Remembering James Connolly

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“James Connolly and the Reconquest of Ireland,” by Priscilla Metscher. (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 2002), 243 pages. T Rising is a good time to become (re)acquainted he aftermath of the 101st anniversary of the Easter with the views of the great Irish republican socialist, James Connolly. Though many of today’s Irish nation­ alists and “socialists” pay homage to him, they sup­ port parties that collaborate in the partition of Ire­ land, and that vote for capitalist austerity measures.

As Priscilla Metscher’s well written, amply annotat­ ed book implies, this is worse than ironic. She pres­ ents a comprehensive survey of Connolly’s politics, as they evolved between 1896 and 1916. Each chapter links his writings and speeches to the momentous events of his time.

James Connolly was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1868 of Irish immigrant parents and grew up in the slums of that city. He started to work at about age 10 as a printer’s devil, then in a bakery, then in a tiling factory. At 14 he joined the army and was sent to Ireland, where over the next seven years he saw first-hand the oppression of the Irish people. Back in Scotland he joined the socialist movement, standing (unsuccessfully) as its candidate for municipal office in 1894. He knew about the Land League in Ireland, and as a socialist, realized the importance of British workers’ support for the freedom struggle in Ireland.

Connolly learned that the struggle of the Land League was diverted by adoption of the single-plank electoral platform of Home Rule, counter posed to in­ dependence from Britain. His remedy was the organi­ zation of a working-class party that would go beyond the liberal aims of the Irish Parliamentary Party.

With a few fellow workers, Connolly founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896. As the name suggests, it set to unite the struggle for national free­ dom with the socialist emancipation of the working class. Its programme proclaimed the need for nation­ alization of railways, canals, banks, and the “gradual extension of the principle of public ownership and supply of all the necessaries of life” (all quotes are from the book).

In 1903 Connolly helped to write a manifesto for the Socialist Labour Party of Scotland, which more clear­ ly expressed the need for a working-class party, the concept of the class struggle, and the aim of wresting control of the state from the capitalist class.

Its immediate demands combined with a vision of profound change involving workers’ control of in­ dustry and a cooperative agricultural system. Under the slogan “agitate, educate, organize,” working-class power should be spread by all means, including elec­ tions. But he maintained that the election of a major­ ity of Socialist Republicans to parliament would not herald the dawn of the socialist republic. It would, however, represent “the moral insurrection of the Irish people”: “their desire for separation from the British Empire,” which could be converted into a mili­ tary insurrection by the use of “a small expeditionary force and war material.”

Connolly rejected the conspiratorial methods as­ sociated with the failure of the Young Irelanders and the Fenians. He wanted to make republicanism a public issue, to purge it of “the odor of illegality,” and to change it from the “politics of despair” into the “Science of Revolution.” In the process, he tried to convert “advanced nationalists” to socialism, mak­ ing a key distinction between bourgeois liberals and anti-imperialists.

He realized that the limits of constitutionalism (leg­ islative reform of the structure of government) are dictated by the very nature of the state “created by the propertied classes for their own purposes.”

The election of a majority of Irish Socialist Republi­ cans to parliament would be a preliminary step, but only a step, towards the “revolutionary reconstruc­ tion of society.” The latter is the task of the working class, in which he included the rural peasantry.

How would this be done? “The governing power must be wrested from the hands of the rich peace­ ably, if possible, forcibly if necessary.” Expect the rul­ ers to resist fiercely. Connolly’s answer, like Malcolm X’s many years later, was simply: by any means neces­ sary.

The ISRP was a tiny propaganda group. Connolly tried to forge it into a disciplined body, equipping it with a vital tool of education and organization—the party newspaper. Connolly was the editor and pub­ lisher of the Workers’ Republic. He used the pages of the WR not only to present socialist republicanism to the general public, but also as a weapon against the Home Rule party and the United Irish League, expos­ ing their capitalist interests in “making terms with the Imperial government.”

The ISRP was internationalist. It held the first pub­ lic meeting to protest against the Boer War in 1899. “Every war now is a capitalist move for new markets, and it is a move capitalism must make or perish.” The spectacle of imperialist war reinforced Connolly’s be­ lief that it was unlikely that the capitalist class as a whole would yield up its privileges peacefully.

Frustrated by the slow progress of the ISRP, Con­ nolly emigrated to the United States in 1903. Over the next seven years, he became an organizer for the In­ dustrial Workers of the World (IWW), and a member, and critic, of Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labour Party.

The SLP was sectarian on political and trade-union issues, quite evident in its strident propaganda against Catholicism and its dual-unionism stance. De Leon provoked a split in the IWW, driving the latter even farther away from campaigning on political is­ sues and towards anarchism.

In 1908, after quitting the SLP, Connolly joined the Socialist Party of America, attracted by its mass base and growing left wing, notwithstanding its political reformism. But the idea of industrial unionism stayed with him, making him a sharp opponent of the craft unionism of Samuel Gompers and the American Fed­ eration of Labour.

In “Socialism Made Easy,” Connolly subordinates the political struggle for state power to the everyday battle at the work place to control industry.

His concept of the party is “one Socialist party em­ bracing all shades and conceptions of Socialist politi­ cal thought.” But he contradicts that view by reiterat­ ing the vanguard role of the socialist party, and more­ over, by asserting the importance of political action before economic battles.

His major work, “Labour in Irish History,” shows the development of a national self-consciousness in Ireland, the result of centuries of oppression and of action against it. With that book, which he regarded as part of the literature of Gaelic revival, Connolly set out to map an Irish path to socialism. A free Ireland would take its distinct place in the world: “the inter­ nationalism of the future will be based on the free federation of free peoples.”

Sadly, his vision of freedom was impaired on wom­ en’s emancipation. While in the forefront of the fight for women’s suffrage, Connolly opposed divorce, and rejected any attempt “to identify Socialism with any theory of marriage or sexual relations.”

The Belfast to which Connolly returned in 1910 was a scene of sweated labour and miserable wages. In­ dustrial unrest in 1909 and 1911 led to a major con­ frontation in 1913, the Dublin Strike and Lockout. Tens of thousands joined the struggle, which was met with stiff employer intransigence and unbridled police brutality. The strikers implored the British Trades Union Congress to take sympathy strike ac­ tion, to isolate Belfast from international trade and commerce. But the TUC refused, signal­ ing the end of an inspiring chapter.

Connolly was quick to point out that the growth of unions and labour feder­ ations did not necessarily mean a great increase in solidarity and revolutionary spirit; it often led to increased bureau­ cracy and alienation of officials from the rank and file.

It was during the Dublin strike that the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Vol­ unteers were founded, which paved the way to the Easter Rising of 1916.

Meanwhile, the First World War raged across Europe. At an international con­ ference of socialists in Zimmerwald in 1915, Russia’s Bolshevik Party leader V.I. Lenin said, “Turn the imperialist war into civil war.” Connolly agreed. The suppression of Irish nationalist papers, plus other restrictions of civil liberties, and the threat of conscription by the British crown, led him to say, “constitutional action in normal times ... revolutionary action in exceptional times. These are exceptional times.” He turned to making the Citizen Army into a disciplined force.

The book chronicles the series of un­ fortunate events that doomed the Eas­ ter Rising, which began April 24, 1916. Connolly, vice president of the rebel Irish Republic, was injured while de­ fending its headquarters in the Dublin Post Office. He was captured and shot in Killmainham Jail by the British.

Lenin observed that a revolutionary situation was growing in Ireland, but was not fully developed. Still, this uprising was no putsch.

It was a true popular rebellion, however premature. The historical tragedy was that James Connolly and Padraic Pearse, president of the provisional govern­ ment, were eliminated just prior to the revolutionary situation that soon emerged in 1918-20.

An important political error in Priscilla Metscher’s book is its claim that Connolly subscribed to a “stag­ es” concept of the revolution, such as outlined by Lenin in his early “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution.” The truth is that both Lenin and Connolly recognized certain phases of the struggle, but they rejected any notion of stages in which the interests of the working class should be subordinated to those of the capitalists, domestic or foreign. As Russia demonstrated, it was a permanent revolution that ushered in the workers’ state that be­ gan socialist construction.

In his “Re-Conquest of Ireland,” Connolly replaces the term “Workers’ Republic” with “Co-operative Commonwealth,” which he defines as “a system of society in which the workshops, factories, docks, rail­ ways, shipyards, etc., shall be owned by the nation, but administered by the Industrial Unions of the re­ spective industries.” This is clearly not a blueprint for a bourgeois state.

What stood in the way of Connolly’s dream? It was the absence of a strong revolutionary workers’ party, and the lack of a revolutionary socialist-led labour movement. But that takes little away from the fact that James Connolly was one of the greatest socialist leaders of the 20th century. n ... U.S. bombing of Syria (continued from page 2: “Stop the U.S. bombing of Syria!”)

tion of the Syrian people.

The defeat of imperialist intervention is the pre­ requisite for the Syrian masses to organize their own independent class-struggle forces aimed at fully meeting the needs and aspirations of Syria’s workers and farmers as they strive in the future to build a socialist society. Today’s U.S.-backed Syrian “rebels,” if they exist at all, are ever de­ manding that the U.S. bomb Syria to smithereens.

Indeed, these “rebels” are increasing integrated into and indistinguishable from the terrorist/ji­ hadist al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front. They offer nothing in the way of liberating ideas and action for the Syrian people.

The days ahead will prove to be a critical mea­ sure of the antiwar movement’s capacity to unite and stay the hand of the world’s most dangerous superpower. n SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2017 9

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Marty Goodman / Socialist Action