The Legacy Of Connolly

The Politics of James Connolly Kieran Allen (Pluto Press)

Connolly; A Marxist Analysis — Johnston, Larragy, McWilliams (IWG)

The legacy of James Connolly has moulded the Irish left throughout this century right up to this day. This is readily acknowledged by the writers of both books. A ‘true giant” (Allen), “above any other Irish Marxist then or since” (Johnston etal). The problem, according to the writers, is that Connolly’s work and ideas have been used and distorted to justify particular political positions.

When one considers Connolly’s place in the “Pantheon” of Irish leaders and the claims to his mantle made by personalities as diverse as Eamon De Valera, Dick Spring and Gerry Adams the point seems well made. Equally well made is the criticism of some previous writings on Connolly which sanitised him for a conservative nationalist audience or idealised himas an Irish Lenin (C.D.Greaves).

Both books claim to rise above such base imterests and are presented as honest evaluations of Connolly's theory and practice, handing out praise when praise is due but also exposing the warts. Have they succeeded?

### CONNOLLY WAS WRONG

The books are written from different political perspeclives. Kieran Allen is a leader of the Socialist Workers Movement and Johnston, Larragy and McWilliams are members of the Irish Workers Group. Both these organisalions are distinguished by an economistic analysis and workerist political strategy. Not surprisingly then they both reach the same conclusion that Connolly was wrong to participate in the organising of the 1916 rising.

There’s nothing new in this approach which basically mirrors that of most of the international socialist movement when news of Connolly’s role in the Easter Rising came out. Allen chronicles the response, pointing out that Lenin was almost alone in hailing the rising and ridiculing those who denounced it as a “putch”.

He goes on approvingly to quote Lenin;

“To imagine that social revolution is concievable without revolts of small nations, in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary Outbursts by a section of the petly bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movementof the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian massesagainstoppression by landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc - to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution.

So one army lines up in one place and says “We are for socialism” and another, somewhere else, says “We are for imperialism” and that will be a social revoluuon. Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling ita “putch”.

However Kieran Allen is unwilling to follow the logic of this all the way. Basically his position is that socialists should have applauded the insurgents from the sidelines. The GPO was on place for any class-conscious worker.

The Irish Workers Group have no need for such blandness:

“Firstly we say that he (Connolly) was wrong to lower the red flag to the green...

Secondly, we hold that, even had Connolly been determined to conduct the Rising on the principled basis of AN REABHLOID Page 7

making independent fighting propaganda for action by the working class, he still would have been wrong to call for or organise an insurrection against British rule in the conditions of 1916...”

So, in the conditions of 1916, the Irish Workers Group would have been picketing Liberty Hall demanding that the Rising be called off.

### RELEVENCE TODAY

Whatis the relevance of Connolly today? Both books deal usefully with Connolly’s career as a professional revolutionist both in Ireland and in America, The influence of the orthodox Marxism of the Second International, the syndicalism of Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labour Party in America, Connolly’s role in the young Irish trade union movement zre all closely examined. So too his views on women’s emancipation, marriage and religion. It is well demonstrated that Connoliy was an imperfect Marxist.

However Connolly’s relevance today does not centrally reston his role asa trade union leader or his confused views onreligion but on his attempts to grapple with the relationship between the Irish national independence movement and the struggle for socialism.

Shortly after arriving in Ireland in 1896 Connolly dissolved the Dublin Socialist Society and founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party, for whom he drafted a new programme dedicated to the complete separation of Ireland from the British empire and the establishment of an Irish Socialist Republic.

An early manifesto of the ISRP declared: “The struggle for Irish Freedom has two aspects; it is national and it is social. The national ideal can never be realised until Ireland stands forth before the world a nation free and independent. It is social and economic, because no matter what form the government may be, as long as one class owns as private property the land and instruments of labour from which all mankind derives their substance, that class will always have the power to plunder and enslave the remainder of their fellow creatures... The party which would lead the Irish people from bondage to freedom must then recognise both aspects of the long struggle of the Irish nation.”

This approach distinguished Connolly from the “Municipal” socialists of the day who argued that the national question was no concern of the working class, while the Republican Brotherhood, in the tradition of Fenianism, had no social program but united around the use of physical force to drive the British out of Ireland.

### RED AND GREEN

The charge against Connolly is that by linking the national and socialist struggles in this way he created a mishmash subordinated the interests of the working class to the interests of Irish capitalism.

The evidence for this assertion is pretty thin. Connolly in his analysis of the Irish independence struggle ascribed to the Irish bourgeoisie an unimpressive role. He was convinced that they had no genuine interest in securing national independence. Any throughgoing national revolution would be led by the working class and would necessarily entail the establishment of a Workers Republic, He warned that the Irish bourgeoisie would always compromise with imperialism. The capitalist class;

“have a thousand economic strings in the shape of investments binding them to English capitalism... only the Irish working class remains as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland.”

Connolly understood also the necessity for the political independence of the working class;

“the Irish socialists refuse to lose their identity with those who only half-understand the problem of liberty.”

It’s ludicrous to assert that Connolly abandoned all this in his alliance with the Republican Brotherhood in 1916. In order to understand his position we need to understand one other major aspect of his politics - his internationalism.

### INTERNATIONALISM

Both Alien and Johnston et al point out that Connolly’s political career almost exactly spanned the life of the Second International. Founded in 1890, it was marked by a developing struggle between Marxism and a reformist AN REABHLOID Page 8

revisionism which promoted a policy of seeking gradual advances which in ime would see capitalist society evolve towards socialism. This spawned a policy of class collaboration including participation in capitalist governments.

With the outbreak of the First World War the reformists staged a criminal betrayal of socialism. Internationalism and anti-imperialism were abandoned and in each country , they united with “their” capitalist class to send workers to the slaughter. Connolly stood with revolutionists like Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg in branding the war as an interimperialistconflict, denouncing the betrayal of the reformists and calling on workers to tum the war into revolution against their capitalist masters. So for Connolly arising in Ireland was both a blow struck for Irish freedom and part of a larger international process that was to see a series of revolutionary uprisings in Germany and successful revolution in Russia.

In 1914, in the Irish Worker, Connolly wrote;

“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.”

On Easter Monday 1916 Connolly marched into Dublin’s GPO to ignite that spark, almost certainly knowing he would die in the effort.

### BUILDING A PARTY

Much is made in both books of Connolly’s failure to build a revolutionary party. Marxists today, with the benefit of hindsight, may have a clearer appreciation of the need for such a party but the fact is that it has not been built by today’s more “perfect” Marxist and, 75 years after the Easter Rising, Ireland remains a country dominated by imperialism and by the “carnival of reaction” Connolly foresaw arising from partition.

Tharoad to such a party is not some sort of organisational task buta political one. James Connolly remains relevant day because his attempt to understand the unique political dynamic of the Irish revolution, the political bedrock for the self-organisation of the working class, has not been surpassed. In fact itis obvious from these books that it is not even clearly understood by many in the revolutionary movement today.

Both books are worth reading in that they provide a review on which a necessary debate can take place. The book by Johnston etal tends to be more rigorous and Kieran Allen’s book more readable. Both fail in that they are attempts to stake outa claim to the mantle of Connolly socialism and this could only succeed with new research and new analysis. There is little new here. In their failure to accept the central theoretical contribution that Connolly made they cannot pass beyond the ABC of Marxism and are forced to focus on Connolly’s “flaws” and “ambiguities”. Unable to build on Connolly’s strengths, they are unable to assist in breaking the allegiance of today’s working class to bourgeois and pelty-bourgeois parties.

JOHN MAGEE.