50 Years Ago: The Easter Rising (1966)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

A grave armed revolt in Dublin against English rule is raging at the time of writing. It is a revolt doomed from the outset, both because of the futility of its Nationalist aims, and the utter hopelessness of such a revolt against the mighty organised force of the political State. It is, apart from the fact that Socialism is worth fighting for. yet another illustration (if such were needed) that the organised Socialist conquest of political power plays into the hands of the oppressor and strengthens the chains that fetter us.

Such a revolt, however, is the natural result of centuries of alien oppression; which has forced the ideas of Irishmen into Nationalist channels and blinded them to its futility. And it is at the same time a fitting commentary on the perfervid declarations of the British champions of “honour" and “righteousness" that “they" are lighting, above all, for “the rights of small Nationalities".

From the Socialist Standard, May 1916.

Letters: Right about Kenya (2006)

Letters to the Editors from the May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Right about Kenya

Dear Editors

The letter “Wrong on Kenya?” (March Socialist Standard) by Okoth Osewe can’t be taken as a passing cloud.

Osewe knows very well, if he has been existing in Kenya, that no attempt at socialism has been made here.  Those few who have talked about it are, like him, opportunist or capitalism’s apologists.  Thus his Kenya Socialist Democratic Alliance (KSDA) party is non-existent or it exists only on paper.

On the issue of the constitution, Osewe knows very well that this process was hijacked by opportunists(like him) and politicians.  During the campaign for either yes or no, it was clear that these were campaigns not to either reject or support the document, but to propel some people to positions of leadership.  Many politicians saw this as an opportunity to prepare themselves for next years general election. 

Why people like Osewe “pambana” (struggle) join the campaigns for the draft leaves a lot to be explained.  Why the need to use so much money to campaign for the rejection of the draft?

The No campaign was lead by politicians (like Osewe) who are always opposing the government.  The campaign was tribalistic, hatred was obvious, propaganda for swing vote. Those who always think that they are the ones who can lead  (and not be led) positioned themselves in the Orange Democratic Movement(ODM).  This wasn’t a campaign for a constitution but for proper elections.  Kenyans know better.

Socialism can only be brought about by a majority of workers organising for it.  Politicians like Osewe and many others will not, will never get anywhere near establishing socialism.

Kenyan workers know that their situation has never improved despite our constitution being amended so many times since independence. The situation isn’t likely to get anywhere even with the introduction of the so-called “Bomas Draft”, “Wako draft” or any other document.  Reforms which have come and gone haven’t made changes in our lives. 

Kenya is surely ripe for socialism but people like Osewe will only manage to have beautiful socialist titles but will never manage to organise Kenyans for socialism.

I invite him to join us in our struggle for common ownership, democratic control and leaderless cause.

Only when we join hands will our desire for socialism materialise.  And then socialism will rule the world, Kenya included, in the not too distant future.

Patrick Ndege,

Nairobi, Kenya

Buyer beware

Dear Editors,

I don’t always manage to remember the many downsides of capitalism and how much better things could be. But there’s nothing like personally falling foul of the functioning of capitalism to bring this point home. Once such occurrence happened to me recently. I thought I’d share it with you.

I’d bought some Mr Muscle Sink and Plughole Unblocker, which I’d recently seen advertised on TV, as the sink in my room had recently become blocked. The advertisement had shown a happy man and woman gently pouring the product down their kitchen sink. The name of the product gives rise to images of a magical little creature that pops out of the contained and does the job required, and as an imaginatively-inclined person I tend to be a bit too taken in by this kind of imagery. I had a smile on my face as I gently and slowly poured the magical product down my bedroom sink, bit by bit. It did occur to me that I could smell it, but I thought nothing of it at the time, and I was delighted to find twenty minutes later that my sink was working once again. Hurrah for Mr Muscle!!!

A couple of days later I found myself with a seriously painful sore throat. I wasn’t sure exactly what it had been caused by although I had a number of ideas as possibilities. Swallowing was agony for a couple of days. After I’d gotten over the worst of it I went to the doctor to see if he had any advice. He told me that sore throats were only really caused by infections or by chemical fumes. I told him about my use of the Mr Muscle product and he said he regarded it as a very likely cause.

I thought I’d tell a few people about what had happened as a warning to them not to be as imprudent as I’d been. A friend told me that when he’d had a blocked sink he’d asked the hardware store shopkeeper what the best thing to use was, and had been told that a couple of kettles of boiling water was as good as anything. He’d tried this and it had worked perfectly. “Oh” I thought to myself, feeling a little humbled…. and my mind wandered to visions of a society in which TV advertisements were replaced by helpful practical advice, and dangerous toxic chemicals were presented for what they were…. Wow! What would that be like?

Adam Waterhouse, 

Bristol

Wrong about Ireland?

Dear Editors.

I was saddened by Richard Montague’s “The Easter Rising – 90 Years On” (April Socialist Standard). Montague’s contemptuous view is not shared by many socialists in Wales, to whom national liberation continues to be an aspiration. Even a bourgeois republic would be a blessed improvement and relief from eight centuries of thralldom, stagnating under English rule.

Whatever the faults of Padraig Pearse, James Connolly and the five other signatories of the Irish Proclamation of Independence at Easter 1916, they were men of principle and courage dedicated to the well-being of the working people of all Ireland. We honour their memory, and the noble cause for which they fought and died. Pob bendith arnynt!

Alun Hughes, National Secretary, 

Plaid Gomwnydd Cymru/Communist Party of Wales.

Reply: 

Members of the Socialist Party in and from Wales, including those who speak Welsh, do not aspire to “national liberation” but to the emancipation of all humanity through the establishment of world socialism. It is not “English rule” that is responsible for the problems faced by workers in Wales, but capitalism. Which is why they would continue even if a “bourgeois republic” were to be established in Wales. Just look at Ireland – Editors.

Vauxhall election

Dear Editors,

In the April Socialist Standard, Ivan took the time and trouble to profile the Labour MP for Vauxhall, Kate Hoey. He correctly describes how she mal-represents the workers of South London who may have voted for her.

What he omits is the most tragic part of the story. Unlike workers in every other constituency at the last election, those in Vauxhall had the opportunity to hear and vote for the case for socialism, because our candidate, Danny Lambert, stood against her in last year’s general election.

It is worth noting, that alone at the hustings, Comrade Lambert put forward the case for the genuine interest of the workers, unlike Hoey and all her fellow pretenders to office.

Perhaps any south London electors who read Ivan’s article may care to reflect and lament upon their choice; however some for them have the chance to put things right, as three socialist candidates are contesting the local elections in Lambeth this May, where workers will once again have the choice of voting to overthrow a rotten system.

Bill Martin (by email)

There is also a Socialist Party candidate standing in Kingston in the local elections on 4 May.

The Easter Rising – 90 years on (2006)

From the April 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Easter sees the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rebellion against British rule in Ireland. The Irish Cabinet – specifically, the government of the Republic of Ireland – and members of the Dail will watch as the Irish army marches past the General Post Office in Dublin’s O’Connell Street where Pearse and Connolly established the rebel HQ in 1916.

After being cancelled for years the Rising Commemoration has been restored by the Ahern government, anxious to maintain its republican credentials against the growing threat of Sinn Fein in the impending General Election. The excuse for originally cancelling the Commemoration was that the army was so overstretched on foreign UN peace-keeping duties that it couldn’t stage a march of a couple of hours’ duration in Dublin.

The real reason, of course, was that the genuine inheritors of the political lunacy of 1916, the Provisional IRA, were actively engaged in the killing business, intermixed with bank robberies and crimes of violence not only in Northern Ireland but in the Republic of Ireland as well. Celebrating the killings of those who had laid the foundations of the Irish state was regarded as honourable but the new killings of their latter-day progenitors were not. The fear was that the Provisional IRA might well be the political and military beneficiaries of a dramatic outburst of the patriotic emotion engendered by the establishment’s recognition of a Rising that had even less justification than the resuscitation of the IRA in 1970.

It was Dublin that bore the bloody birth pangs of the IRA when about 1,000 men of the Irish Volunteers coalesced with Connolly’s 300-member Irish Citizen Army on Easter Monday 1916 to become the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and challenge the might of the British army as well as units of the British navy in a fight for Irish political independence.

The Commander-in-Chief of the rebel army was a Dublin schoolteacher and poet called Patrick Pearse. At a practical level he appears to have been an inoffensive pedagogue but his writings reveal another side to the man, a side that might well have preoccupied a psychiatrist, for his alter ego was a soldier of destiny with an inclination for blood sacrifice.

In 1916 blood sacrifice was high on the agenda of world capitalism. Competition between opposing national segments of capitalism had spilled over into massive violence as hapless legions of working men contested on the blood-soaked battlefields of Europe in the interests of their masters. Pearse obviously felt the exhilaration of an absent participant; in 1915, when incompetent generals and field marshals were sending millions of men to assured death in northern France he wrote: “The last 15 months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august honour was never offered to God as this.”

In The Story of a Success, he complains: “The exhilaration of fighting has gone out of Ireland when people say that Ireland will be happy when her mills throb and her harbours swarm with shipping they are talking as foolishly as if one were to say of a lost saint, ‘That man will be happy again when he has a comfortable income’. I know that Ireland will not be happy again until she recollects that laughing gesture of a young man that is going into battle or climbing to a gibbet.”

Thus, the idiocies of the Commander-in-Chief of the armed wing of Sinn Fein who, in kindness, we can only see as deeply mentally disturbed. But, along with Pearse, in creating what W B Yeats saw as the birth of “a terrible beauty” was James Connolly, one-time member of the Social Democratic Federation, who broke with that organisation a short time before the founding comrades of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and was one of those who combined in establishing a Scottish section of the Socialist Labour Party.

Connolly claimed to be a Marxist and described Marx as the greatest of modern thinkers. In 1913 during the great Dublin lockout when the Irish Constabulary attacked the strikers, Connolly and James Larkin, the strike leader, had established a workers’ defence organisation with the grandiose title of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) that, in 1916, was to combine with a small section of the Irish volunteers as the IRA, whose political mouthpiece was Sinn Fein.

The Irish dramatist, Sean O’Casey, who was secretary to the ICA, said Connolly forsook the cause of the international proletariat for the insular romanticism of Irish Nationalism. In fact, Connolly’s espousal of Irish nationalism could be more properly defined as a betrayal of the worker’s trade-union cause as what he brought the impoverished members of the ICA out to fight for on Easter Monday was the right of a fledgling Irish bourgeoisie to establish legislative independence that would afford it trade protection, in the words of Sinn Fein, “from English and other foreign capitalists”.

Ironically, then, the people whose economic interests were to be fought for was the nascent Irish capitalist class; the very people who had locked out the Irish workers in 1912 and called out Crown forces to attack those workers; the very people who had led Larkin and Connolly to conclude the need for a defensive Irish Citizen Army.

Sinn Fein, in its policy statement of 1907 had made clear the identity of the class it represented though it euphemistically referred to the Irish capitalist class as “home manufacturers and producers”: “If an Irish manufacturer cannot produce an article as cheaply as an English or other foreign capitalist, only because his foreign competitor has larger resources at his disposal, then it is the first duty of the Irish nation to accord protection to that manufacturer.” As an epilogue to the Rising we might recall the words of Patrick Pearse in The Coming Revolution: “We might make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people but bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing.”

In the Rising of 90 years ago which the political agents of Irish capitalism are commemorating this Easter, some 50 rebels were killed while more than four times that number of civilians died. It was the latter, innocent and, as it happened, uniformly poor, who were the real blood sacrifice and their deaths presaged even worse to come.

Richard Montague

Renegade socialist (1991)

Book Review from the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Politics of James Connolly. By Kieran Allen. Pluto Press, £9.95.

James Connolly has always been an enigma. How did someone who at the time was the General Secretary of the ITGWU, Ireland’s leading trade union, and who a few years previously had been a revolutionary socialist who had participated in the so-called “impossibilist (anti-reformist) revolt” in the SDF in Britain that led to the formation of the SLP in 1903 (which he joined) and the SPGB in 1904—how did such a person end up being shot by the British state for being one of the leaders of an armed uprising to establish a capitalist Republic in Ireland, so entering into the pantheon of Irish “national heroes”?

This book by a leading Socialist Worker member in Ireland does not provide the answer, but it does show the extent to which the SWP’s position on Ireland ("critical support for the IRA”) is mistaken.

According to Allen, Connolly was right to have participated in the Easter 1916 “rising” alongside the Irish Republicans; his mistake was to have done so as a republican rather than as a socialist, which wouldn’t have happened had he concentrated in the pre-war years on “building a party” rather than a trying to build a syndicalist trade union and a broad-church, reformist Labour Party in Ireland. This, of course, is the usual Trotskyist line of explaining why things went wrong by the absence of a vanguard party.

In so far as Connolly was still a socialist in 1916 (which is very much open to doubt), by taking part in an insurrection aimed at establishing an independent capitalist government in Ireland he betrayed the cause of international socialism. To the extent that the Irish Republicans had any views on how society should be organised they endorsed those of Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, who argued in favour of protection for nascent Irish capitalist industry and for the establishment of an Irish merchant marine and an Irish stock exchange. All these were eventually achieved either under Griffith himself or later under one of Connolly’s fellow putschists De Valera—without the working class in Ireland benefitting in any way.

Adam Buick

The Irish Capitalist Republic (1972)

From the August 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just before he was tied to a chair and shot by a firing squad in May 1916, the injured James Connolly is said to have remarked, “The Socialists will never understand why I am here”. Well might he have felt guilty, from a socialist and working class point of view, about what he had done. For he was being executed for his leading part in the Easter Rising, an armed insurrection aimed at establishing, with aid from imperial Germany, an independent, and unavoidably capitalist, Republic in Ireland.

Before the war Connolly, who was well acquainted with Marxist and Socialist ideas*, had been a prominent and successful trade union organiser. At the time of his execution he was the secretary of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union and “commandant” of its armed defensive force, the Irish Citizen Army. This had been formed in the course of the great Dublin lock-out of 1913 to protect union members from police violence and intimidation, but Connolly turned it into a Republican body. He himself was almost certainly admitted to the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood before being appointed commander of its forces in Dublin during the rising.

The 1RB had no social programme and was simply dedicated to using physical force to establish an Irish Republic. The Declaration of the Republic which was proclaimed from the steps of the GPO in Dublin does, it is true, express a few democratic and reformist sentiments, but only in the vaguest terms. Its main concern was obviously “the Republic”. In fact when, only a few years later, it came to adopting a definite social programme the IRB endorsed Arthur Griffith’s long-standing policy of Irish capitalism, stock exchange and all. Connolly had died not for international Socialism, not even for trade unionism, but for an Irish capitalist republic.

The Easter Rising, and the merciless execution of its leaders, did have the effect of transforming the Irish political scene: the Nationalist parliamentary party rapidly lost ground to Sinn Fein. Taking their cue from the Ulster Unionist, the Nationalists and Republicans too had formed an armed militia before the war. Called the Irish National Volunteers, prominent amongst its leaders were secret members of the IRB. On the outbreak of the first world war the movement split, the great majority following the pro-war lead of the Nationalist MP’s. It was the minority, who retained the name Irish Volunteers, that the IRB planned to mobilise for its 1916 insurrection but the plan misfired and only a few of its units actually took part. After the rising the Irish Volunteers were popularly known as the Sinn Fein Volunteers.

Sinn Fein, now republican, began to win by-elections at the expense of the Nationalist parliamentary party. In the 1918 British General Election Sinn Fein won a large majority of Irish seats, 73 compared with 6 for the Nationalists and 26 for the Unionists. In accordance with their abstentionist policy, instead of going to Westminster, they met in Dublin in January 1919, declared themselves to be the parliament (Dail, in Irish) of an independent Irish Republic and appointed a provisional government under De Valera with Griffith as Minister of Home Affairs. This was no idle declaration since behind it stood the armed Sinn Fein Volunteers, to be renamed later that year the Irish Republican Army or IRA.

For two years a brutal war of reprisals and counter-reprisals waged between the IRA and the British Army with its notorious “black and tans” (no-good soldiers) and “auxiliaries” (no-good officers). A truce was arranged in December 1921 and negotiations for a peace treaty started. The British government offered the 26 counties of Southern Ireland political independence as “the Irish Free State”, nominally subject to the British Crown, and threw in the power to impose tariffs to protect Irish industry as an added concession. A majority of the IRA and the Sinn Fein government accepted this; a minority including De Valera, regarding the Treaty as a betrayal of Republican ideals, did not. The new Free State government with Griffith as Prime Minister resolved to crush this minority and eventually did so, but only after a bitter Civil War which didn’t end till 1923 and which killed more people than the previous war with Britain. Although the IRA stopped fighting, they didn’t give up their arms. They hid them and continued to exist as an illegal underground organisation.

The new government settled down to governing Irish capitalism, in the interests of the bigger capitalists and big cattle ranchers who exported to Britain, and with callous indifference to the problems of the working class. “It is no function of government”, one Minister once said when criticised about the level of unemployment, “to provide work for anybody”. Strikes broke out as wages fell; trade union membership declined; poverty, ill-health, slums, unemployment and emigration continued. Independence, in short, had made no difference whatsoever to the position and problems of the working class. They had merely experienced a change of masters from the capitalists of Britain to the capitalists of Southern Ireland.

Civil liberties began to be eroded as Home Rule came to take on some of the features of “Rome Rule”. In 1925 divorce was abolished. Until that time people living in Ireland had been able to get divorced on the same terms, strict as they then were, as people living in England. This was stopped, and it applied to Protestants as well as Catholics. In 1929 a “Censorship of Publications Board” was set up which proceeded to ban the import and sale of books the Catholic hierarchy found offensive. Education in Ireland always had been denominational, but the new government made no attempt to set up non-sectarian State schools. Quite the contrary. It gave the Catholic Church a virtual free hand in the education of those whose parents were Catholics, i.e., the overwhelming majority of Irish school-children. The only price they had to pay for this was the cost of subsidising separate Protestant schools for the small Protestant minority. But the move that was to make the South of Ireland virtually a Catholic State—the 1937 Constitution—was the work not of the pro-Treatyites but of their Republican opponents.

In 1926 De Valera led a group of supporters out of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, after a small majority had refused to endorse his proposal to use the ballot-box and Free State parliament to try to establish (or restore, as he put it) "the Republic”. Thus was founded Fianna Fail, now Ireland’s normal governing party.

Fianna Fail inherited its economic programme from the original Sinn Fein, promising “to encourage native industries that minister to the needs of the people, to protect them by such tariffs, subsidies and other methods as may be necessary”. The new party also promised protection for agriculture and "to break up the large grazing ranches and distribute them amongst young farmers and agricultural labourers”. Fianna Fail in fact was basically the party of the small farmer and its agricultural policy, which included increased tillage in place of raising cattle for export to Britain, opposed their interests to those of the big cattle farmers which the then government (whose political descendants are Fine Gael, the main Irish opposition party) tended to represent.

Fianna Fail made rapid headway and by 1932 was the majority party, with De Valera as Prime Minister. The new government proceeded to do precisely what the Belfast capitalists had always believed a Home Rule government would sooner or later do: erect tariff walls behind which Irish manufacturing industry could grow. Indeed the declared—and quite unrealistic—policy of Fianna Fail at this time was “a self-sufficing Ireland, an Ireland not dependent for its economic life on its external trade” (Fianna Fail 1926-1951).

Steps were taken to emphasise Ireland’s formal independence from Britain—the oath of allegiance was abolished; the Governor General sacked, and a brand new republican constitution enacted—none of which had any relevance whatsoever to the problems the working class of Ireland were facing in the midst of the Great Depression of the thirties.

The new 1937 Constitution was a peculiar blending of Irish Republican ideology and Catholic social and political teaching. It embodied all the aspects of “Rome Rule” which had come to the fore under the Free State. Article 44(2) proclaimed that “the State recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of its citizens”. Article 40, making censorship constitutional, declared that “publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punished in accordance with law”. And Article 41 baldly stated, “No law shall be enacted providing for the grant of a dissolution of marriage”. So pleased was the Vatican with these arrangements that they have never bothered to draw up a formal agreement with the Irish government about the position of the Catholic Church as they have done with the governments of other Catholic countries. Nor has the Catholic hierarchy ever been bashful about interfering in politics, to denounce some harmless social reform or some luckless politician.

During the 1930’s the IRA rapidly degenerated from a popular movement into the small gang of terrorists it is today. In 1936 the De Valera government banned it. When three years later the IRA launched its notorious bombing campaign in England (whose main achievement was the killing of 5 and the injuring of over fifty innocent workers in Coventry in August 1939) the Irish government took even more drastic action: it introduced the Offences Against the State Act which gave it the power to intern without trial members of any organisation it chose to declare “unlawful”, and which, together with the “special position” of the Catholic Church, is the other great undemocratic feature of the Southern Irish State which survives to this day.

Trade unions in Ireland too have had to suffer from more restrictive laws than in Britain, at least until the introduction of the British Industrial Relations Act.

While Ireland was politically a part of Britain the law on trade unions was the same, though industrial conditions were different. Ireland was largely an agricultural country and, outside Belfast, its towns were commercial rather than industrial centres. Corresponding to this lower level of industrial development the leading Irish trade unions tended to be general rather than industrial, as best typified by the Irish Transport and General Workers Union founded by James Larkin which is still the largest union in Ireland. In 1895 most of the trade unions operating in Ireland, including those with headquarters in England, set up an Irish TUC which in 1912 decided to finance an Irish Labour Party. For years this was only a trade union pressure group trying, none too successfully, to get a few reforms of benefit to the working class and which, since wage workers were till recently a minority of the population of Southern Ireland, never seriously aspired to be an alternative governing party for Irish capitalism. Later, however, on two occasions, in 1948 and again in 1954, it did join with the openly conservative Fine Gael and others in anti-Fianna Fail coalition governments and so has taken part in running capitalism for the benefit of the Irish (and British) capitalist class. The Labour Party now says it won’t enter into a coalition with “capitalist parties” again, but it probably would if the occasion arose—not that it’s not a capitalist party itself of course.

In 1941 the Fianna Fail government brought in a Trade Union Act which largely anticipated, by thirty years, Britain’s Industrial Relations Act. Only trade unions which, in return for a financial deposit, had been granted a “negotiation licence” by the State were to continue to enjoy protection against claims for civil damages arising out of strikes; any other union which tried to negotiate over wages and working conditions not only lost this protection but was to be subject to continuing fines till it stopped. A further section allowed a majority union in a particular industry to claim sole negotiating rights for that industry on application to a special tribunal and subject to an individual ballot of the workers involved. This was later declared unconstitutional, but the rest of the Act remains in force. The Irish Republicans, including the Fianna Fail government, had on nationalist grounds never liked “English” trade unions operating in Ireland and the third section of the Act was partly designed to drive such unions out of Southern Ireland. It didn’t work but for a while nationalism did split the Irish trade union movement. After Partition trade unionists North and South of the Border continued to be united in the Irish TUC, a sound arrangement since the Border was of no relevance to the working class in either part of Ireland. But after the second world war, under nationalist influence, the ITGWU split from the Irish TUC and set up a rival and exclusively Southern Irish Congress of Irish Unions. All-Ireland trade union unity did not come again for twenty years when the two rival centres united to form the present Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU).

Up until 1922 social benefits in Ireland had been the same as in the rest of Britain, but afterwards lagged behind as mainly agricultural Ireland could not afford to pay (or would not have gained much economic advantage from paying), the same level of benefits as industrial Britain. Indeed, paying lower pensions and benefits was one of the reasons given for the 1912 Home Rule Bill. The Primrose Committee set up to examine the financial implications of Home Rule was particularly concerned about “the extravagance and waste that results from too close an assimilation of the scale of expenditure in Ireland to that of Great Britain” and specifically singled out the newly- introduced Old Age Pensions as an example. Paragraph 13 of their Report declared:

   . . . it is impossible not to feel that, if the Government had had to construct a scheme of Old Age Pensions especially for Ireland, they would have devised a much less costly and a much less comprehensive scheme than the one now in operation. But the Act had to be framed to suit the conditions of the industrial workers of Great Britain, and, in consequence of the political connection, had to be extended, unchanged and unadapted, to a population whose conditions were widely dissimilar. If Home Rule had been granted to Ireland before the passage of the Old Age Pensions Act, it is very doubtful indeed if an Irish Parliament would have in that regard followed the example of Great Britain. So much has been almost in terms stated in public speeches by the leading Irish politicians (Report by the Committee on Irish Finance Cd 6153).

The Committee conceded that current pensions should not be reduced, but insisted that an Irish government would have to give priority to cutting expenditure below the level the British government has been forced to shoulder in Ireland adding.

  From what we have said in Paragraph 13 it will be gathered that we regard Old Age Pensions as an item of expenditure on which reduction would be not only legitimate but desirable in the new conditions to be established in Ireland—of course in respect of future pensions only (Report Paragraph 55).

So, from one point of view, “Home Rule” and “Independence” for Ireland was a way of saving the British capitalist class money on unnecessary social reforms. Social benefits in Southern Ireland are still less extensive than in the rest of Britain (including Northern Ireland) but the gap has been closing as Ireland has become more industrialised.

If anything, then, the working class in Ireland suffered—with less political democracy, a divided and more restricted trade union movement, lower social benefits—from so-called independence which was for them, as we said, basically only a change of masters. But for the nascent Southern Irish capitalist class it meant the political power to legislate to further their own economic interests. This their governments did, through protection, during the period 1932- 1959. Then, as protection became increasingly inefficient, the Fianna Fail government completely reversed its previous economic policy, took down the tariff barriers and invited outside capitalists to invest in Ireland. In 1965 an Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement, providing for full free trade between the two countries by 1975, was signed. And now, along with Britain, Ireland is to join the Common Market (E.E.C.).

When this process of full economic re-integration with Britain is completed Ireland will be back where it was before 1922—and the thousands of young men who sacrificed their (and other people’s) lives “for Ireland” will be clearly seen to have died and killed merely to have got about thirty years of protection for Irish capitalist industry to catch up with the rest of Britain plus a few superficial political changes which, where they weren’t for the worse, amounted to little more than “painting the pillar boxes green” as the popular saying accurately puts it.

Adam Buick

Next month: an exposure of the 
Northern Ireland statelet.

* As a member of the Social Democratic Federation at the turn of the century he [Connolly] had been involved in the “impossibilist revolt” against its undemocratic and reformist nature which led to the founding of the Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Connolly had been the chairman of the first SLP Conference.

Dublin, Easter 1916: What We Said At The Time (2016)

From the March 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

A grave armed revolt in Dublin against English rule is raging at the time of writing. It is a revolt doomed from the outset, both because of the futility of its narrow nationalist aims, and the utter hopelessness of such a revolt against the mighty organised force of the political State. It is, apart from the fact that Socialism alone is worth fighting for, yet another illustration (if such were needed) that the organised Socialist conquest of the political power of the State is the only way, and that mere mob violence plays into the hands of the oppressor and strengthens the gyves that fetter us. Such a revolt, however, is the natural result of centuries of alien oppression, which has forced the ideas of Irishmen into nationalist channels and blinded them to its futility. And it is at the same time a fitting commentary on the pervid declarations of the British champions of “honour” and “righteousness” that “they” are fighting, above all, for the “rights of small nationalities”. (Editorial, May 1916)

The capitalist class – national and international – being in possession of the wealth stolen from the workers, compete with each other for the control of the world’s markets. This capitalist class, split into warring factions, are continually embroiled in trouble over the disposal of the wealth on the markets, but they present a solid front to the workers whenever the latter get out of hand in the endeavour to better their conditions of life. We have just witnessed in Ireland an example, where, as a result of an incorrect conception of their position in society, thousands of working men and women flocked into the Sinn Fein movement, only to be butchered by their oppressors in control of the armed forces of the State.
It is true that the Irish workers have a fearful struggle to live, like the rest of their class the world over. But an anti-social movement like theirs, with “Ireland for Irishmen” for its slogan, was doomed to failure from the start. We, the working men and women who form the Socialist Party of Great Britain, sympathise with our fellow workers in Ireland in their struggle against the hideously squalid conditions that prevail among them, but must record our hostility to any movement that is not based upon the class struggle. (The Prize-Fighter’s Evidence, July 1916)

We have heard much in times past on the subject of German atrocities, but the revelations vouchsafed to us in connection with the Dublin revolution leaves the question, a very debatable one as to whether the ruling class here are any better than elsewhere. The shooting of Sheehy Skeffington and two other journalists affords an illustration of the point. The details are rather significant, particularly the second shooting of Skeffington, when it is borne in mind that the officer who gave the order is declared insane. The reports of the court-martial to be found in the columns of the “Daily Chronicle” for June 7th and 8th are highly interesting. (By the Way, July 1916)

The latest blunder of the Irish working class is in the support given to the Sinn Fein movement, which seeks to establish a republic, with the examples of France and the United States before them proving conclusively the futility of such an experiment to abate their ever-growing poverty. The form of government makes no difference to the workers. Government implies subjects and under the capitalist system of society the actual government machinery, Parliament, councils and judiciary, etc., are representative of the capitalist class – the necessary machinery for ruling a subject class composed of wage-slaves. (….)
It is a false notion of the Sinn Feiners and Nationalists that the Irish workers must struggle for national independence before they can tackle the problem of poverty. But the working class everywhere is under one capitalist government or another. To split territories, set up new governments, or to re-establish old ones will not help them nor even simplify the problem. Their only hope lies in the speedy establishment of Socialism. They must join hands with the workers of the world, and make common cause against the ruling class. They must make ready use of the last war – the war of the classes, in which classes will be abolished and a real equality established on the basis of “common ownership and democratic control of all the means of life.” (The Irish Question in History, August 1916.)

The difficulties already existing in Ireland, coupled with the feelings engendered by the ruthless use of the military both during and since the futile “rebellion” would seem to make the game [of imposing conscription on Ireland] scarcely worth the candle (…)
Not until the working class in Ireland clearly grip the essential fact that they are slaves to the master class no matter what nationality these latter may be; fully realise that such slavery is confined within no national boundary but is world wide; throw off the mental shackles of either “nationalism” or “religion,” and join hands with their fellow workers the world over to abolish capitalism –the cause of modern wars –not until then will they be free from oppression and tyranny and be able to enjoy the results of their efforts applied to Nature’s resources. (Conscription Continued, November 1916)

Ignominious end (2018)

Book Review from the October 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The James Connolly Reader’. Edited by Shaun Harkin. (Haymarket Books. 2018. 460 pages)

James Connolly is of interest not just because he is an Irish Nation(alist) Hero who claimed to be a socialist but also because he took part in the ‘impossibilist revolt’ in the Social Democratic Federation. This involved SDF members, mainly in Scotland and London, who were opposed to the autocratic control of the organisation by a clique around its leader, H. M. Hyndman, and to its opportunist policies. It led to a breakaway, in 1903, by those in Scotland to form the Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain and, in 1904, of those in London to form the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Connolly, who was born in Scotland but was then living in Dublin, was associated with the first group and chaired its inaugural meeting. When later in 1903 he emigrated to America he joined the SLP of America.

By this time the SLP’s leading figure, Daniel De Leon, had developed the theory of ‘socialist industrial unionism’ according to which, to achieve socialism, the working class had to organise both politically and industrially, but with organisation into industrial unions to take over the means of production being the more important. This was the original position of the IWW when it was founded in 1905, and for which Connolly was an organiser for a while.

During his period in America Connolly held this position, even after leaving the SLP.  It led him away from his earlier position that the socialist political party should be a strictly socialist one towards saying that it only needed to be a party committed to furthering the interests of the working class. Following this up, he joined the Socialist Party of America. His views in this period can be found in his 1909 pamphlet Socialism Made Easy (reproduced here). Also included in this collection, brought out to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, is his 1910 classic Labour in Irish History.

He returned to Ireland in 1910 and was one of those behind the formation of the Irish Labour Party in 1912, intended to be the equivalent in the coming Home Rule Parliament in Dublin of the Labour Party at Westminster, i.e., a trade union pressure group. Connolly was now an organiser for the Irish Transport and General Workers Union and most of his work from then on was trade union activity, in Belfast as well as Dublin, including during the notorious Dublin Lock-Out of 1913.

In his 80-page introduction Harkin, an SWPer, says that Connolly developed a pioneering view on ‘the relationship between national liberation and socialism’ with his argument that, since in Ireland the propertied classes were too dependent on British imperialism to successfully lead the struggle for Irish independence, this task fell to the Irish working class. He may well have argued this, but he didn’t practise it.  He ended up a ‘Martyr for Old Ireland’ in 1916 in a futile insurrection led, not by the working class, but by non-socialist pure-and-simple Irish Republicans and backed by Imperial Germany. In his written ‘Last Statement’ to his daughter before he was executed by a British Army firing squad he made no mention of socialism, only of Irish freedom and ‘national rights’.

He died not for socialism but for capitalist Irish Republicanism. His sad descent towards this ignominious end can be traced in last hundred pages of Harkin’s selection.

Adam Buick

Ireland's Civil War (1969)

Book Review from the February 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ireland’s Civil War, by Calton Younger. (Muller 50/-.)

Calton Younger gives here a detailed and factual account of the events which finally erupted in a cruel and merciless civil war.

Probably his greatest failing is the identifying of the years from the 1916 Easter Rising to the civil war in 1922 with “revolution'’ and, as he suggests, the inevitability of civil war after “revolution". This may be true of “bloody revolutions" but there was hardly anything revolutionary about the 1916 Rising. James Connolly was the only one of the insurgent leaders who was acquainted with revolutionary ideas but he erroneously believed that an Irish republic and socialist society were compatible, and this, together with the fact that he was an influential leader, probably accounts for why he involved himself in a purely capitalist venture.

The British Government's policy of staggering the executions of the 1916 leaders over a number of days is classed by the author as sheer stupidity. Younger fails to see it as the desperate effort of a ruling class to stamp out dissension from imperialist rule for of course, an independent Ireland would have been a weakness in British defence strategy in the war. The depths to which Lloyd-George, Churchill and the other cabinet ministers were willing to go, were manifest when they sent the dreaded Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries into Ireland to stamp out the raging guerilla war. The I.R.A. could distinguish between British troops and civilians but the British troops, just like the Americans in Vietnam today, often could not distinguish between rebels and other people: when in counter-reprisals they vehemently ravished whole villages and murdered innocent people. This situation was temporarily halted in 1921 when a truce was agreed upon due to pressure inside and outside Westminster.

The negotiations in London (which followed the short-lived peace) between the Irish plenipotentiaries and leading Cabinet Ministers; the reaction of the Republicans to the terms of the Treaty and the civil war that ensued because of the split in the ranks of I.RA, are all described. Various accounts of incidents are given by still-living I.R.A. veterans and much use is made of recently released Cabinet documents. Most of the book tells a sordid story. It should be read by Scottish and Welsh nationalists because it exposes the degradations which the venom of nationalism can lead to.

Patrick Garvey

The Prize-Fighter's Evidence. (1916)

From the July 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

The statement always made by the Socialist that the capitalist system is responsible for  the horrors of modern society still awaits the bold economist to explode it. The basis of society, the private ownership of the means of life, breeds the most hideous manifestations. The capitalist class, who own and control the means of wealth production and distribution, force the working class in order to live to operate those instruments for the profit of the former class. The wealth filched from the producers is sold upon the open market, and the workers, because they only receive a portion thereof as wages in return for their labour-power, cannot buy back the whole of their product. The result is the inevitable congestion of the market, with the consequent stagnation and crisis.

The capitalist class — national and international—being in possession of the wealth stolen from the workers, compete with each other for the control of the world’s markets. This capitalist class, split into warring factions, are continually embroiled in trouble over the disposal of the wealth on the markets, but they present a solid front to the workers whenever the latter get out of hand in the endeavour to better their conditions of life. We have just witnessed in Ireland an example, where, as a result of an incorrect conception of their position in society, thousands of working men and women flocked into the Sinn Fein movement, only to be butchered by their oppressors in control of the armed forces of the Skate.

It is true that the Irish workers have a fearful struggle to live, like the rest of their class the world over. But an anti-social movement like theirs, with “Ireland for Irishmen” for its slogan, was doomed to failure from the start. We, the working men and women who form the Socialist Party of Great Britain, sympathise with our fellow workers in Ireland in their struggle against the hideously squalid conditions that prevail among them, but must record our hostility to any movement that is not based upon the class struggle.

The blood-thirsty gang known as the international capitalist class know full well the horrible conditions that are rampant among the wealth producers, but while they pretend to condole with them, they do not intend to ease by a fraction the exploitation to which they subject them. Just at the moment when the various European governments are proclaiming that the war is being waged in the interests of their workers, it is well not to forget the awful conditions that are the lot of the toiling masses. Whether in London, Paris, Berlin, or Rome, in spite of the plausible tales of the reptile Press, millions of working men, women, and children are without even the bare necessaries of life. Writing on the Irish revolt one of the retired prize-fighters of the master class, while giving HIS opinion why the workers were led to the shambles, incidentally showed the state of things that prevail in one of OUR possessions.

The glorious British Empire! Such conditions as the above prevail wherever you care to travel in the much-vaunted, world wide dominions. Nor are these conditions confined to the British Empire, but they prevail wherever the private ownership in the means of life obtains.

Until the working class understand the class struggle, and recognise that the capitalist system and its parasitic class are alone responsible for the whole of the horrors we now witness, the common anomalies always prevalent, i.e., abject poverty and misery on one hand and riotous luxury and affluence on the other; international trade wars for markets and sea routes with their attendant bloodshed, will run concurrently with the cruel and ceaseless slaughter of the workers from the prolongation of the worst of all wars—the Class War.

The only hope lies in the deluded, toiling masses of wealth producers mustering under the crimson banner of Socialism, determined to gain control of the machinery of government, including the armed forces, to use it as the agent of emancipation, and to usher in the system of society based upon the common ownership of the means of life; the social system wherein the interests of the human family shall form a harmonious whole. 

C. F. Carter

Editorial: Fryatt and Others. (1916)

Editorial from the August 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

The fate of Captain Fryatt has caused another violent outbreak of cant to sweep over the larger part of the civilised globe. Such a bowl of indignation from those who are urging men on to wholesale murder might lead one to the conclusion that murder itself is a harmless and unimportant matter compared with the method and circumstances of the murder. Men are torn from their homes and sent willy-nilly into death-trap trenches to slaughter and be slaughtered in a quarrel that is not theirs, and that is doing glorious work and dying glorious deaths. The Cain-mark upon their foreheads takes the form Victoria Crosses or Iron Crosses and the like, while they who send them to their crime and their doom have their names inscribed on the “pegs of history" that is not placed in tbs category of the Newgate Calendar. There is no hint from our masters' paid mouth pieces, whether of Fleet Street or of Canterbury and York, that there is anything foul in all this. Crime under authority savours of heaven.

Authorities have a habit of making laws to support their authority, and it is characteristic of them that they never make the mistake of asking the concurrence of those they make subject to those laws If "Thou shalt" or "Thou shall not" are insufficient, then the requirements of the case are fully met with the noose or the bullet. Whatever wordy warfare may centre around the fact of the offence, it is always recognised that the question of tbs justice of the law will not stand argument, and there never is any. Thus in the Casement business not one word has been argued by the prosecution as to whether the prisoner's motives were grounded on patriotism or some baser sentiment. To let the evidence prove the former—it very well might—would by all the rules of logic place Casement on the same plane as Nurse Cavell—and that would never do. It would also have opened grave doubts as to the standing of those misguided Dublin rebels who shared the adventure with Casement, but not being of aristocratic blood, were shot out of hand. Were they not patriots also, and did they approve of the laws under which they were butchered in cold blood ?

The fact is all rule is coercion, and all rulers are bullies. The bullies make laws to suit their own needs without reference to the point of view of those whom they put under the laws, and to talk of justice in the case is laughable. For those who shot the Dublin prisoners in cold blood to complain of the judgment of the German court-martial is incongruous.

Of course the execution of Captain Fryatt was murder—foul, brutal, and stinking. But our masters want us to view it as something standing in a class by itself, something typically and peculiarly German ; but in truth it is nothing of the kind. It is simply another capitalist outrage upon a member of the working class, committed to suit capitalist ends, and accepted and exploited by other capitalists to fan the flame of hatred and feed the declining war-fever. That is our judgment of all these "atrocities."

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 and the Easter Rising (2016)

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back Blog

This is the text of a talk given by Adam Buick, one of the speakers at the Wakefield Socialist History Society forum on James Connolly and the Easter Rising

I want to develop the case put by Sean O’Casey in 1919 in his The Story of the Irish Citizen Army that, in participating in the 1916 insurrection, Connolly was not acting as a socialist.

O’Casey wrote that “Connolly had stepped from the narrow by-way of Irish Socialism on to the crowded highway of Irish Nationalism”. He gave “fixing on the frontage of Liberty Hall a scroll on which was written ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland’” as an example of Connolly’s “determined attachment to the principles enunciated by Sinn Fein and the Irish Volunteers, which were. in many instances, directly contrary to his life-long teaching of Socialism”. As a result, O’Casey went on, “Liberty Hall was no longer the Headquarters of Irish Labour, but the centre of Irish disaffection”.

The Easter Rising, so-called, was an insurrection planned and led by the Irish Republican Brotherhood whose aim was to establish a Republic in Ireland along the lines of those in France and the United States. In other words, an independent Irish capitalist state.

Connolly had always stood for Ireland becoming a separate country. But in this, he was only adhering to the general viewpoint of the Second International that workers had a country and should strive to establish socialism  in it. In so far as they didn't think “socialism in one country” to be possible they envisaged a federation of independent socialist countries. Connolly was insisting that Ireland should be one of these countries. This view led to their downfall in 1914 when most of them rallied to the defence of their “country” in the First World War. It could also be said to have been Connolly’s too as it led to him also rallying to a capitalist state, albeit a would-be one.

Connolly had been a part of the revolutionary socialist scene for a period. In Scotland, where he was born, he had been a member of the Social Democratic Federation, the organisation that first introduced Marxist ideas into Britain, and then of its equivalent in Ireland, the Irish Socialist Republican Party. He participated in the “impossiblist revolt” in the SDF against the authoritarianism and opportunism of its founder Hyndman, which led to the formation of the Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain in 1903 and of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904. Connolly was, in fact, the first chairman of the SLP, but soon afterwards left for America where he joined the Socialist Labor Party of America. Other members of the ISRP who left Ireland joined the SPGB.

The SLP of America was a party which, under Daniel De Leon, combined Second International Marxism and Syndicalism. Syndicalism is the doctrine that the best way, both to get improvements under capitalism and to overthrow the whole system, is through industrial action, culminating in the working class seizing control of the means of production. “Taking and holding” them was the phrase used. Unlike the French revolutionary syndicalists who rejected electoral action, De Leon and the SLP held that the “taking and holding” of the means of production would have to be backed by political action to win control of the state via the ballot box. The SLP called its view “socialist industrial unionism”.

The SLP participated in the formation of the IWW in 1905 but in 1908 the IWW adopted an anti-political stance, i.e. a pure syndicalist position, and De Leon and the SLP were expelled. Connolly, who by this time had fallen out with De Leon, remained and left the SLP.  In 1909 he published a pamphlet Socialism Made Easy setting out his views. The first part was made up of short “workshop talks” he had written some years previously; the second of longer articles explaining his “industrial unionism” which showed that, despite what the IWW had decided in 1908, he still adhered to the same basic position as De Leon: industrial action to overthrow capitalism backed up by political action at the ballot box. Writing in capitals he emphasised:

“IT IS, THEREFORE, ABSOLUTELY INDISPENSABLE FOR THE EFFICIENT TRAINING OF THE WORKING CLASS ALONG CORRECT LINES THAT ACTION AT THE BALLOT BOX SHOULD ACCOMPANY ACTION IN THE WORKSHOP.”

He went on:

“The workers will be industrially organised on the economic field, and until that organisation is perfected, whilst the resultant feeling of class consciousness is permeating the minds of the workers, the Socialist Political Party will carry on an independent campaign of education and attack upon the political field, and as a consequence will remain the sole representative of the Socialist idea in politics.”

Although I think he got it the wrong way round – I think that, while both are necessary, political action is more important than industrial action and he was clearly wrong in assuming that “industrial union consciousness” would automatically reflect itself on the political field as socialist consciousness – this pamphlet shows that Connolly had once been part of the revolutionary socialist scene.

After his return to Ireland in 1910, Connolly came to abandon this position about the need for a socialist party to carry on a campaign of education and attack on the political field and to be “the sole representative of the Socialist idea in politics”. In 1912 he supported the setting up of the Irish Labour Party, a non-socialist party modelled on the Labour Party in Britain, to be the political arm of the trade union movement in Ireland. His 1915 pamphlet The Re-conquest of Ireland envisages this happening through the spread of co-operatives and the gradual nationalisation of more and more industries. It also lists a number of social reforms which “Labour”, i.e the Labour Party, should campaign for. He still believed in “One Big Union” but more to defend workers within capitalism than to take and hold the means of production.

It is not his drift towards Labour reformism that’s the issue here. The mystery is how he came to play a leading role in a pure and simple Irish Republican uprising. He had of course always been a republican in a sense. After all, he was a founding member of the Irish Socialist Republican Party with its paper The Workers Republic (although the terms “Socialist Republic” and “Workers Republic” were also in use outside Ireland as an alternative name for socialism as a system of society). But, precisely, a “socialist” or “workers” republic, not a capitalist republic as in France or the United States.

One of the articles included in Socialism Made Easy was a reprint of an article from The Workers Republic of 1899 entitled “Let Us Free Ireland !” Here’s an extract:

“After Ireland is free, says the patriot who won’t touch socialism, we will protect all classes, and if you won’t pay your rent you will be evicted same as now. But the evicting party, under command of the sheriff, will wear green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the roadside will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic. Now, isn’t that worth fighting for?And when you cannot find employment, and, giving up the struggle of life in despair, enter the poorhouse, the band of the nearest regiment of the Irish army will escort you to the poorhouse door to the tune of St. Patrick's Day. Oh! It will be nice to live in those days!“With the Green Flag floating o’er us” and an ever-increasing army of unemployed workers walking about under the Green Flag, wishing they had something to eat. Same as now! Whoop it up for liberty!”

This is prophetic of what did happen after an Irish State was established in 1922. The only thing he didn’t get right was that the flag that floated over the unemployed was a tricolour and not a green one with a harp.

This was not aimed at the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster as they supported only Home Rule. It was, and can only be, a criticism of pure and simple Republicanism, of “patriots who won’t touch socialism” as Connolly called them. So why then did he later join them in a vain attempt to set up an Irish capitalist Republic?

People have speculated as to why Connolly departed even from his later commitment to Labourism to support a typical Fenian stunt. Psychological explanations have been offered such as disillusion with workers for supporting the war or with Irish workers joining the British Army. It’s even been suggested that he had come to share Patrick Pearse’s view that a blood sacrifice was needed to revive Irish Nationalism.

Certainly, the insurrection was suicidal. Its leaders must have known that it had no chance of success, not even with German aid. It had very little popular support and was challenging the might of the world’s most powerful capitalist states which, being at war, was going to be at its most ruthless. And it was.

I want to finish by quoting what the Socialist Standard, the SPGB’s paper, said at the time:

From the May 1916 issue:
“A grave armed revolt in Dublin against English rule is raging at the time of writing. It is a revolt doomed from the outset, both because of the futility of its narrow nationalist aims, and the utter hopelessness of such a revolt against the mighty organised force of the political State.”

From July 1916:

It is true that the Irish workers have a fearful struggle to live, like the rest of their class the world over. But an anti-social movement like theirs, with "Ireland for Irishmen" for its slogan, was doomed to failure from the start. We, the working men and women who form the Socialist Party of Great Britain, sympathise with our fellow workers in Ireland in their struggle against the hideously squalid conditions that prevail among them, but must record our hostility to any movement that is not based upon the class struggle.h

And, finally, from August 1916:

It is a false notion of the Sinn Feiners and Nationalists that the Irish workers must struggle for national independence before they can tackle the problem of poverty. But the working class everywhere is under one capitalist government or another. To split territories, set up new governments, or to re-establish old ones will not help them nor even simplify the problem. Their only hope lies in the speedy establishment of Socialism. They must join hands with the workers of the world, and make common cause against the ruling class. They must make ready use of the last war – the war of the classes, in which classes will be abolished and a real equality established on the basis of ‘common ownership and democratic control of all the means of life.’”

Adam Buick

Making Nationalists (2016)

From the May 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world is divided into almost 200 different countries and most of them celebrate some type of annual ‘national’ day.

The most widely known examples are the 4th July Independence Day of the United States and Bastille Day on 14 July in France. Mexico has its ‘El Grito’ in September which celebrates the beginning of its struggle to end Spanish rule and Cuba has its Liberation Day to mark the advent of the Castro regime. Britain is unusual in not having any widely recognised national day although the Queen’s Official Birthday and St. George’s Day (at least in England) partly fulfil the role. In Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day on the 17 March is generally accepted as the national day (especially in the Republic) although Easter Monday (the date of the Rising in 1916) is also a calendar date of importance. National days usually commemorate the formation of the country in the sense of gaining ‘freedom’ from a governing colonial power, as in the case of the USA, or else mark some major change (erroneously called a revolution) in the social structure of a country as with France. Sometimes they have their roots in and take their context from cultural, religious or historical events. For countries that have experienced much social and political upheaval over the last 100 years, such as Germany or Russia, the day considered as the national day, has changed many times over the years.

In Ireland, this year being the centenary of the Easter Rising, the day was given a more pronounced significance. For the previous year, the government planned a whole series of ceremonies with the major commemorations held on Easter Sunday and Easter Monday; 27 and 28 March. What’s a socialist perspective on this? As the articles in the March Standard suggested, in spite of all the rhetoric of the state and media, there really is very little tangible to see in the day-to-day lives of the citizens of the Republic of Ireland that is connected to the Rising apart from the fact that most major railway stations in Irish cities are named after some of the leading participants.

It’s interesting to compare this centenary celebration with the commemoration that occurred in 1966 on the half centenary. The centrepiece on that occasion was a traditional old style military parade of the Irish Army down O’Connell Street in Dublin whilst being reviewed by Eamon De Valera and other elderly survivors of the Rising. Watching old film of it is very reminiscent of observing the May Day parades that the leadership of the Soviet Union indulged in with the massed ranks of marching troops, the armoured columns and the flypasts of combat aircraft. Of course for  Ireland, the military hardware on show was on a much smaller scale.

For this year’s anniversary, the aim was to be much more ‘inclusive’ with family events, educational lectures, historical re-enactments, street festivals, etc. Of course the underlying nationalist message was still present though in a more muted form; an example being that in the weeks prior to Easter, the Proclamation was read out in all school playgrounds under the Tricolour.

The correct attitude to adopt to the Rising has always been somewhat problematical for Irish Governments. While Irish Independence is nominally taken to have begun with the rebellion, in fact the origins of the state really date from the unplanned and erratic series of events that occurred from the Conscription crisis of 1918 to the end of the Civil War in 1923.

The undemocratic and vanguardist nature of the military operation of Easter 1916 has unpalatable parallels with the more recent campaign of the Provisional IRA. In fact during these more recent troubles, apologists for the Provisional movement liked to justify their struggle against claims that it had little popular support by reference to the minority action of 1916. The authorities in Dublin were keenly aware of this and certainly during the 1970s and 1980s there was little official observance of the date on any grand scale.

The participation of James Connolly in the planning and execution of the Rising has always given it left-wing appeal even though he was in a clear minority in terms of his political outlook compared to the other leaders. Connolly had an admirable record prior to the Rising as a social agitator and resolute campaigner against capitalism and militarism. The other leaders, while some of them had vaguely progressive ideas, were more straightforward cultural nationalists who envisaged the new state that would be formed as replicating other nascent European nation-states. For many of them, the aim of the Rising was to give Ireland its own lag, anthem, currency and  language; the usual trappings of a sovereign capitalist nation. A well-known phrase from the Proclamation ‘cherishing all the children of the nation equally’ has since been used to vindicate the claim that it was a progressive event even though that wording was placed there more for grandiose political purposes than a call to any specific programme of social action.

What’s the view from today? It can be debated over and back whether the 26 counties that eventually went on to form the Republic of Ireland would have been better or worse off if they had remained as part of the UK. It’s a calculation that has been and continues to be put forward to the Scottish people by the governing SNP in Edinburgh. To an extent it’s similar to the current debate in the UK about its own membership of the larger European political union.

While we constantly hear that we live in a globalised world, national sovereignty still resonates with many people. As socialists we reject the concept absolutely. The delineation of national boundaries within a system of world capitalism is just a reflection of the nationalist consciousness that currently prevails amongst the people of this planet. The celebration of national days, the supporting of the national team at international football tournaments, the organised remembrance of common history etc. are all manifestations of the constant encouragement to us to make identification with our fellow countrymen as the primary determinant of our political consciousness. This is a false proposition. The problems of the Irish people were not solved by independence; the hundreds of thousands of emigrants who left Ireland since 1922 are proof of that. The same will hold for the Scottish people. In the long term, the maintenance or relinquishment of membership of the EU will not improve or worsen the overall position of the majority of the people of the island of Britain. As socialists we say the only political allegiance we should give is to our fellow workers and our objective should be to finish with countries and their bogus ‘national’ days.

Kevin Cronin

Founding myths (2016)

Book Review from the March 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Who’s Afraid of the Easter Rising? 1916-2016'. By James Heartfield and Kevin Rooney. Zero Books, 2015, £11.99.

Socialists will not like this book, because of its relentless pro-Irish Republican stance.  Those who took part in the  armed uprising in Dublin at Easter in 1916 were, we are told, ‘heroes’ and ‘freedom fighters’ who fought for a ‘noble cause’. Certainly, those prepared to die for their beliefs deserve some respect, but what was the ‘noble’ cause? What was the ‘freedom’ they died for?

The rebels proclaimed an ‘Irish Republic’ from the steps of the GPO. The proclamation was a typical bourgeois-revolutionary text. The freedom and equality it invoked were merely the same as those of the bourgeois-revolutionaries who set up the first French Republic in 1793 – freedom from hereditary and alien rulers and equality before the law and in the marketplace. The aim was set up an independent, capitalist Irish state. It had nothing to do with socialism despite the participation of the one-time revolutionary socialist James Connolly; in fact, in participating in it he could be said to have betrayed the cause of the working class and socialism.

The authors make another extravagant, though less implausible, claim for the uprising: that it was anti-war and anti-imperialist, ‘the first open revolt against Europe’s warlords’, a key event in bringing the First World War to an end. Hardly, as it occurred relatively early on in the war which continued for a further two-and-a-half years. It is true that, later, nationalists seeking independence from the British Empire did look back to it as an anti-imperialist action to emulate. For the participants, though, it was a simple pro-Irish revolt.

In describing it as ‘the founding act of the Irish State', Heartfield and Rooney are going along with the Irish State’s myth of its own origin. A much more historically accurate candidate for this would be the decision of the Sinn Fein MPs elected to the House of Commons in the 1918 UK general election not to take up their seats but to meet on their own in January 1919 as the parliament of an independent state.

In any event, both were insurrectionary acts, and Heartfield and Rooney derive much fun from pointing to the embarrassment of the present ruling class in Ireland who are clearly ashamed of the insurrectionary origin of their state. A large part of the book is taken up with arguing against the views of the ‘revisionist’ school of modern Irish history which says that the uprising  was unnecessary and even harmful as, after the War, Home Rule and eventually an independent Irish state would have come about peacefully, harmful because it enshrined the gun into Irish politics.

We can agree with the revisionist historians that the myth of the Easter Rising needs debunking. The Irish Republican tradition has been harmful and anti-working class but then so has Unionism. However,  those who argue that a peaceful transition to Home Rule and an independent state was likely had it not been for the Easter Rising are assuming that the Unionists in the North would have accepted this without resorting to violence (as they had done before the war, introducing more guns into politics than the Nationalists). After all, Ireland was then of strategic importance to the British Empire, and the established industrial capitalists of the North had a vital economic interest in not being cut off from their fellow British capitalists behind the tariffs walls of an economically backward Irish state.

In any event, irrespective of how it came into being, an independent Irish state was of no interest or benefit to the working class there.

There are a couple of mistakes about names. The Randolph Churchill who played the ‘Orange card’ in 1886 was not a Sir but a Lord (the son of a duke, and Winston’s father). The Con Lyhane mentioned as helping Tom Jackson’s anti-war activity in Leeds is surely Con Lehane; both incidentally founder members of the SPGB who later went off the rails.

Adam Buick