Where oh where is our James Connolly?” So goes the famous Irish ballad, lamenting the loss of one of the finest socialists ever to have lived. It was a sentiment shared across Ireland long before those words were ever written. The death of James Connolly was a terrible blow to the workers’ movement and to socialists here and the world over.
Lenin’s judgment that the Easter Rising had come too early, before the European reaction against the barbarism of the First World War had matured, was proven correct. Within 18 months the situation had changed dramatically: Russia was gripped by a revolutionary upsurge, overthrowing the Tsarist regime and, in October, leading to a socialist revolution. The rest of Europe soon followed suit, with the working class asserting its power in country after country—Hungary and the German province of Bavaria saw the creation of short-lived soviet republics, and left-led uprisings occurred in Berlin and Vienna. Even in those countries where events fell short of a revolutionary challenge for power, such as Italy or Britain, wave after wave of industrial unrest and huge general strikes would shape the contours of politics. As Connolly had foreseen, it was workers’ revolution that brought an end to war between the Great Powers.
Ireland was not immune to this revolutionary fervour. A combination of guerrilla war organised by a resurgent republican movement and a massive campaign of strikes and civil disobedience in which labour played a leading role rocked British rule in Ireland. The working class was right at the heart of the Irish Revolution. On 23 April 1918 a general strike was organised against conscription. The Irish Times described it “as the day on which Irish Labour realised its strength”. In 1919 the spectre of working class unity re-emerged in Belfast during a general strike demanding the introduction of the 42-hour working week. And in Limerick a “soviet” was formed—inspired by the workers’ councils established during Russia’s revolutionary upsurge—which ran the city from 15 to 27 April 1919, printing its own currency and organising the city’s food supply.
The Irish Revolution was not to end in the victorious march of socialism, as Connolly had hoped. The working class was left without a political expression during these tumultuous years, without an organised force that could draw its best fighters together around a fight for revolutionary socialism. Connolly had left a brilliant legacy, but he left no party behind that could fight for his ideas after his death. Instead nationalist forces made their peace with the British, acceding to a partitioned Ireland, and creating a conservative Catholic state in the 26 counties. In the North unionist forces set about consolidating their power, laying the foundations for a sectarian state that would protect capitalist interests to the detriment of the working class, and particularly its Catholic minority. Connolly warned that such a scenario would lead to a carnival of reaction, and right he was: the two conservative states that still survive in Ireland today are a product of this counter-revolution.
The ghost of James Connolly continues to haunt the Irish establishment. Try as they might, the radical legacy that he left behind cannot be completely extinguished. The true story of his life remains an embarrassment to a Southern conservative elite which would rather forget that one of their most famous heroes was a revolutionary Marxist. Nor do Connolly’s life and legacy sit well with the Orange and Green forces that today run the North of Ireland; his call for Catholic and Protestant workers to unite in a fight against capitalism and sectarianism contrasts sharply with a political setup that portrays communal difference as inevitable.
Nevertheless, thousands of people across Ireland and the world are wondering anew about James Connolly. As part of this process a new generation will have to excavate his legacy from beneath the rubble of establishment distortion, and rediscover his extraordinary contributions to the struggle for a more equal world. He made mistakes, of course, but he did so in the thick of the struggle, and always on the side of the workers and the oppressed. All things considered, James Connolly has few equals in Irish history; as comfortable in the realm of ideas as he was in the thick of action, outstanding as a thinker, fighter and agitator. James Connolly was a revolutionary to the end. And that is his true epitaph.