A Useful Volume Reviewed. (1914)

Book Review from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour in Irish History. By James Connolly. Paper covers, 1s net. Published by Maunsel & Co. Ltd., 96, Mid Abbey St., Dublin.

Home Rule and Carsonism are filling the columns of newspapers. Wild and furious threats, accompanied by more or less genuine spasms of gun-running, are thrown out as to what will happen if Home Rule is established, and thousands of workers both in England and Ireland are quite excited as to the result of the conflict.

At such a time much good may be done by drawing attention to certain historical evidences for the fundamental facts so important for the workers’ consideration.

And this book will largely help in such a desirable end.

Written by one who has made some study of the Marxian analysis of society, it cuts through the sham superficialities of the struggle between Home Ruler and Ulsterite, Catholic and Protestant, and shows how in Ireland, as everywhere else where classes exist, the real fight, the fundamental antagonism, is between those who own the means of life and those who have nothing but the sale of their labour-power to depend upon for an existence.

The development of the worker in Ireland is traced from the days of the Williamite wars to the present day, after a short account has been given of the previous conditions.

A particularly useful part of the book, in face of the many romances dealing with the time, is the description of the period preceding and covering the “Act of Union” between England and Ireland. The analysis of the various “revolutionary” leaders and their movements, with the exposure of frauds like Grattan, Flood, and O’Connell, is well worthy of study. Above all the fear and hatred of the working class by the wealth owners is shown by their slimy scheming to disarm the volunteers at that time.

These consisted of three sections—the Liberty Corps—working class; the Merchants’ Corps—capitalist class; and the Lawyers’ Corps—members of the legal profession.

As the author puts it:

“The Government [Irish Government bear in mind] had to use force to seize    the arms of the working men, but the capitalists gave up theirs secretly as the     result of a private bargain . . . and the lawyers privately handed their guns over     to the enemies of the people.”

    

“The working men fought, the capitalists sold out, and the lawyers bluffed.”    (p. 58).

An interesting account of a co-operative colony founded at Ralahine, County Clare, in 1831 is given, but the reader will tend to gather the impression that it is by such means the workers will emancipate themselves—an impression distinctly reactionary in face of the growth of the Social forces and the power needed for their economic manipulation.

There is one part of the work, however, to which distinct exception can be taken. This is the section dealing with the first Irish Socialist. One is here curiously reminded of the same attitude taken up by Miss Beatrice Potter (now Mrs Sidney Webb) in her book on "Co-operation".

The attitude is one of suggesting a thing without actually saying it.

The author claims that the great forerunner of Marx—standing between the Utopians and the latter—was an Irishman named William Thompson, who, among numerous notable statements, laid bare the source of value in his work entitled, An Inquiry into the Principles of Wealth most conducive to Human Happiness, etc, published 1824, where it is laid down that all labour can be reduced to unskilled labour of the average kind at a given time.

Miss Potter says Marx took his notion of “homogenous human labour” from Thompson and incorporated it in Capital.

The author says “In the English speaking world the work of this Irish thinker is practically unknown, but on the Continent of Europe his position has long been established” (p. 115).

Now what is common to both Connolly and Miss Potter is the curious fact that neither of them state who established Thompson’s position and made him known on the Continent. The uninstructed reader may learn with surprise that the person responsible was—Karl Marx!

Many years ago Dr Aveling pointed out in a little book called Darwin Made Easy, that the various “objections” by ignorant Christians and parsons to Darwin’s work were all first formulated by Darwin himself in the Origin of Species, and no opponent had ever brought forward any other. So with Marx. All the opponents of Marx who are so loud in their claims to have discovered “forerunners” of his work and ideas are all of them—German, English and Irish alike—indebted to Marx, who first discovered and gave full credit to them in his various works, particularly in the Poverty of Philosophy and the Critique of Political Economy.

And among others he points out that Benjamin Franklin had already in 1721 stumbled on the secret of undifferentiated labour as the source of value, though he (Franklin) did not work the idea out to any extent.

However, it is the fashion to-day among the shallow critics of scientific Socialism who are unable to refute the case or show a flaw in the arguments of Marx to pretend to demolish that genius by finding someone who “anticipated” him, and keeping “gradely dark” the fact that the very person they are indebted to for such discovery is Marx himself.

Jack Fitzgerald

The Dublin lockout of 1913 (2002)

Book Review from the February 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Dublin lockout is an important part of working class history, but there are few accessible sources of information. We review a new book which puts this right

Perhaps only those who have taken a particular interest in the history of the workers’ movement in Britain will have heard of the Dublin lockout of 1913 and then maybe will only know what happened in general terms, for instance that the workers’ leader was called Larkin and that mobs led by Catholic priests prevented workers sending their children to the rest of Britain for the duration of the dispute. Up to now the most accessible source of information about it has been James Plunkett’s 1969 novel Strumpet City but that was a novel. Now Irish Times journalist Padraig Yeates has produced a 600-page account, based on original contemporary sources, called simply Lockout: Dublin 1913 (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 19.04 euro). It is an important contribution to working class history, especially as the events in Dublin in 1913 and 1914 raise general issues concerning trade unionism, nationalism, and the role of religion.

Ireland in 1913 was in the midst of yet another Home Rule crisis. A Liberal government was trying for a third time to bring in Home Rule for Ireland in the form of a parliament which would have certain powers within the United Kingdom and the British Empire. The Unionists in Ulster, supported and egged on by the Tory opposition, were mobilising to resist coming under the control of a Home Rule parliament in Dublin.

One revealing aspect of Yeates’s book is how the socialist analysis of the Irish Home Rule crises has now become the standard view. We have always attributed the conflict in Ireland between Nationalists and Unionists to a split between two sections of the capitalist class there whose vital interests differred: the developed industrial capitalists of the North who were an integral part of the overall British capitalist class and who wanted to remain a full part of the UK so as to have continued free access to the markets of Britain and its Empire, and the fledgling capitalists of the rest of Ireland who wanted protection from the competition of British products behind a tariff wall. To win popular support for their respective positions the Northern capitalists played the Orange card while the other side played the Catholic card. Hence what was essentially a split in the capitalist class in Ireland appeared as a religious conflict between protestants and catholics.

Yeates takes this for granted and accepts that Irish nationalism was essentially the nationalism of the rising Catholic “middle class” (in the 19th century sense of small business and professional people). One of these was the leading Irish businessman, William Martin Murphy, who was a central figure in the Dublin lockout. The chairman of the company that ran the Dublin trams and owner of the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent and the Evening Herald, he had been an Irish Party MP on the anti-Parnellite wing, i.e., the wing that was particularly influenced by the Catholic Church which had enjoined the Irish Party MPs to disown Parnell because on his affair with a married woman.

Murphy, Yeates tells us, “saw home rule less as an opportunity to seize the levers of state power and patronage than as a chance to develop Irish industry. His increasing criticism of Redmond’s leadership of the Irish Party had less to do with the fact that Redmond had been a Parnellite than with his inability to gain greater fiscal powers from the Liberals for the proposed home rule parliament” (pp. 4-5).

However, it was not in his capacity as a Nationalist politician that Murphy has earned his notoriety in British and Irish working-class history. It was as the leader of the Dublin employers (most of the bigger ones in fact were not Nationalists but protestants and Unionists). But it did show that workers in Ireland could expect no charge in their condition from a Home Rule – or even an independent – government.

Syndicalism

The whole affair started in July when James Larkin, leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (and he was a leader with followers, even if he could still be described as a working-class fighter), decided to organise the Dublin tramway workers. Murphy replied by sacking members of the union. The union then got its other members to black the Dublin tram company. It also organised a big protest demonstration in the centre of Dublin on 31 August, which the government banned and which turned into a police riot in which many passers-by were beaten up – yet another bloody Sunday. Murphy’s next move was to get the Dublin employers to agree to require their workers to sign a form stating that they would have nothing to do with the ITGWU; those who refused were sacked, in effect locked out.

Larkin was what was called at the time a “syndicalist”, which meant someone who believed that the way forward for workers was combined industrial action on the basis of “an injury to one is an injury to all”. In practice it meant that other workers – ideally, all other workers – should take action in support of any group of workers on strike by blacking goods produced by or supplied to their employers – the “sympathetic strike”.

People who call themselves syndicalists today tend to be doctrinaire anarcho-syndicalists who repudiate any form of political action and rely on strikes only, including one big final general strike to overthrow capitalism. Larkin and the others were not so doctrinaire; in fact Larkin himself had been elected as a Labour councillor to Dublin City Council in 1910 (but had been disqualified because of a previous criminal conviction). Their position was well summed up by Tom Mann, the most prominent English syndicalist of the time (and former member of the Socialist League and future member of the Communist Party) in a speech he gave to the locked-out workers in Dublin on 27 January 1914, as written up by Yeates quoting a contemporary report:

“‘trades unionism is syndicalism’. His object was ‘to combine all workers in each industry, to raise them all nationally and internationally, so as to take over control of the whole economic system.’ In that way the proletariat ‘could fix the number of working days, the abolition of employers, capitalists and government–which latter is only a functionary of the employers.’ The ‘ideal of the co-operative commonwealth will be realised'” (p. 531).

This was all very well in theory but to be effective it would require a very high degree of class consciousness, so high in fact that, if it existed, workers would be in a position to take direct political action to end capitalism. The syndicalists, however, advocated the use of this tactic by workers who were not fully class-conscious, i. e., not socialist-minded and who still thought in sectional rather than class terms, and while leaving the state in the hands of the representatives of the capitalist class. Another factor working against its success was that under capitalism the employers always have the whiphand. If they so choose they can, because they own so much wealth, always break any strike by starving the workers back to work. This was in fact the choice of the Dublin employers in 1913. Murphy had already insolently, but unfortunately pertinently, reminded his workers of this when he addressed them in July right at the beginning of the dispute:

“Murphy told the tramway men that the company’s shareholders ‘will have three meals a day’, whether the strike succeeded or not. ‘I don’t know if the men who go out can count on this'” (p. 7).

Faced with this tactic by the employers of trying to starve into submission the workers in the ITGWU and those in other unions that had taken action to support them, a sympathetic strike by British transport workers (seamen, railwaymen, dockers) was one option. This was what Larkin favoured. Another option was to enable the workers to hold out longer by providing them with food and/or money. This was the option the TUC chose, and unions and union members contributed considerable amounts of food (carried to Dublin in specially freighted ships) and money. Yeates estimates this at the equivalent today of 10 million Irish pounds (12.5 million euro or £8 million sterling), an impressive display of working-class solidarity, and it did allow the workers to hold out until the end of January 1914.

The Catholic Church

Another initiative in this sense, not from the TUC but from individuals sympathetic to the Dublin workers, was to lodge Dublin workers’ children with sympathisers in England and Scotland while the dispute lasted. This seemed a reasonable tactic, but when they heard of it the Catholic Church went ape. The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr William Walsh (who was an Irish Nationalist and had also been one of those who had instigated the campaign to topple Parnell) immediately issued a statement condemning this as a danger to the children’s souls. This was the green light for the most outrageous actions by his priests. Screaming mobs led by priests stopped the children going. The Irish Catholic wrote about protecting “the children whom degraded and dissolute parents would fain surrender to Socialism or to any other Satanic influence” (p. 321).

One of the few to denounce the Catholic Church’s stance on this issue was the poet W. B. Yeats who declared at a public meeting “some day we will have to reckon with those who have fomented fanaticism in Dublin to break up the organisation of the workers” (p. 297).

Both Larkin and James Connolly, the IGTWU’s Belfast organiser who had been called to Dublin to help, were practising Catholics who claimed, contrary to all the evidence, that Socialism and Catholicism were not incompatible. Yeates quotes from a sermon given on 12 September by Father John Condon, a leading Dublin theologian of the time, which raises the intriguing question of what Larkin and Connolly were told when they went to confession:

“I have to tell you, beloved brethren, that the word Socialism connotes a body of doctrine which no Catholic who values his faith can accept; and I say further, that the Catholic who, with his eyes open, gives his sympathy and support to the methods and aims of Socialism is a recreant to his creed” (p. 157).

Archbishop Walsh, addressing a meeting of the St Vincent de Paul Society on 27 October, took up an even worse position preaching that only faith in God providing a better life in heaven could make the poor happy (“pie in the sky when you die”), a reminder of one important reason why socialists oppose religion:

“he dismissed outright the belief of Larkin and his fellow-socialists that the poor could save themselves by some form of social revolution. He believed that happiness was possible in this urban hell only for those willing to accept their lot; ‘holidays’ in England would make the attainment of that spiritual goal far more difficult” (p. 313).

Larkin, to give him his due, told the priests not to interfere. Connolly, too, had replied, in his pamphlet Labour, Nationality and Religion, to an attack on socialism by a Jesuit priest, Father Kane, in his 1910 “Lenten Discourses”. Father Kane, incidentally, had evidently read some SPGB publication as Connolly quotes him as saying at one point: “Now, as to the Socialist system. In the official declaration of the English Socialists we read – the object of Socialism is ‘the establishment of a system of society, based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by, and in the interests of the whole community'”.

The Irish Nationalists

The Irish Nationalists and Home Rulers were no more favourable to the workers. Some denounced the aid given by the TUC as “English charity” and even hinted that it was intended to further disadvantage Irish industry by raising wages so as to make it less competitive with English industry. One of these was Arthur Griffith, the narrow-minded founding member and theoretician of Sinn Fein, who, records Yeates, felt that “British trade unionists were exploiting the lockout to undermine Irish business” (p. 353). He also attacked in article in Sinn Fein on 25 October the view that “Capitalism not England is the enemy” by claiming:

“Not Capitalism, but the abuse of Capitalism oppresses Labour . . . Not in the destruction of the Capitalist, but in his subjection to the law of the State, interpreting the conscience and the interests of the Nation, will Labour be delivered from its oppression and restored to all its rights. I affirm that the evils of the social system, as they exist in this country and in Great Britain, are wholly due to English policy and Government . . .” (p. 354).

Fellow narrow nationalist and later Irish Republican hero and martyr, Patrick Pearse, took up a similar position, stating that he believed that “the root of the matter [dire and desperate poverty] lies in foreign domination” (p. 221).

In fact, there weren’t many who were actually saying (correctly) that “Capitalism not England is the enemy”. Connolly, who by now was well on the way to becoming a physical force republican (and, like Pearse, a future republican hero and martyr), argued in effect that “Capitalism and England are the enemy”. Larkin wouldn’t have disagreed but his approach was more down-to-earth: “Home Rule does not put a loaf in anybody’s pocket” (p. 181); Redmond (leader of the Irish Party) and Carson (leader of the Ulster Unionists) were “both simply the mouthpieces of the capitalist class” (p. 254); “Home rule would ‘clear the decks for the workers'” (p. 272).

That’s about all it did. In 1921 Ireland – or 26 of its 32 counties – did get an independence of sorts but capitalism remained—and so, as predicted by socialists, did its problems. The facts themselves – the continuing dire and desperate poverty, unemployment, emigration, slums, and ill-health – were to confirm that it was indeed not “English rule” or “foreign domination”, but capitalism, that had been the cause of the problems the workers in Ireland had had to face in 1913, 1914 and before.

The sympathetic strike – or rather the resistance to the lockout – ended in failure at the end of January in face of the intransigence of the employers and after the TUC had decided it could no longer afford to continue sending food and money. Larkin advised his members to go back while still refusing to sign the anti-union form. The employers took most but by no means all of them back but didn’t insist they sign the form.

Larkin blamed the TUC for not having called a general sympathetic strike of transport workers in Britain. Maybe this would have made the employers bend a little, by perhaps getting them to offer a “no victimisation” clause, i. e., the restoration of the status quo before the dispute. Which could hardly be called a victory. Basically, however, the reason for the failure was that the “syndicalist” tactic wasn’t as effective as its advocates imagined.

Adam Buick

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.

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

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

Material World: The Vote in Hong Kong (2020)

The Material World Column from the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Momentous events are taking place around the world where many discontented workers – Chile, Iran, Lebanon and Iraq, to name a few – are now confronting the status quo governments and demanding change. One of those protest movements because of the importance it has to the world economy and global politics is what taking place in Hong Kong, where there has been a sustained campaign for more democracy, although such calls are now being supplanted with more radical demands. Some consider that the Chinese authorities are acting with restraint considering their past history in the brutal and bloody suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy encampment or the totalitarian internment of the Uighurs. But Hong Kong’s importance is a vital financial centre for the Chinese economy and the justified fear of causing a deeper recession deters any military intervention.

After weeks of street demonstrations, which at times escalated into violence against the police and symbols of the state authorities, routine district council elections in November offered an opportunity for people to express their views and attitudes. Unlike Hong Kong’s Legislative Council which is composed of 70 members not all elected by the public, headed by Carrie Lam, who also is not elected by a popular vote but a form of electoral college, which appoints her 29-strong Executive Council to run Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region of the Republic of China, under the ‘one country, two systems’ constitution where it is in charge of Hong Kong’s internal affairs.

The territory’s district councils in the past have held little political power and mainly deal with neighbourhood issues such as bus routes, no parking laws and rubbish collection. Previously they were not organs of political power, but more like administrative parish councils, allocating budgets for local projects. This all changed when people sought to express their democratic will.

Pro-democracy candidates won close to 60 percent of the total vote, but achieved a landslide in terms of seats – 347 of the 452 (76 percent of the seats) – because of the first-past-the-post system, taking control of at least 17 of the city’s 18 district councils. A record 71 percent of Hong Kong’s 4.1 million registered voters cast their ballot, well exceeding the 47 percent turnout in the district council elections four years ago. Pro-Beijing candidates won 60 seats (13 percent seats with 40 percent vote), losing all but one of the 298 seats they won in the previous election of four years ago. Chinese state media blame the losses upon violence and intimidation by the pro-democracy activists rather than a genuine reflection of people dissatisfaction with the current political system they live under.

When the Industrial Workers of the World chose to drop its commitment to the political electoral process in 1908, James Connolly, at that time a Socialist Labor Party of America speaker, remarked that it would not be possible to stop workers from exercising their vote. Connolly later explained: ‘He fights, and he votes; he votes and he fights. He may not always, he does not always, vote right; nor yet does he always fight when and as he should…’

Although the Socialist Party has irreconcilable differences with Connolly on his nationalism, on this point we share a similar sentiment.

The electoral victory of the pro-democracy candidates in Hong Kong is confirmation of his and our contention that, when a mass movement mobilises and where the opportunity to vote exists, the movement will use the ballot box. The sensible strategy for the social change to socialism can be expected to similar: mass organization and mobilisation outside parliament plus the vote. We say that elections can, and should be, transformed into a means of emancipation

Those pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong who are resorting to violence can’t win against the armed might of the Chinese State and will be crushed. The only chance of winning they had was mass demonstrations backed by public opinion. If they abandon that strategy, the Hong Kong democracy movement is doomed. The overwhelming solidarity vote for them legitimises the will of the people who no longer can be dismissed as an unrepresentative minority of hooligans and rioters.

When the time comes the socialist majority can be expected to use the ballot box since it will be the obvious thing to do, and nobody will be able to prevent them or persuade them not to. At that time it will be the anti-electoralists who will be irrelevant. As socialists, we do not regard the vote in itself as sufficient to emancipate humanity. But we do recognise that it provides by far the best conditions for the development and success of the socialist movement. It can be used to legitimise the revolutionary act by signalling that a majority of ordinary people fully understand and want to effect that change.

ALJO

The Workers in Ireland (1973)

Book Review from the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A History of the Irish Working Class by P. Berresford Ellis. Gollancz. £3.50.

The Rise of the Irish Trade Unions 1729-1970 by Andrew Boyd. Anvil. 50p.

A history of the working class in Ireland is badly needed but this book by Ellis is no good. It is too hastily written, too full of factual mistakes and too biased in favour of Irish republicanism. Indeed the last part is largely a list of the various republican sects, all of which claim to be “socialist”—which means they stand for an Irish state capitalism of one sort or another. Nor are we told much about the trade union movement.

This omission is corrected in Boyd’s booklet (for it is only about a hundred pages). He describes the laws passed against and the punishments meted out to the local craft unions of Dublin and Belfast in the 18th and early 19th centuries (including, be it noted, those passed between 1782 and 1800 by the Irish Home Rule Parliament). Later these craft unions were to amalgamate into national unions, though generally on an all-Britain rather than an all-Ireland basis, much to the dislike of later Irish Nationalists. Then in the years before the first world war came the organisation of the unskilled (Catholic) workers by men like Jim Larkin and James Connolly.

Irish trade unionism has of course been weakened by the sectarian divisions amongst the workers. Boyd tends to blame the Unionists exclusively for this, and indeed Ulster Unionist employers did use sectarianism in a bid to defeat attempts to organise their workers into unions. But the blame must be shared by union organisers like Connolly who openly proclaimed their own Irish Nationalism and even that the unions in Ireland should support the demand for Irish independence. No wonder the ITGWU in Belfast remained confined to Catholic workers. The Protestant workers, with some justice, suspected that Connolly wanted Protestant / Catholic unity as much for Irish Nationalist political ends as for trade unionism.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that those who argued that the trade unions in Ireland should steer clear of politics, both Nationalist and Unionist, and concentrate on bread-and-butter issues like wages and working conditions were better trade unionists than Connolly even if they weren’t always so militant over wage demands. After all, when it comes to organising workers to defend their interests at work a man’s politics or religion is irrelevant. What is required is unity.

Adam Buick

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.

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

50 Years Ago: Forerunners of Marx (1964)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

The author claims that the great forerunners of Marx—standing between the Utopians and the latter— was an Irishman named William Thompson, who, among numerous notable statements, laid bare the source of value in his work entitled, “An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most conducive to Human Happiness”, etc., published 1824, where it is laid down that all labour can be reduced to unskilled labour of the average kind at a given time.

Miss Potter says Marx took his notion of “homogeneous human labour” from Thompson and incorporated it in “Capital”.

The author says, “In the English speaking world the work of this Irish thinker is practically unknown, but on the Continent of Europe his position has long him established'" (p 115)

Now what is common to both Connolly and Miss Potter is the curious fact that neither of them state who established Thompson's position and made him known on the Continent. The uninstructed reader may learn with surprise that the person responsible was—Karl Marx!

Many years ago Dr. Aveling pointed out in a little book called “Darwin Made Easy”, that the various “objections” by ignorant Christians and parsons to Darwin's work were all first formulated by Darwin himself in the “Origin of Species”, and no opponent had ever brought forward any other. So with Marx. All the opponents of Marx who are so loud in their claims to have discovered “forerunners” of his work and ideas are all of them—German, English and Irish alike—indebted to Marx, who first discovered and gave full credit to them in his various works, particularly in the “Poverty of Philosophy” and the “Critique of Political Economy”.

And among others he points out that Benjamin Franklin had already in 1721 stumbled on the secret of undifferentiated labour as the source of value, though he (Franklin) did not work the idea out to any extent.

However, it is the fashion today among the shallow critics of scientific Socialism who are unable to refute the case or show a flaw in the arguments of Marx to pretend to demolish that genius by finding someone who “anticipated” him, and keeping “gradely dark” the fact that the very person they are indebted to for such discovery is Marx himself.

(From the Socialist Standard, June, 1914. Extract from a review of “Labour in Irish History" by James Connolly)