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
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