Con Lehane . . . again (2019)

Lehane in 1905.

Following on from the unfortunate business about the SPGB receiving some bum information about Con Lehane, which resulted in some major inaccuracies appearing in the 2004 Socialist Standard article, Some Black Sheep, I thought I'd add a further corrective to the mix by cross-posting this article about Lehane which appeared on the Irish Central website back in 2019. The year is significant because 2019 was the hundredth anniversary of Lehane's death.

I make no political claims for the author of the article, Pauline Murphy. I just thought it was an interesting article because it fleshes out Lehane's political life both before his time in the SPGB, and his political journey after he departed from the SPGB.

Con Lehane - forgotten Irish labor activist who died in New York 100 years ago

Pauline Murphy Contributor@IrishCentral Dec 31, 2019

 

From his birth in County Cork to standing his ground in London and working alongside Jim Larkin in New York city. On New Year's Eve 1919 Con Lehane passed away.

Con Lehane, who also went by the name Con O'Lyhane, was born in Coachford, County Cork, in 1877. He proved to be a gifted student and went on to study chemistry and Irish at the Cork Technical School but, his future lay with the fight for social justice.

Lehane took up work as a clerk with a butter merchant in Cork city. He was one of the founders of the Cork branch of James Connolly's Irish Socialist Republican Party and wrote under the pen name 'Proletarian' for The Workers Republic newspaper.

In 1897, Britain celebrated the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria and it was also deemed to be a celebratory affair for Ireland but, many did not see it that way including Lehane who led anti-jubilee protests in Cork which saw the Coachford man storm into a fire station which was displaying the union jack and tearing it down! A year later he established the Wolfe Tone Literary Society to coincide with the centenary of the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion. It was this same club that would go on to remold itself as The Fintan Lalor Club - the Cork branch of Connolly's ISRP.

Con Lehane was a force to be reckoned with in the Cork socialist movement at the turn of the 20th century. His staunch atheism resulted in his parish priest denouncing him from the pulpit. His hard-line stance against the Catholic Church even blighted his often testy relationship with James Connolly. The two men would eventually fall out. Lehane would nickname Connolly "Catholic Connolly" for what he saw as his soft approach to the church's iron rule in Irish society while Connolly would deride Lehane as a deserter for leaving Ireland for England in 1901 after being denounced from the pulpit.

Lehane settled in Finsbury Park, London, and became a big player in the labor movement there. In 1903 James Connolly wrote to John Carstairs Matheson "I did not expect that a man who ran away from Cork would stand his ground in London!"

In 1904, Lehane joined the Social Democratic Federation but would later leave that organization to become a founding member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and he became its first general secretary and editor of the Socialist Standard. 

In 1906, Lehane and the majority of the Islington branch were expelled from the party following its annual conference. The Bexley branch tabled a motion for the party to adopt a policy of socialist industrial unionism. It was voted down and the Bexley branch was expelled. Lehane, who led the Islington branch, became vocal against the expulsion of the Bexley branch and he, along with members of his own branch, also got expelled.

Lehane speaking in Union Square in 1914.

In 1913, Lehane went to America where he worked alongside Jim Larkin in the labor movement there. He became a lead vocalist against World War One and one famous photo of the Corkman shows him speaking at an anti-war rally in Union Square New York City, in 1914.

In the September 4th edition of the Pittsburg Gazette of 1914, a headline piece declared "a noted socialist is here."

The piece informed the reader that Lehane was to speak at Lyceum Theatre and it mentioned his achievements, including one in Cork:

"Lehane was given chief command of the great gas strike in Cork by the trades council. In fighting for the gas workers Lehane cut off the entire gas supply of the city which was in a state of total darkness for several weeks."

The strike in question began in early 1901 due to great animosity between workers and managers in the Cork Gas Works. With safety issues and increased workload, workers downed tools and went on strike with Lehane leading them. The strike ended in September.

In May 1916, Lehane was addressing a meeting of delegates to the Connecticut Socialist Party in Bridgeport where he spoke of the Easter Rising. He described it as the only bright spot in the World War and the shooting of the leaders of the Rising would inspire others to work and die for the cause. Among those who died in front of the firing squad in Easter 1916 was Lehane's former frosty comrade James Connolly.

Lehane's anti-war protests would see him meet the end of many a policeman's baton and feel the weight of heavy handcuffs around his wrists. In 1917, he was imprisoned and his time behind bars saw his health decline. He was released in late 1919 a shadow of the man he used to be.

Con Lehane died from pneumonia in Bellevue Hospital New York 100 years ago on New Years' Eve 1919 at the age of 42.

Some Black Sheep (2004)

From the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note: With regards to the passage about Con Lehane, you have to check out the afterword which corrects some bum information about Lehane that we got via Laurens Otter.

What have a Labour member of the House of Lords, a President of the TUC, a member of the Army Council of the IRA, a Communist Party journalist, a Syndicalist pamphleteer, and a Tory mayor and magistrate have in common?

    

Answer: this was the subsequent fate of six of the 140 or so present at the meeting on 12 June 1904 which set up the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Obviously, we are not proud of what these particular founding members became, but it does at least show that the meeting did have some significance even from a non-socialist point of view. And, since more is known about the lives of these six individuals than for most of the others who set up the SPGB, their political trajectory before and after 1904 can give some idea of the sort of people involved and of political developments in the first half of the last century

McEntee in ermine.

The Labour Lord

The future Labour Lord was Valentine McEntee. Born in Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire) south of Dublin in 1871, the son of a doctor from the Protestant minority, he was orphaned at an early age and was apprenticed as a carpenter. He was an early member of the Irish Socialist Republican Party which had been founded, largely on the initiative of James Connolly, in 1896 as the Irish equivalent of the SDF. In 1899, like many Irish workers, he emigrated to America, to New York, but within a year returned to Europe, but to London not Dublin. He joined the SDF and was also the secretary and chairman of the Walthamstow branch of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners.

    

At the inaugural meeting of the SPGB he moved that the name of the new party be “The Socialist Party of Great Britain and Ireland” but his motion only obtained six votes, presumably because the others felt that workers in Ireland should organise their own socialist party. His membership was not to last long since in December 1904 he was nominated by his union as a potential parliamentary candidate, which would have meant him standing for the Labour Representation Committee, the forerunner of the Labour Party. Called to account for this, which would of course have been contrary to the SPGB’s principles, he was eventually asked to resign and did so in February 1905.

    

After that he rejoined the SDF and began his career as a budding Labour politician. In 1908 he was an (unsuccessful) candidate for Walthamstow council. In 1909 he self-published a short pamphlet entitled Socialism Explained. This was a general criticism of capitalism but went out of its way to claim that socialism “is neither pro nor anti-Christian” and was supposedly supported by “ministers of the Gospel of all denominations”.

    

In 1920 he was finally elected to Walthamstow Council and in 1922 as Labour MP for Walthamstow West. Defeated in 1924 he was re-elected in 1929 and remained an MP till he retired in 1950. In 1951 he was made Baron McEntee of Walthamstow. He died in 1953.

The leftwing Trade Union leader

George Hicks was also to become a Labour MP, for East Woolwich from 1931 to 1950, but it was as a leftwing trade union leader at the time of the 1926 General Strike that he has a place in working-class history.

    

He was born in 1879 in Venham Dean, near Andover, in Hampshire where his father was a builder. In 1904 he was working as a bricklayer and (like a number of other founder-members) an active member of the Operative Bricklayers Society. The records show that he resigned in March 1905 but rejoined in December 1908, resigning again a few years later as his trade union career took off. In 1912 he was appointed a national organiser of the OBS. By 1919 he was its General Secretary and President of the National Federation of Building Trades Operatives. In 1921, having successfully seen through the amalgamation of this federation into a single union, he became the first general secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers, a post he was to occupy for the next twenty years. As such he was elected a member of the General Council of the TUC.

    

In 1925 he was one of a group of leftwing trade union leaders who went to Moscow where they agreed to set up an Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee. Stalin and the Russian government had an interest in this as they wanted to build up mass support in countries like Britain against military action to invade Russia, but it is difficult to see what was the advantage for the trade union movement; no doubt the trade union leaders involved, including Hicks, mistakenly felt that what existed in Russia was some sort of workers’ regime. When the general strike occurred in Britain the following year, the leftwing trade union leaders on the Anglo-Russian Committee were unable to prevent the majority on the TUC General Council betraying the miners. Trotsky saw this as a heaven-sent stick with which to try to beat Stalin for relying on “left lackeys of imperialism” such as “Purcell, Hicks and other traitors”. But Trotsky, who by this time was on his way out, had clearly lost touch with reality, wanting to “orient the working class toward a general strike and an armed insurrection in the course of a war”. Hicks, whose turn it was to be to be TUC President in 1927-28, survived. Trotsky did not.

    

Hicks rejoined the reconstituted SDF, now affiliated to the Labour Party, and in 1931, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its founding, was invited to give the keynote address. This was later published as a pamphlet Poverty from Plenty. The Industrial Depression: Its Cause and Cure. He began: “its cause is capitalism: its cure is Socialism”. Although his analysis was rather too under-consumptionist, it did show some evidence of his passage through the SPGB.

    

In 1941 he became a junior minister – Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Works – in the war-time coalition government, with as his parliamentary private secretary none other than the future Lord McEntee. He died in 1954.

Jackson in 1905.

The Communist Party hack

When the Communist Party of Great Britain was founded in July 1920 among the founding members was Thomas (T. A.) Jackson. Born in Clerkenwell, North London, in 1879, he left school at 13 to be apprenticed as, like his father, a compositor. He joined the SDF in 1900. In his autobiography Solo Trumpet, published in 1953, he claimed to have been only marginally involved with the SPGB, which he doesn’t mention by name simply referring to some mysterious “impossibilist” (in his original manuscript he had written “leftist”) group. The records show, however, that he was a very active member for nearly five years, being on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Principles, speaking outdoors and indoors, writing articles, serving on the executive committee and even acting for a short while as General Secretary (and he married another founder member, “Miss K. Hawkins”).

    

These activities resulted in him having difficulty in finding a job in his trade and, in 1909, as he frankly told some Party members at the time, he decided to sell his speaking abilities to other propagandist groups in order to survive. He thus ended up joining the ILP but without really believing in what they stood for. When he moved to Leeds he got a job speaking for the Secularists. Later he was a freelance speaker, depending on his audience putting money in his hat.

    

During the war he was able to find employment as a storeman. By its end he had joined the SLP and it was as a member of its pro-Bolshevik wing, which was one of the constituent organisations that set up the CPGB, that he became a founder of that party. For the rest of his life he was a paid writer and journalist for the CP and its papers the Sunday Worker and then the Daily Worker. In the 1920s he was in fact one of the leading figures in the CP, editing its first weekly journal, The Communist, and a member of its central committee and executive committee. In 1929, when Stalin ordered the parties in the Comintern to “turn left”, he was one of the leaders who were removed as “rightists”. He remained a CP member, but only as a journalist and writer. As such he wrote numerous articles and a number of books, but none of them showed the slightest evidence of anything he had learned while in the SPGB, not surprising for someone who declared that he had come “to see Marx and Engels through the spectacles provided by Lenin and Leninism”. Quite the worst was a long turgid book on Dialectics (1936), pretentiously subtitled “The logic of Marxism, and its critics: an essay in exploration”, which regurgitated Lenin’s ideas on philosophy. He wrote a nationalist history of Ireland, Ireland Her Own, for which he dishonestly allowed himself to be billed as a “Protestant Nationalist” (when his connection with Ireland was very tenuous). He also wrote a book on Dickens and other literary subjects. He died in 1955.

The Tory Mayor

The strangest case is that of Jack Kent. Prior to joining the SPGB, he had been a prominent member of the SDF, serving on its national executive, writing in its journal Justice and organising its activities. As such he was probably the most high-profile SDF member to have gone over to the SPGB. Born in Lambeth, in South London, in 1870, in 1904 he was working as a clerk at the head office of Whitbreads, the brewers. In the elections for the Party’s 1905 Executive Committee he topped the poll; he was an outdoor speaker and indoor lecturer, wrote a regular column in the Socialist Standard, organised speakers’ classes, and in 1907 was the Party’s treasurer. He resigned in 1908. He had been promoted at work to departmental manager and was able to afford to move to the then up-market west London suburb of Acton. Here he turned his coat completely, helping to form an organisation called the “Constitutionalists” whose aims were “to uphold the Constitution, advocate a Consolidated Empire, to oppose Socialistic legislation, to propagate Tariff Reform, and to contest Municipal elections”. As this outfit ran street-corner meetings, no doubt the skills he had acquired in the SDF and the SPGB proved invaluable. In 1912, after sitting on the local Coronation Committee, he was elected a member of Acton Council. From then on it was downhill all the way. Joining the Acton Volunteers to serve British capitalism (if only on the streets of Acton rather than in the trenches of Northern France), he was chairman of the local Conservative and Unionist Association in 1918, a magistrate in 1920, Mayor of Acton in 1922-23, and a Middlesex County Councillor. At the time of his death in 1945 he was chairman of the local magistrates bench as well as of the local Tory Party. Why did he turn? Initially at least, probably for the same reason as Jackson: to earn a better living. Yet further proof of how unfree workers are under capitalism and its wages system, forced by economic circumstances to compromise their views.

Allen in 1905.

The Syndicalist pamphleteer

One of the youngest founder members of the SPGB was Ernest Allen, or E. J. B. Allen as he was known. Born near Oxford in 1884 the son of a butcher, he had joined the SDF there when only 16, later moving to London where he played an active role in the “impossibilist revolt” within the SDF. A speaker and writer, he was particularly interested in the trade union question. The early SPGB had not yet worked out a fixed policy on this and Allen was one of those who favoured the setting up of a socialist union in opposition to the existing trade unions based on the sectional interests of their members. At the party’s first annual conference in 1905 he moved that as soon as the party had attained 5000 members it should set up a socialist union. There was no seconder.

    

In 1906 a series of special party meetings were held at which the matter was thrashed out. Many members were hostile to the existing unions because of their non-socialist nature and their association with moves to set up a reformist Labour party. In the event no agreement could be reached and the position was left as it had been before: that SPGB members could be members of the existing ones (as many of the founder-members had been, McEntee and Hicks for instance), supporting any action of theirs on sound class lines and opposing all actions on unsound lines. Although the votes were close, and despite the subsequent myth put about by later opponents (starting with the Labour activist and historian G. D. H. Cole), the SPGB never took up an anti trade union position. Ironically, the SLP, which Allen was to join for a while, accused the SPGB of being pro-trade union! Before the debate within the SPGB on the trade union question was over, Allen had joined an organisation called the “Advocate of Industrial Unionism”, whose aim was to set up in Britain the equivalent of the IWW in North America. As the SPGB did not regard the IWW as a socialist organisation he resigned. In the years that followed Allen passed through all the variant positions associated with those who advocated “socialist industrial unionism” to overthrow capitalism: from holding that this should be complemented by political action at the ballot box (the SLP position), through arguing that industrial action alone to “take and hold” the means of production would be sufficient (the anarcho-syndicalist position, expressed in his 1909 pamphlet Revolutionary Unionism), and then ending up as a propagandist for Tom Mann’s Industrial Syndicalist Education League which advocated industrial action for reformist ends too.

    

In 1912 he emigrated to New Zealand where he continued his syndicalist activity. His pamphlet was reprinted, and for a while he was president of the General Labourers Union in Auckland. When the war came he supported it, including conscription. This destroyed for ever his reputation as any sort of revolutionary. After the war he ended up as a supporter of the NZ Labour Party and later of the leftwing breakaway party set up by ex-Labour MP John A. Lee for whose Weekly he wrote articles. He also wrote and spoke for the NZ Rationalist Association. He died in1945.

Lehane in 1905.

The IRA man [See correction below.]

Con (Cornelius) Lehane, who was the Party’s General Secretary for the first two years of its existence, was born in Cork and, like Valentine McEntee, had been a member of the Irish Socialist Republican Party before moving to England and transferring to the SDF. He worked as a clerk and later trained to be, and became, a solicitor. In school, as part of the Gaelic revival, he had learnt Irish which he spoke fluently, ending one of his contributions to the Socialist Standard, in the Irish spelling of the time, “Saoghal fada dho! – Conchubhar”. It was in fact through militant Irish nationalism that he came to socialism. However, it was not this that led to him leaving the SPGB. Yet again, it was an issue related to the trade union question.

    

Lehane was on the wing of the Party which (unlike another former ISRP member, James Connolly, who was a founder member of the SLP in Britain) didn’t think much of the so-called “economic power” of the working class and insisted that socialists should concentrate on getting the working class to first win control of political power, i.e. to expropriate the capitalist class politically so as to be in a position to then expropriate them economically. He fell out with the Party because he felt that the Executive Committee was not taking a tough enough attitude towards industrial unionists who had joined the Party. To protest against this, in 1906, the Islington branch, of which he was a member, suspended all propaganda activities and got itself expelled for dereliction of duty. After his expulsion Lehane published a couple of pamphlets attacking the SPGB for having gone off the rails.

    

Ironically, he was next heard of as a supporter of Jim Larkin, the leader of the ITGWU who favoured syndicalist tactics. It is not clear when he reverted to his original Irish republicanism, perhaps when he was in America during the First World War. In any event, during the 1930s he was a member of the Army Council of the IRA, which earned him an 18-month jail sentence in 1935 for sedition after the Council issued a statement promising “maximum support” for a strike of Dublin transport workers. After his release he left the IRA and, together with former IRA Chief of Staff, Sean MacBride, and others was of a founder-member in 1940 of the leftwing republican party, Clann na Poblachta. In 1948 he was elected a Clann member of the Dail for Dublin. Following this election, in which it had won 10 seats, the CnP joined in an anti-Fianna Fail coalition government. So, ironically for a one-time “impossiblist” who had advocated political power for the sole purpose of achieving socialism, he ended up as a supporter of an openly capitalist government. He lost his seat in the 1951 general election.

Adam Buick

Con Lehane: A Correction

In the September Socialist Standard we stated that Con Lehane, who was a founder member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, went on to become in the 1930s and 40s a member of the IRA and a Republican member of the Irish parliament. This was not the case and was due to a confusion with someone else with the same name.

The Con Lehane who was a founder member was born in Cork in 1878 was indeed an Irish Republican but he died in New York in 1919, shortly after being released from prison where he had been detained for his political activities. In 1916 he had published a pamphlet entitled The Irish Republic arguing that the so-called Easter Rising in Dublin that year had been a workers’ revolution.

The other Con Lehane, who was on the Army Council of the IRA in the 1930s and a Clann na Poblachta deputy from 1948 to 1951, was born in Belfast in 1912 and died in 1983 (see Irish Times, 27 September 1983).

The original source of the error was an article which appeared in the anarchist paper Freedom on 8 February 1992. Our apologies for not having first checked this thoroughly enough –Editors.

Traitor to Socialism (1998)

Book Review from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Lost Writings. By James Connolly. Pluto Press. £13.99.

James Connolly is an Irish National Hero, a Martyr no less, executed by the Brits for his leading role in the fool-hardy and intentionally suicidal 1916 “Easter Rising”. He also had the reputation for being a socialist, and in fact was for a while a participant in the impossiblist, or anti-reformist, revolt in Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation (SDF) which led to the formation of a British equivalent of the American Socialist Labour Party (SLP) in 1903 and of the SPGB in 1904.

Connolly had been born in Edinburgh in 1868 and first became active in the SDF’s equivalent there. In 1896 he moved to Dublin where he was one of the founders of the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) which had a similar policy—socialism as an aim, but combined with a programme of reforms to be achieved under capitalism—except that it also stood for an independent Ireland.

Connolly soon saw through Hyndman (this collection contains an article of his denouncing Hyndman’s anti-semitism) and was attracted by the ideas of Daniel De Leon and the American SLP. Thus, in the impossiblist revolt within the SDF, Connolly was associated with the SLP not us (though he was in correspondence with some of those who set up the SPGB). In 1903 he moved to America where he got a paid job with the SLP but soon fell out with De Leon and went to work for the rival SPA. He was also involved with the IWW. In 1910 he returned to Ireland where he became an organiser, first in Belfast then in Dublin, for the Irish Transport and General Workers Union.

In this collection of articles by Connolly not previously republished it is those up to 1910 that are interesting from a socialist point of view in that they give an idea of the intellectual milieu out of which our own party emerged, in particular the view that there was an irreconcilable conflict of interest between the working class and “the master class” and that the working class, once enlightened, could use the ballot box as an instrument of emancipation. Connolly, however, was always wrong on the issue of a reform programme. It was him who drafted the Platform of the SLP (included here) after it broke away from the SDF which, surprisingly since this was not the policy of the American SLP, contained a list of immediate demands short of socialism. The SLP later dropped this, but not Connolly.

In fact by the time he returned to Ireland he was a Labourite reformist and fervent Irish Nationalist. Whereas in his ISRP days he had laughed at those who invoked “the spiritual inheritance of the Gael”, his articles (in this period best described by the title of one of them, “Some Rambling Remarks”) now spoke of the “soul” of the “Irish Race” and he denounced Protestant workers in the North as “a local majority of bigoted traitors of Ireland“. And, whereas in 1899 he had argued that “the cry for a ‘Union of Classes’ is in reality an insidious move on the part of our Irish master class to have the powers of government transferred from the hands of the English capitalist government into the hands of an Irish capitalist government” (Workers Republic, 2 September 1899), he was proudly declaring at a public meeting in 1914 to discuss “The Position of the Nation” with regard to the First World War that “he had with him on the platform men drawn from all classes” (Irish Worker, 17 October 1914).

Connolly to his credit opposed the war, but more on Irish Nationalist rather than international socialist grounds. Indeed, a pro-German stance can be detected in some of his articles. For instance, in the speech above in October 1914 he was reported as saying that “Germany was fighting for the commerce of the seas and for the means of building up a sane civilisation in Europe” and, a month later, wrote that “in this attack upon Germany it [the Irish working class] sees an attack upon the nation whose working class had advanced nearest to the capture of the citadels of capitalism” (Irish Worker, 21 November 1914).

As the war dragged on, he turned more and more to the physical-force Irish Republicans and began to talk like the nutcase Patrick Pearse about the need for a blood sacrifice to save the soul of the Irish race, declaring that “no agency less potent than the red tide of war on Irish soil will ever be able to enable the Irish race to recover its self-respect” and that “without the Shedding of Blood there is no Redemption” (Workers Republic, 5 February 1916).

At least he practised what he preached and sacrificed his own blood. After his death he got his “red tide of war on Irish soil” in which thousands of Irish workers were killed to establish an Irish Capitalist state which did absolutely nothing for those who survived. Connolly had died a “bigoted traitor” to the international working class.

Adam Buick

The Irish Socialist Republican Party 1896-1904 (2005)

Book Review from the July 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radical Politics in Modern Ireland. The Irish Socialist Republican Party 1896-1904. David Lynch. Irish Academic Press. €39

The Irish Socialist Republican Party, which only existed between 1896 and 1904, was the equivalent in Ireland of the Social Democratic Federation in Britain. Like the SDF, the ISRP tried to combine campaigning for the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production (socialism, also called at the time, in Britain as well as Ireland, the Socialist Republic) with campaigning for reforms as a means, in the words of the ISRP’s programme, “of palliating the evils of the present social system”. The ISRP had another demand: Irish independence. As this book shows, it wasn’t easy to combine these three objectives.

The party – which according to Lynch never had more than 80 members – was torn in all three directions. The main enemy was seen as the Home Rule party, both because it stood for capitalism in a Home Rule Ireland and because it didn’t stand for a complete political break with the British Empire. This led the ISRP to appeal to “advanced Nationalists”, trying to convince them that an independent capitalist Ireland was an impossibility and that if they wanted an independent Ireland they should support socialism. One of Lynch’s criticisms of the ISRP is that it wasn’t true that an independent capitalist Ireland wasn’t possible. It was (and it happened), and was the explicit policy of Arthur Griffith’s original Sinn Fein with its call for the establishment of an Irish Stock Exchange, an Irish merchant marine, protection for Irish manufacturing industries, etc and the implicit policy of the physical-force Republicans.

The leading light in the ISRP was James Connolly, who for virtually the whole of its existence was its full-time organiser and editor of its paper, the Workers’ Republic. He was later to resolve the conflict between socialism and republicanism by opting for republicanism and to die in a futile bid to establish an independent Capitalist Republic in Ireland. He is in fact an Irish National Hero with a railway station in Dublin named after him. As a result, his political writings, including those in which his socialism was more prominent than his republicanism, are still printed and read. Particularly good, from this period, is his Labour in Irish History which, though not published as a pamphlet till 1910, first appeared as a series in the Workers’ Republic.

But it was not the conflict between socialism and republicanism that led to the demise of the ISRP in 1904, but that between socialism and reformism. From about 1898, as Lynch records, the ISRP came under the influence of the SLP of America and Daniel De Leon. In 1900 the SLP abandoned its reform programme and similar ideas spread within the ISRP. Although the ISRP never actually dropped its reform programme, when Connolly stood in the elections to Dublin City Council in 1903 his election address (reproduced as an appendix to this book, but which can also be seen at http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1903/01/woodquay.htm), unlike at previous elections, contained no programme of reforms. Connolly presided at the founding conference of the Socialist Labour Party of Britain in 1903 – part of the “impossibilist revolt” within the SDF which also led to the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain the following year. He emigrated to America in 1903, so contributing to the demise of the ISRP, joined the SLP and became a De Leonist Industrial Unionist for a while. But that’s outside the period of this book. A number of early members of the SPGB had previously been in the ISRP.

Lynch writes as a Trotskyist (quoting from Tony Cliff’s Life of Lenin), which leads to some misinterpretations. For instance, when the ISRP made the point that in socialism there’d be no need for trade unions and strikes (because there’d be no class working for wages) he likens this to Trotsky’s proposal to suppress trade unions in Bolshevik Russia because there was no need for them under a “workers’ government”. More amusing in view of the sort of criticism the SWP makes of us, is Lynch’s argument that the ISRP, despite its emphasis on electoral action, wasn’t a mere electoralist party as it also held numerous street corner meetings and so was also engaged in street politics. Nevertheless, his book is the only history of the ISRP and as such a valuable addition to the history of the working-class movement in the two large islands off the north-west coast of the European mainland.

Adam Buick

Exhibition Review: 'We Only Want the Earth’ (2016)

Exhibition Review from the November 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the anniversaries being marked this year is the centenary of the Dublin Easter Rising (see the March Socialist Standard). James Connolly, who was probably its best-known figure and who had to be tied to a chair so he could be executed by a British firing squad, is commemorated in an exhibition ‘We Only Want the Earth’ at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. As the curators note, Connolly’s life ‘is often remembered more for the manner of his leaving it than for the politically active way he lived it’ (echoes of the Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth).

The exhibition mainly consists of displays of books and pamphlets by or about Connolly and related political movements, together with some letters and panels containing photos and relevant information. It does not, however, say much to explain his move towards Irish nationalism, though it is stated that he had once argued that independence without socialism would just mean replacing one set of capitalist exploiters by another.

But then Connolly’s status as a socialist in the first place is somewhat arguable. He had been a member of the Social-Democratic Federation, and part of the Impossibilist revolt against H.M. Hyndman. However, the Irish Socialist Republican Party, which he helped found in 1896, stood for state-run banks and a minimum wage. Its aim, though not mentioned in this exhibition, was ‘the public ownership by the Irish people of the land, and instruments of production, distribution and exchange’ (so not socialism, as there would still be exchange, and even at this date seen in national terms). He was opposed to divorce, and saw religion as a private matter, not connected to politics.

The doomed 1916 uprising included a statement by the ‘Provisional Government of the Irish Republic’, which begins, ‘In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland …’. Connolly was one of the signatories of this and, even if we regard this phrase as just a piece of rhetoric, the whole text reveals the mystic nationalistic nonsense he was now involved in. A copy of this document is displayed in the Salford exhibition, but without any commentary on it.  

Paul Bennett

James Connolly - An Unpublished Letter (1973)

From the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Below is a previously unpublished letter from Connolly to the Edinburgh branch of the Social Democratic Federation. We publish it, together with a commentary and an assessment of Connolly’s political career, as it throws some interesting light on the “Impossibilist revolt” in the SDF which eventually led to the founding of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904.

Memo from Irish Socialist Republican Party.

Central Branch.

To: Sec. Edin. S.D.F

1 November 1901.

Dear Comrade,

I am forwarding herewith a copy of the pamphlet part of this month’s “Workers Republic”. The full paper will be delivered in a few days. I must take this opportunity to congratulate you on the magnificent stand made by the Scotch and more especially the Edinburgh comrades against the present compromising policy of the leaders of the S.D.F. Things may seem to look dangerous for you at present, but time is on your side, and when the English branches really realise the issues at stake and understand your position, the triumph will be yours. I speak with the knowledge of who one having been all through England knows that the only hope of the gang in power is to keep the English comrades ignorant. The present issue of our paper is primarily intended to prevent that hope being realised, by giving the large number of English branches who now take our paper a more clear exposition of this question than Justice has allowed them to have.

I only wish our paper was bigger or that our plant was more suitable for rapid printing than it is at present, but we are poor and we are still short of the cash necessary to supply us with a quick printing machine, but such help as we have we will readily give to you.

I would only say in conclusion to beware of all dodges and devices to drive you out of the S.D.F. Help in the organisation, do not be brow-beaten, nor get disgusted; for the sake of those who are in remain in also, and sooner or later you will find your policy tacitly adopted by the whole body even if they do not admit their indebtedness to you.

For the Revolution

Your old comrade

James Connolly

Dublin

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James Connolly was born in Edinburgh on 5 June 1868, the son of an Irish immigrant labourer. He went to work at the age of ten or eleven and then seems to have joined the British army, being stationed in Cork. In 1889 he left (deserted) and went back to Scotland planning to marry a girl he had met in Dublin. In Dundee Connolly, who must already have had vague radical Irish nationalist sentiments, joined the local branch of the Socialist League. This was a breakaway from the Social Democratic Federation in 1884, in which William Morris was prominently involved. However by this time there was little difference between the Socialist League and the SDF and it was only an accident that Connolly joined the one and not the other. Soon in Scotland the two bodies united to form the Scottish Socialist Federation which in 1895 became the Edinburgh branch of the SDF. It was this organisation which first introduced Connolly to Socialist and Marxist ideas.

But the SDF was not an uncompromisingly Socialist body. It advocated reforms (or “palliatives” as they were then called) as stepping stones towards Socialism and was involved in the general ferment of the time in favour of independent (of the Liberals, that is, and not necessarily Socialist) working-class representation in Parliament and local councils. Connolly himself seems also to have been a member of the ILP as well as being secretary of the Edinburgh branch of the SSF/SDF. In 1894 he had stood as a “Labour” candidate in the local elections. Being an unskilled labourer - and an “agitator” - he found work difficult to get and eventually advertised his services to the “Labour movement” as a paid speaker, lecturer, and organiser. His offer was taken up by the Dublin Socialist Society and in 1896 he and his family left Scotland for Ireland.

In Dublin he was instrumental in forming an Irish Socialist Republican Party similar in character to the SDF. Basically “Labourist”, it also argued some Socialist and Marxist ideas. But it had a programme of palliatives ranging from nationalisation of the railways and a 48-hour week to free maintenance for children and universal suffrage. And it supported the demand for Irish independence. This last was quite in accord with the Social Democratic (though not Socialist) thinking which, when it spoke of “international socialism”, envisaged this as a federation of independent national “socialist republics”; so, on this view, insofar as “the Irish” were to be regarded as a “nation” they were entitled to an independent State - so ran the mistaken Social Democratic argument which Connolly accepted.

He believed that only through the establishment of an Irish “socialist republic” could Ireland really become independent of England, and appealed to Irish nationalist sentiment on this basis. He was of course an implacable opponent of the Irish Home Rule MPs at Westminster, pointing out that Home Rule under capitalism would make no difference to the poverty and misery of the workers of Ireland. In fact up until the turn of the century the activities of the IRSP seem to have been a combination of Labourism and Irish Republicanism, both of which were deviations from straight agitation for working-class political power for Socialism.

But by 1900 the position inside the SDF was changing. Some of the younger members were challenging the autocracy and opportunism of the clique around Hyndman which dominated the organisation. In Scotland they came under the influence of Daniel De Leon and the American Socialist Labor Party which some of them had come across at the Paris Congress of the Second International in 1900. Connolly, who still kept in contact with Scotland, also to a certain extent came under their influence. In 1901 he had done a paid speaking tour in England and Scotland.

The American SLP was on what might be called the extreme left of the Second International. It was completely opposed to compromises with the bourgeois parties and was moving towards saying that the struggle for reforms was futile and that instead socialists should concentrate exclusively on the capture of political power for Socialism via the ballot box. (The SLP’s syndicalism deviation was to occur later, as we shall see) It still, however, had a national rather than world conception of “socialism” (and still does to this day)

In 1899 a French “Socialist” MP by the name of Millerand accepted a post in a bourgeois government There was an immediate storm. At the Paris Congress of the Second International a compromise resolution which condemned Millerand but not the principle of participating in bourgeois governments, was carried in place of one opposing participation on principle. The critics, or “impossibilists” as they were called (since they were supposed to be saying that improvements in working-class conditions under capitalism were impossible and so not worth striving for), also challenged the lack of Party control over Justice which, despite being the SDF’s official organ, was owned and controlled by Hyndman and some of his friends.

Connolly associated himself with the impossibilists and allowed them to use the IRSP paper, the Workers’ Republic, to put their case on this, and other issues. A pamphlet of the pages was later published as the New Evangel which shows the limitations of Connolly’s position at this time. He still had not broken with the idea that a socialist party should struggle for palliatives as well as for Socialism. In fact the following January he stood as a candidate in the Dublin local elections on a programme of immediate demands.

Perpetually short of money, Connolly decided to go later that year on a speaking tour to America to help the American SLP get the Irish vote (yes, despite their stand on reforms, aspects of opportunism survived!). Before he went he arranged to for the press on which theWorkers Republic was printed to be used to publish a journal called The Socialist, on paper the organ of the Scottish Council of the SDF but in fact controlled by the Scottish “impossibilists”. In America he spoke all across the country from New York and Buffalo to San Francisco and Los Angeles. He returned to Ireland an SLP man. In January 1903 he again stood for the local council in Dublin. This time, however, there was no immediate demands in his programme, only the advocacy of political power for Socialism via the ballot box - in fact the sort of election manifesto we ourselves could have endorsed.

Meanwhile things were coming to a head in the SDF. At their 1903 Conference in London over Easter the expulsion of the leading Scottish impossibilists, Yates, was confirmed. The other Scottish impossibilists thereupon resigned and in June was founded the Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain, with The Socialist as its official organ. Connolly, who was on another paid speaking tour of Scotland at the time (and reversing the opinion expressed in 1901 to stay in the SDF), chaired the first conference of the new party and was appointed its first organiser. However, the new party, like the SDF, had it list of palliatives - a move to delete them was defeated and it was not until 1905 that they were dropped, probably under the influence of the SPGB which never had such a list. By then Connolly was in America but it is probably safe to assume, in view of his subsequent evolution of his political ideas, that in 1903 he had been one of those in favour of the SLP having a reform programme.

The SPGB had been formed in June 1904 by the London “impossibilists”. Right from the start it advocated only socialism and had no reform programme. Among the founding members was Alex Anderson, who before moving to London had been the Secretary of the Edinburgh branch of the SDF.

To complete the Connolly story. In the autumn of 1903 he returned to America hoping to pursue his chosen career as a professional “labour organiser” by getting a job with the SLP. He got no such job, though he remained an SLP member and activist becoming a member of its National Executive Committee. In 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in Chicago. Connolly, as part of the SLP delegation, attended this congress and spoke on their behalf in favour of founding the new organisation. This support for the IWW represented a complete reversal of the previous policy of the SLP and its leader Daniel De Leon. Previously they had stressed the primacy of political action through a class-conscious socialist political party; now they reduced political action to a subordinate, supporting role to the “socialist industrial unions” which were to take and hold the means of production. Connolly accepted this syndicalism deviation from Marxism and also its corollary that the industrial unions were to be the future administration of “socialist” society.

Connolly, however, was beginning to get tired of the sectarianism of the SLP and had already spoken in favour of a merger between the SLP and the more opportunist Socialist Party of America. In March 1907 he helped establish an “Irish Socialist Federation”. This brought him into conflict with the SLP hierarchy and led to his expulsion or resignation (depending on your point of view). Anyway he left, and continued his career as a professional organiser by getting a job with the IWW. The IWW was in reality a militant general union with a revolutionary ideology and, like all unions, (as they must to be effective, of course) recruited members on an open-house principle, i.e. workers of all political views and not just revolutionaries. In January 1908 The Harp was launched as the organ of the ISF and Connolly used it to urge support for Eugene Debs, the SPA candidate in the 1908 Presidential elections. This despite the fact that the IWW, for which he worked, had that year adopted a completely anti-political stance - though this was the occasion on a rare sensible comment from Connolly: asked if this meant he was against the workers taking political action to establish Socialism, he replied that when the time came “it would be impossible to prevent the workers taking it”, a point that could well be borne in mind by today‘s anti-parliamentarians. But he soon moved to a new job in line with his increasingly reformist views, becoming in 1909 a national organiser for the SPA.

When he returned to Ireland in July 1910 he had gone quite reformist. His new job was organiser for the “Socialist Party of Ireland”. This was the at-this-time somewhat moribund successor to the IRSP he had founded in 1896, a self-styled “Marxist” party involved in reformist and Irish nationalist politics. The SPI soon found it couldn’t afford a paid organiser so Connolly moved on to become the Belfast organiser of Larkin’s Irish Transport Workers Union. Here he joined in the campaign to get the Irish TUC to set up an Irish (as, purposely, opposed to the British ) Labour Party, i.e. a non-socialist, trade union party to act as a pressure group in the expected Home Rule Parliament. This was eventually done in 1912.

So Connolly had now embraced Labourism and it is not surprising to find him standing as a Labour (and Irish nationalist) candidate on a completely reformist programme in the Belfast municipal elections of January 1913. Later that year he returned to Dublin to play a leading role in resisting the Great Lock-Out through which the Dublin employers, led by William Murphy, tried to destroy the ITWU. Connolly stayed on afterwards as the acting general secretary. The depth of his reformism at this period can be gauged from reading his Re-conquest of Ireland. This envisages “socialism” being established in Ireland as a gradual process, commencing with “municipal socialism”, a reform of the educational system, etc. A sentimental nationalism (so often found in “patriots” born outside their “native” country, as Connolly was) with talk of the “soul of the Irish nation” is also evident.

When the first world war broke out Connolly can at least be given credit for opposing it, though behind the socialist rhetoric it is possible to detect a more basic Irish nationalism. As the war dragged on Connolly was to get involved in a conspiracy with “pure and simple” republicans to stage an armed uprising with help from Imperial Germany, to try to establish an independent Irish Republic. He began to neglect his trade union duties for military training and put the Irish Citizen Army, originally a self-defence body formed by the ITWU to protect its members from police brutality, at the disposal of the Republicans. The “rising” at Easter 1916 was a fiasco, easily put down by the British army. Connolly was executed for his part in it and so became an Irish National Hero - a sad end for someone who for a while came near to becoming a revolutionary socialist but who later fell back into the bog of careerism, Labour reformism and Irish republicanism.

Adam Buick