightly bow legged as a result of rickets, a common by product
of poverty and malnurishment.
He was only fourteen when poverty forced him to adopt a pseudonym and
enlist with the Kings Liverpool Regiment of the British Army. His service
took him to Ireland and lasted almost seven years before he deserted
and returned to Scotland at the end of 1888 or early in 1889.
It was then that, scraping by through casual work as a carter in Edinburgh,
Connolly began his lifelong involvement in socialist politics. He joined
the Socialist League, a split from the Social Democratic Federation,
one of the earliest socialist groups in Britain. Members of the Socialist
League included Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, and one of its
main influences was Frederick Engels.
All the groups that existed at the time were very loose and federal
in structure and there was a constant overlap in membership. By the
time he left Scotland in 1896 to take up an invitation to become the
secretary of the Dublin Socialist Club, Connolly, although in financial
destitution, was the Secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation
and of the Scottish Labour Party, the local name for Kier Hardie’s
Independent Labour Party.
Within months of his arrival in Dublin he converted the Dublin Socialist
Club into the much more organised Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP),
formed at a meeting of eight people in a snug in a bar in Dublin’s
Thomas Street in May 1896. He became its paid organiser at a salary
of £1 per week.
From that time to his execution in that city twenty years later, Connolly
was a full time revolutionary, working, when the money was there, for
small socialist groups like the ISRP or later the Socialist Party of
Ireland or else as an outstanding trade union organiser. When it was
not possible to raise money from these organisations to support him
and his family he took what work he could find to try make ends meet.
For much of this time Connolly and his family continued to live in poverty.
He was often forced to go on prolonged speaking tours to raise funds,
tours to Scotland, England and to the US where he spent the last three
months of 1902.
Connolly understood the need for publications to get his ideas across.
He produced a number of important pamphlets and published a number of
newspapers, notably Workers Republic, first launched as an ISRP publication
and The Harp, a newspaper he first issued in the United States where
he lived from 1903-1910.
Maintaining these papers on a shoe string and with a limited circulation
would not have been possible but for the gargantuan energies Connolly
poured into the task. He was the main contributor, the person who ensured
that publication dates were met, printers’ bills paid and was
most often the main driving force on sales.
Bearing out that the job of revolutionaries is to do what needs to be
done, no matter how mundane the task, Connolly took it on himself to
see that his papers reached the widest working class audience. In the
US he stood at street corners and outside meetings selling The Harp.
One of the early pioneers of the US labour movement, Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn, in her autobiography, remembers Connolly pushing the sales of
this journal:
“It was a pathetic sight to see him standing, poorly clad, at
the door of Cooper Union or some other East Side Hall, selling his little
paper.”
It was through his articles in these Journals and in the papers of other
organisations that Connolly developed the ideas that he held most consistently
through his life. He took the ideas of Marx and Engels, especially their
view that the motor force of history is the struggle between contending
classes, and applied them to Ireland.
His earliest pamphlet, a series of essays published in 1897 under the
title, Erin’s Hope drew the conclusion that Connolly defended
and expanded upon throughout his life that the Irish working class was
“the only secure foundation on which a free nation can be built”.
This conclusion was amplified and presented in a more rounded form in
his major work, the 1910 pamphlet “Labour in Irish History”.
This booklet remains Connolly’s most important contribution in
the realm of ideas.
The main conclusion of Labour in Irish History is that the Irish middle
and propertied class “have a thousand economic strings in the
shape of investments binding them to English capitalism”. It follows
that “only the Irish working class remain as the incorruptible
inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland.”
These conclusions parallel the ideas being developed by Leon Trotsky
at the time, now known as the theory of the permanent revolution.
Trotsky explained that the native bourgeois (capitalist class) in the
less developed countries and in the colonial world had emerged late
onto the scene of history.
They were too enfeebled as a class to dare to put themselves at the
head of movements to remove the last vestiges of feudalism or establish
independent nation states as the bourgeois in the established capitalist
powers had, nervously and often incompletely, managed to do.
These tasks fell then to the working class who, in taking power would
carry through the unfinished tasks that in a previous historical period
had fallen to the rising capitalist class, but at same time would proceed,
uninterrupted, to carry through also the tasks of the socialist revolution.
Connolly never drew these conclusions with the precision of Trotsky.
Nor had he the opportunity to read Trotsky’s material. As with
many of his other writings there is occasional ambiguity in his writings
on the national question, an ambiguity that was amplified by his actions
at the end of his life.
He did make statements, especially at that time, which could be read
as supporting the idea that independence would give a boost to the struggle
for socialism, for example his comment in 1916 that independence is
“the first requisite for the free development of the national
powers needed for our class”. Loose formulations like this have
been used by some on the left to back the mistaken notion that national
independence is somehow a necessary first “stage” on the
road to socialism and to justify alliances with nationalists to achieve
this.
This was never really Connolly’s view. His most consistent material
states the opposite. In Labour in Irish History and in his other main
writings on the national question he is more or less at one with Trotsky;
that it is the working class who must achieve independence and, in so
doing, will also establish socialism. This makes him a giant of his
time.
In many other respects Connolly stood politically head and shoulders
above those around him in the British and Irish labour movement. He
recognised that “every political party is the party of a class”
which it uses “to create and maintain the conditions most favourable
to its own class rule”. The working class needed its own political
instrument and this instrument should stand independent of other parties.
It goes without saying what his position would have been on the present
day calls of trade union leaders for “social partnership”,
on those like the Irish Labour Party and Sinn Fein who spend their time
knocking on the doors of the right wing establishment parties seeking
coalition government, or indeed on those on the left who quietly drop
their socialist ideas so they can participate in broad “fronts”
with individuals and groups that are fervently hostile to socialism.
The socialist organisations of Connolly’s time were still mainly
propaganda organisations without a mass political base or influence.
To Connolly this was something to be changed and the question of the
hour was how to build them into mass organisations without diluting
their socialist content.
Intense debates on questions like this raged within all the socialist
groupings that Connolly was involved with. There were often very bitter
exchanges that reflected different political trends that were emerging.
One of his political experiences was with the Scottish wing of the British
Socialist Democratic Federation (SDF), ultimately a propagandist sect,
led by Henry Hyndman, a man whose role, as Connolly saw it, was “to
preach revolution and practice compromise and to do neither thoroughly.”
When he left Ireland for the United States in 1903 he joined the Socialist
Labour Party which was led by Daniel De Leon. Connolly soon clashed
with De Leon over a number of theoretical questions and more particularly
over the dictatorial way in which he ran the SLP. De Leon’s response
was not always political – among other things he accused Connolly
of being a “Jesuit agent” and a “police spy”.
All in all it was a bitter experience and Connolly would have agreed
with Engels who, early in the 1890s, wrote that the SDF and SLP treated
Marxism in a “doctrinaire and dogmatic way as something to be
learnt off by heart ….To them it is a credo and not a guide to
action.”
Connolly left the SLP in 1908 declaring it had no future except in De
Leon’s hands, except as a “church”. He joined the
Socialist Party, a larger organisation but with a more compromising/reformist
outlook in order to be “be one of the revolutionary minority within
it”.
This demonstrates his total absence of political sectarianism. He knew
the importance of clear ideas but he also understood that it was necessary
to take those ideas into the living movement of the working class, not
refrigerate them in a pure political sect.
At the 1912 Irish Trades Union Congress, held in Clonmel, it was Connolly
who successfully moved the motion for independent labour representation
that marked the birth of the Irish Labour Party. He saw no contradiction
between this and his work to build his own Socialist Party of Ireland.
Connolly, in other words, instinctively understood the dual task of
socialists to encourage, assist and participate in every development
that draws the broad mass of workers into political activity while at
the same time building a more conscious socialist organisation.
This does not mean that he had clear conception of the need for a revolutionary
party that could act as the instrument of the working class in carrying
through the socialist revolution. At the time only Lenin in Russia understood
that a successful revolution would require a conscious leadership organised
in such a way that it would not bend politically under the pressures
of events.
Connolly, like most of the Marxists of his day, was not fully clear
what instrument the working class would use to overthrow capitalism
or how. For a time he put forward the syndicalist view that the main
role would be played by industrial unions. His flirtation with syndicalism
does not mean that he saw no role for politics or parties. Throughout
his life he was consistent on the need for the working class to organise
itself politically as well as industrially.
Connolly understood the critical importance of ideas. But he would never
have been content to play the role of a dusty, De Leon style, professor.
He understood that theory is only a preparation for action and that
the only real testing ground for ideas is in the living movement. During
the last decade of his life in particular, most of which he spent working
as a revolutionary trade union organiser, his ideas and his methods
were put into practice in a series of momentous struggles and upheavals.
His ability as a mass workers leader was put to the test in Ireland
in 1911 when he became the Belfast organiser of Larkin’s Irish
Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU). He had returned from the
US with several years’ experience working as an organiser for
the Industrial Workers of the World. During this time he had participated
in some of the bloody battles that were being fought by US workers against
vicious bosses backed by armed police and scabs.
Connolly took up his position in the ITGWU just as an explosive wave
of strikes was taking place in Britain and Ireland. Three million strike
days were lost in 1909. Three years later the figure was 41 million.
Ireland saw the most bitter battles as employers tried to forcibly resist
the militant growth of New Unionism, the organisation of the semi skilled
and unskilled, in the form of the ITGWU.
In 1911 Connolly led a struggle of the Belfast dockers. That was quickly
followed by an approach from female mill workers, the “linen slaves
of Belfast” and an inspiring strike by more than 1,000 of these
workers against the grim conditions and tyrannical managerial regime
they suffered in the mills.
At the end of 1911 Connolly had to go to Wexford where ITGWU members
had been locked out since August in an attempt by employers to break
the union. During this dispute the workers formed a defence organisation
a “Workers Police”, to protect themselves from the police.
This was a forerunner of the Irish Citizens Army which was formed for
the same reason during the 1913 Dublin Lock out.
Dublin 1913 was the culmination of this period in which the forces of
Labour and Capital went head to head in Ireland. In August 1913 the
Dublin Employers Association, led by William Martin Murphy, locked out
ITGWU members demanding they leave the union. This was a bid to finally
break the back of the Irish Labour Movement before a Home Rule parliament
was established.
The struggle dragged on until the end of January 1914 when the workers
were finally starved back to work. At its highpoint it involved virtually
the whole of the Dublin working class. The undisputed leaders of the
workers were Larkin and Connolly.
Arraigned against them were not just the employers and the forces of
the capitalist state, but the churches and the forces of right wing
nationalism. Lenten pastorals from the pulpits denounced socialism and
trade unionism. The Ancient Order of Hibernians – Ancient Order
of Hooligans to Connolly - who from the early days of the IRSP had been
involved in repeated attempts to physically break up Connolly’s
meetings and rallies, broke into the Irish Worker printing office and
smashed the type.
In the end it was the false friends rather than the open enemies of
the ITGWU that left the workers of Dublin isolated and with little choice
but to return to work. Connolly and Larkin had called for a solidarity
general strike in Britain and for the blacking of the scab boats that
were delivering goods in and out of the port of Dublin.
The issue of blacking was debated at a special meeting of the British
TUC in December but, with the leaders of the main unions opposed to
solidarity action, the motion was decisively defeated by 2,280,000 votes
to 203,000.
The eventual return to work was on the employers’ terms but the
immediate victory they had won was at the cost of laying down a tradition
of militancy and solidarity which meant that the union had been badly
winded but not broken.
This was one of three defeats suffered by the working class movement
in the space of a few short years which without a doubt left Connolly
somewhat disorientated and shaped the direction he took in the last
three years of his life.
Connolly’s return to Belfast after the strike was against the
backcloth of the Home Rule crisis of 1912 -14. The proposal by Westminster
to grant limited Home Rule to Ireland had invoked a furious opposition
among Unionists and from a significant section of the British ruling
class. The Ulster Volunteer Force was formed in 1913 and the Unionist
hierarchy voted to establish a provisional government in Ulster in the
event of the Home Rule Bill becoming law.
With the drums of civil war beating loudly a compromise was arrived
at that allowed for the “temporary” exclusion of any of
the Ulster counties that chose to stay out of the arrangement. Nationalist
leader, John Redmond, accepted this deal.
Connolly dismissed the idea that this exclusion would be temporary and
correctly viewed these events as a defeat for the working class. He
predicted that partition would “mean a carnival of reaction both
North and South, would set back the Irish Labour Movement, and paralyse
all advanced movements while it endured.”
During his time in Belfast Connolly had attempted to unite workers both
industrially and politically. But he did not manage to give the unity
achieved in strikes and other struggles a lasting organisational form.
The ITGWU organised Catholic workers in the main, as did the socialist
political groups with which he was involved.
Connolly stood for class unity and fought to achieve it, but this fine
ambition in itself was not enough to break the sectarian mould. He never
properly examined the reasons why big sections of the Protestant working
class were prepared to fall in behind the Lords and Ladies of Unionism.
If he had looked more closely he would have seen that Protestant workers
had real fears about what might happen under a Home Rule parliament
and would have understood that it was necessary for socialists to put
forward ideas to counter those fears.
The greater Belfast area was the industrial hub of Ireland at the time.
The heavy industries that had developed were part of an industrial triangle
whose other two points were Liverpool and Glasgow. Protestant workers
had developed strong ties of struggle with workers in these cities especially.
Their fear was that in a Home Rule parliament, run in the interests
of the smaller businesses in the south who favoured protectionist measures,
their ties with the labour movement in Britain would be broken and their
jobs would be threatened as their industries were cut off from their
export markets.
Connolly’s analysis of the National Question as it had evolved
in Ireland was fundamentally correct, but his application of that analysis
in the form of a programme was somewhat one sided and, as such, would
not re-assure the mass of Protestants.
Along with Larkin, he stood for separate Irish trade unions and as well
as separate political organisations. This was necessary in order to
draw Catholic workers away from the Nationalists. But in the north it
created the danger, as actually happened, that Protestants would, by
and large, stay with the British organisations and workers would be
divided along religious lines.
At the very least it would have been necessary to advocate that special
formal links be maintained between the working class organisations in
Ireland and in Britain, and especially to defend and maintain the ties
that had been built up between shop stewards organisations.
Likewise on the question of independence. Connolly was correct in advocating
an Irish Socialist Republic, but this too was posed in a one sided manner.
When Marx spoke about the struggle for Irish independence, meaning independence
on a capitalist basis, he added the rider that after independence “may
come federation.” Connolly’s material leaves this idea to
the side.
While fighting to place the labour movement, with its goal of a socialist
republic, at the head of the struggle for independence, it would have
been better if Connolly had also argued to maintain the links with the
British working class and had put forward as the ultimate objective
the idea of a voluntary socialist federation of Ireland and Britain.
The third defeat suffered by the working class came in the form of the
outbreak of war in August 1914. Before the war the mighty parties of
the Second International, particularly the Social Democratic Party of
Germany, had issued belligerent anti war statements and had promised
a general strike to paralyse the war effort should hostilities be announced.
When the fighting started, all this resistance, with the exception of
some courageous individual leaders and of a few parties like the Russian
Bolsheviks, crumbled away to nothing. To Connolly this was another blow
and he responded in his typical vituperative style: “What then
becomes of all our resolutions, all our protests of fraternisation,
all our threats of general strikes, all our carefully built machinery
of internationalism, all our hopes for the future? Were they all as
sound and fury, signifying nothing?”
The outbreak of war was accompanied by a wave of jingoism. Class ideas
along with strikes and other expressions of class struggle were, for
the moment, pushed to the background. In Ireland, Nationalist leader
John Redmond, became a voluntary recruiting sergeant for the British
army and tens of thousands who had previously drilled in the uniforms
of the Irish volunteers joined up.
It is clear from Connolly’s writings after 1914 that all these
disappointments and betrayals affected him deeply. His writings on the
war, as a whole, were not so clear and precise as earlier works.
At
bottom he maintained his socialist and internationalist outlook but,
increasingly, his ideas became tempered by his frustration at the passivity
of the working class in face of the slaughter in Europe: “Even
an unsuccessful attempt as Social Revolution by force of arms, following
the paralysis of the economic life of militarism, would be less disastrous
to the Socialist cause than the act of Socialists allowing themselves
to be used in the slaughter of their brothers in the cause. A great
Continental uprising of the working class would stop the war”.
With England so heavily preoccupied he began to consider that the first
blow could be struck in Ireland. As the war bogged down to the seemingly
interminable horror of the trenches the need to act quickly to ensure
that this blow was struck became his overriding concern.
In his impatience he was prepared to set some of the ideas and methods
he had so carefully developed during a lifetime of revolutionary struggle
temporarily to the side. In “Labour and Irish History” he
points out correctly that “revolutions are not the product of
our brains, but of ripe material conditions.”
In
an earlier Shan Van Vocht article he criticised the Young Irelanders
and Fenians for taking to the field when the conditions for revolution
had not matured: “The Young Irelanders made no reasonable effort
to prepare the popular mind for revolution so failure was inevitable.”
Now he stressed the opposite argument, criticising those in the Young
Ireland movement who talked about revolution but when the time came
“began to make excuses, to murmur about the danger of premature
insurrection.”
With the working class largely quiescent Connolly looked to the radical
nationalist forces then organised in the Irish Republican Brotherhood
and the 13,000 Irish Volunteers who had broken from Redmond over his
support for the war. He hoped that an uprising in Ireland, even if it
was organised for nationalist rather than socialist objectives would,
as he put it, “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 war
lord.”
In order to pressurise the IRB, and through them the Volunteers, into
action Connolly was prepared to make political concessions he would
not have made at any other time in his life. He was fully correct to
work alongside the nationalists in opposition to the war as he did in
the Irish Neutrality League.
But in joining hands on specific issues it was also necessary, as Connolly
had done throughout his life, to maintain an organisational and political
independence. Connolly never abandoned his socialist ideas but there
were times when by not putting them forward he allowed his views to
be blurred with those of the nationalists. It was the green flag of
independence, not the red flag of socialism, not even his own Starry
plough, that he flew over Liberty Hall.
The conditions for a successful rising did not exist in 1916. From this
point of view the rising was premature and doomed to failure from the
start. Connolly was aware of this. When, on the morning of the rising
his long term colleague William O’Brien passed him on the stairs
of Liberty Hall and asked if there was any chance of success, Connolly’s
reply was “none whatsoever”.
For Connolly it’s purpose was as an act of military defiance whose
repercussions would hopefully reverberate around the other European
nations and encourage the working class of other countries to rise.
His lack of any real attempt to use his position at the head of the
ITGWU to prepare the working class to back the rising shows that he
was only too well aware that there was no broad mood of support for
what he was about to do.
He made no call for a general strike to paralyse the movement of troops
and munitions. During the rising itself he made no attempt to appeal
to the British troops on a class basis not to fight.
Leaving aside the issue of whether it was correct to go ahead at this
time, the manner in which Connolly participated was also wrong. In his
desperation to make sure that the Rising went ahead he agreed to participate
largely on the political terms of the Volunteers, rather than his own.
He put his name to the Proclamation, which was read by Pearse from the
steps of the GPO. The Proclamation is a straightforward statement of
nationalist, not socialist ideas. It is true that there are phrases
in it that were most probably insisted on by Connolly such as the declaration
of “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland”.
Connolly had previously always sternly opposed the idea of an appeal
to the “whole people”, which includes the “rack renting
landlords” and the “profit-grinding capitalists” and
based himself on the interests of the working class.
In the run up and during the Rising he issued no separate platform setting
out the socialist objectives of the Citizen Army. To have done so would
have been no empty gesture, even in defeat. Had he issued his own platform
making the call for a socialist Ireland he would at least have laid
a foundation stone for future socialist movements. He would also have
prevented political forces and individuals who represent the very antithesis
of everything he stood for, from claiming his mantle.
Those who took part fought heroically and held out for a week against
impossible odds. Connolly’s courage under fire earned him the
respect, not just of the men and women of the Citizen Army, but of the
Volunteer ranks and even of some of the British officers.
After the rising came the reprisals. The main leaders were court-martialled
and executed. Connolly who was severely wounded was in no condition
to face a court martial but General Maxwell, the British General in
charge, insisted that it go ahead in the military hospital.
Connolly was sentenced to death and taken in an ambulance to Kilmainham
jail where he was shot on arrival. It was the revenge of the British
ruling class – backed by their Irish counterparts – not
just for the Rising but for Connolly’s lifetime of struggle against
them.
The real tragedy of 1916 was clear to see just over one year later.
In October 1917 the Bolsheviks led the Russian working class to power.
The shock waves of revolution spread across Europe and beyond.
Ireland too was convulsed by these events and a more favourable opportunity
opened for the working class to take power than had existed at any time
during Connolly’s life.
But Connolly was dead and in his death the Irish working class were
deprived of their foremost and outstanding leader. Connolly had not
recognised the need to build a disciplined revolutionary party and so
there was no force present to carry on his work. The movement ended
not in revolution but in partition and defeat.
Our tribute to Connolly is not to join with the false eulogies that
will drip hypocritically from the lips the establishment, but is to
learn both from his accomplishments and his mistakes so that the experience
of his life will assist the current generation to succeed in finally
ridding the world of capitalism.
