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

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

Did James Connolly Betray Socialism? (2016)

From the March 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many on the Left, James Connolly is their archetypal class warrior but his participation in the ‘Easter Rising’ was a futile heroism, utterly mistaken in tactics and objectives. What happened after showed the fallacy that priority should be given to achieving national independence first and then only afterwards turning attention towards establishing socialism.

History has confirmed that, when that happens, socialism is subsequently forgotten. We only need to look back at the fate of the Irish workers movement. A large section of it was destroyed and into the vacuum stepped opportunists ready to lavish praise upon Connolly in order to contain the class struggle. It was made all the more easy because Connolly had not fought in 1916 for workers’ demands on the question of hours of work, of wages, of factory conditions, and of the ownership of the land and industry but for a purely nationalist proclamation. The Irish Citizens Army, formed to defend workers from the police at the service of the Nationalist employer Murphy during the Dublin lock-out of 1913, ended up fading from history by dissolving itself into the ranks of the pro-employer Dublin brigade of the IRA.

No working class unity

Despite the sacrifice of lives, the Irish working class did not emerge any the stronger from the Easter Rising. Irish nationalism has always been hostile to the workers’ cause. There have been 29 general elections to the Dáil, Ireland’s parliament, since independence and Ireland’s Labour Party have won precisely none. When workers’ interests go up against nationalism in a country where politics is all about the nation, then Labour stands little chance.

In the aftermath of the First World War, Ireland saw the Limerick ‘soviet’ in the south and, in the north, the Belfast strike for a 40-hour week where, to the dismay of the Orange Lodge, ‘Bolsheviks and Sinn Feiners’ were leading astray many ‘good loyalist protestants’ and where the composition of the strike committee was a majority of Protestants, but the chairman was a Catholic. Sectarianism was being challenged. Working class militancy had arrived at Shankill Road and Sandy Row. The National Union of Railwaymen in a resolution at a conference in Belfast stated:

‘Without complete unity amongst the working classes, (we should not allow either religious or political differences to prevent their emancipation) which can be achieved through a great international brotherhood the world over, no satisfactory progress could be made.’

However, the vision of a united movement of Catholic and Protestant workers, North and South, did not become a reality and, instead of trade unionists trying to promote working class unity and solidarity, Irish workers got nationalists declaring the nation must come first; pressing their own interests the workers were said to be endangering the unity of the republican forces. The workers movement and working-class unity were the real victims of the 1916 Dublin Rising which sanctified subordinating their class interests to the nationalist interests of their capitalist employers.

Not socialist

The Rising was not socialist by any stretch of the imagination and the legacy of Connolly’s involvement has been to associate ‘socialism’ with Irish nationalism, and that has been most damaging to the cause of ‘socialism’. He did a disservice by allying a sizeable section of the workers movement to a nationalist insurrectionary project. Sean O’Casey described the Irish Volunteers, which had been set up by the Irish Home Rulers as ‘streaked with employers who had openly tried to starve the women and children of the workers, followed meekly by scabs and blacklegs from the lower elements among the workers themselves, and many of them saw in this agitation a plumrose path to good jobs, now held in Ireland by the younger sons of the English well-to-do.’

The Citizen Army’s first recruitment handbill contained a list of reasons not to join the Irish  Volunteers (‘controlled by forces opposed to labour, officials having locked out union men ...’)  As late as January 1916 Connolly had stated: ‘The labour movement is like no other movement. Its strength lies in being like no other movement. It is never so strong as when it stands alone.’

In 1897 Connolly had written, ‘No revolutionist can safely invite the cooperation of men or classes whose ideals are not theirs and whom, therefore, they may be compelled to fight at some future critical stage of the journey to freedom,’ (which is perhaps why he is said to have later suggested ‘In the event of victory hold on to your rifles, as those with whom we are fighting may stop before our goal is reached.’) And when, at the turn of the century, the French Social Democrat leader, Millerand, accepted a position in the French cabinet, Connolly denounced this betrayal, on the basis that a workers’ party should ‘accept no government position which it cannot conquer through its own strength at the ballot box’. He denounced Millerand’s stand by saying that ‘what good Millerand may have done is claimed for the credit of the bourgeois republican government: what evil the cabinet has done reflects back on the reputation of the socialist parties. Heads they win, tails we lose.’ Connolly would ignore his own earlier advice.

Cartoon from the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Sean O’Casey concluded that in 1916 ‘Jim Connolly had stepped from the narrow byway of Irish Socialism onto the broad and crowded highway of Irish Nationalism’ and in his History of the Irish Citizens Army wrote ‘Liberty Hall was no longer the Headquarters of the Irish Labour movement, but the centre of Irish national disaffection’. Like most ‘socialist leaders’, Connolly surrendered to patriotism in 1914 but in his case it was Irish patriotism. He signed the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, a document with little socialist content, presenting no recognition of the existence of conflicting classes, and steeped in deep religious piety, beginning as it did, ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen: in the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom’ and ending ‘We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God’

Wrong tactic

After one week of fighting the 1916 Dublin Uprising was bloodily suppressed. Lacking any real basis of support, the insurgents did not have much chance of victory. The idea that people can be incited into action by heroic example is a false one, later proven in Germany in 1921 and 1923. Only when the conditions for struggle actually exist, only when the majority of people are prepared to do battle and make enormous sacrifices, can a revolution be achieved. Many of those who advocate the false tactics of the barricades and street-fighting today draw, in part, their inspiration from the Easter Rising. If they removed their blindfolds they would discover that the actual experience of the rising proved the futility of such action. The conditions for a successful revolution expressly did not exist in 1916. They did not exist in Ireland and they did not exist in Europe. In Ireland, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Citizen Army were only a relative handful in number. The revolutionaries hoped that the country would follow them – but nothing happened. Despite his knowledge of Marxism, Connolly forgot that it will take the working class to change society, not a handful of individuals to do it for them. The fact also remains that Connolly, although credited as a socialist scholar, failed to appreciate Engels's counsel in 1895 that the time for street-fighting, barricades, conspiracies and insurrections had passed and that it was now time to recognise as the most immediate task of the workers’ party the slow work of propaganda and electoral activity. Connolly made the glaring error of believing that the British state was incapable of using heavy artillery and so destroying its own property. In fact, the British readily bombarded buildings.

Connolly’s stature is due to his death and martyrdom but what did his blood sacrifice produce? We can speculate on Connolly's role if he had survived and perhaps offer the example of Countess Markiewicz, who became Minister of Labour in the first republican government and died a firm supporter of  De Valera.

James Connolly tried to stand with a foot in both the socialist and nationalist camps simultaneously. Like the left nationalists of today, he hoped that the bulk of nationalist supporters would learn in the course of the independence struggle to throw in their lot with the socialist movement. Unfortunately, that was not to be, as the siren call of the national patriot proved stronger than the appeal to class solidarity. The Socialist Party rejects nationalism as anti-working class because it has always tied the working people to its class enemy and divided it amongst itself.

ALJO