Socialism represents the dominant and conquering force of our age, the hope of the worker, the terror of the oppressor, the light of the future. Workers of Ireland, salute that light; when once it shines full upon your vision the shackles of ages will fall from your limbs. Freedom will be your birthright.
—James Connolly, “Compromise,” Workers’ Republic, August 13, 1898
This introduction aims to bring to light James Connolly’s life and the development of his political ideas and, where possible, to assess his actions in relation to the struggles he faced. The rest of the book is Connolly in his own words. His life, ideas, and efforts deserve attention not only as a guide to understand Irish history, but also as a contribution to the training of a new generation of socialists in the present and future struggles against injustice and inequality, for working-class emancipation, and for socialism. Connolly was an exemplary rebel. He spent his life organizing against injustices he opposed, but he was also for something. He was for socialism. This is incredibly important today.
James Connolly became a revolutionary socialist and Marxist in his early twenties, and dedicated his life to the fight against exploitation, oppression, and imperialism. Everywhere he lived—Scotland, Ireland, and the United States—he organized for socialism and struggled with the working class. He believed in the solidarity of labor across borders and across the entire globe. His vision was universal and inspiring. His militancy and commitment to class struggle was fueled by the terrible poverty he was born into, which he failed to escape throughout his entire life. Political notoriety brought Connolly no luxury; he never left his class.
Connolly’s background is essential for understanding his deep class loyalty and burning resentment of injustice everywhere, but it was his absorption of the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx that gave theoretical direction and optimism to his class anger. Marx’s scientific socialist approach, Connolly argued, was the “key” to understanding history, which otherwise was “but a welter of unrelated facts, a hopeless chaos of sporadic outbreaks, treacheries, intrigues, massacres, murders, and purposeless warfare.” But with a socialist key, “Irish history” was for the Irish worker a “lamp to his feet in the stormy paths of today.”1
Connolly believed that only working-class people, the downtrodden and dispossessed themselves, could cleanse the world of tyranny, war, and injustice. “In our day and generation,” he wrote, “there is only one class which can be depended upon for revolutionary action. That class is the working class. Not because the working class is in its individual members better than other classes, but because it is the only class in the community which has nothing to hope for from the maintenance of present conditions.”2
Connolly is one of the most well known, most revered, and, often, most misrepresented characters in Irish history. George Dangerfield, historian and author of the classic Strange Death of Liberal England, astutely described Connolly as “one of the great figures in modern Irish history: a passionate intellectual, a master of polemical prose, a profound revolutionary socialist. In two causes—the advancement of an Irish working class that he admired, loved and idealized, and the battle against an imperialism he found degrading and hateful—Connolly devoted his life. In terms of the kind of action employed in their service, it was the selfless, empirical and dynamic activism of James Connolly which has given him his place in history.”3
James T. Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy, described Connolly as “an extraordinary figure during the early years of the twentieth century, not only in the Irish movement, but more broadly in the world movement for workers’ emancipation. The intellectual fruits of his life are to be found in his work Labor in Ireland. This book is not only fundamental for a study of modern Irish history, it is also a contribution to the world library of socialist thought.”4 The British labor historian Eric Hobsbawm described Connolly, along with William Morris, as “providing the only really interesting and original contribution to Marxism in these islands.”5
In Ireland, Connolly organized for the simultaneous defeat of British rule and capitalism by attempting to establish a workers’ republic. His goal was “to muster all the forces of labor for a revolutionary reconstruction of society and the incidental destruction of the British Empire.”6 For Connolly, empires, imperial wars, and colonialism stemmed from class society and capitalist competition. Socialism was not some sort of casual add-on, but the very center and soul of his political being.
His aim was clear: “Organize as a class to meet your masters and destroy their mastership; organize to drive them from their hold on public life through their political power; organize to wrench from their robber clutch the land and workshops on and in which they enslave us; organize to cleanse our social life from the stain of social cannibalism, from the preying of man upon his fellow man.”7 Toward this definite goal, Connolly established the Irish Socialist Republican Party and pioneered the application of Marxist ideas to Irish political, social, and economic conditions.
He stood for revolution, not reform or management of capitalism by socialists: “It is necessary in Ireland as well as in England to emphasize the point that the policy of the capitalist at present throughout the world is the policy of pretended sympathy with working-class aspirations—such sympathy taking the form of positions for our leaders—and the man who can not diagnose the motives directing that move BEFORE the harm is done is a danger to the Socialist movement.”8
Connolly is most renowned for his role in the 1916 Irish Rising, also known as the Easter Rising. His aim in the rebellion was to seize the opportunity presented by the slaughter of World War I to strike a blow against British imperial rule in Ireland. But his perspective was never narrowly limited to Ireland. He held a continental vision of permanent revolution: a rising in Ireland could simultaneously ignite a European-wide uprising against war and empire, but also against capitalism, the irrational economic system responsible for generating war.
He clarified this perspective days after the outbreak of war in 1914: “It is our manifest duty to take all possible action to save the poor from the horrors this war has in store…. Starting thus, Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shriveled on the funeral pyre of the last warlord.”9 When socialist parties across Britain and Europe betrayed their commitment to oppose imperialist war, Connolly rose to the occasion and insisted on the need for revolution.
For his leadership of the insurrection, Connolly was executed by a British Army firing squad at dawn on May 12, 1916, in Dublin’s Kilmainham jail. However, he regretted nothing. In his last statement, given to his daughter Nora shortly before his murder, he wrote: “We went out to break the connection between this country and the British Empire, and to establish an Irish Republic. We believed that the call we then issued to the people of Ireland, was a nobler call, in a holier cause, than any call issued to them during this war, having any connection with the war. We succeeded in proving that Irishmen are ready to die endeavoring to win for Ireland those national rights which the British Government has been asking them to die to win for Belgium. As long as that remains the case, the cause of Irish freedom is safe.”10
The execution of Connolly and other leaders of the Easter Rebellion by the butcher generals of the British Empire, with the full support of Ireland’s political and economic elite, was designed to terrify the population into submission. As is often the case, brutal repression had the opposite effect. The boldness of the rising and widespread repression assisted in spurring an all-out political, military, and social revolt against British rule, war conscription, and inequality throughout Ireland in the following years. For many, Connolly became a hero of the Irish revolution of 1918–21, which he never lived to see.
Tragically, Connolly’s premature death denied the revolutionary upheaval engulfing Ireland after 1916 his political and strategic guidance. Connolly and his comrades helped ignite the torch of revolt, but were then desperately needed to lead the bonfire of rebellion. The absence of a committed and experienced mass revolutionary socialist party, steeled and tempered by a network of Marxist cadre and infused with ideas developed by Connolly during the preceding two decades, had a profound impact on the direction and eventual outcome of the struggle over Ireland’s future.
The religiously conservative, procapitalist, and partitioned Ireland, established out of the reactionary backlash against the revolutionary upheaval against British rule, had nothing in common with Connolly’s vision of a workers’ republic. He wrote:
Socialism, in a word, bases itself upon its knowledge of facts, of economic truths, and leaves the building up of religious ideals and faiths to the outside public, or to its individual members, if they so will. It is neither Freethinker nor Christian, Turk nor Jew, Buddhist or Idolater, Mohammedan nor Parsee—it is only HUMAN.11
Throughout his years of political activism he had warned:
If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.12
This incongruity meant that Connolly’s revolutionary commitment to Marxism and socialism had to be systematically submerged by Ireland’s new rulers. Instead, he was deified as a nationalist martyr for Irish freedom. Railway stations, hospitals, and schools were named after him. To depict Connolly as merely a militant Irish nationalist, his lifelong involvement in the international socialist movement had to be completely downplayed. The notion that he had abandoned his commitment to socialism and sacrificed himself for the “cause of Ireland” was widely popularized. Such was the scale of Connolly’s sanitization that he was presented as an orthodox Catholic. Yet an understanding of Connolly’s Marxist training and framework is essential to fully appreciate his political outlook and strategy right through to the 1916 rebellion.
In the subsequent decades, people, parties, and organizations of many different persuasions have shamelessly attempted to claim Connolly as one of their own by highlighting specific aspects of his politics and work. He has been sanitized by Ireland’s rulers, martyrized by Irish nationalists, and blessed holy by Catholic clerics. Conservative union leaders idolize him even though he would have raged against them in his day. However, no one portrays his politics better than Connolly himself. And, fortunately, he was a prolific writer whose ideas and progression can be mapped throughout his life.
His ideas were shaped by his life experiences; by the organizations, events, and activities in which he participated and led; and by the world around him. His lifelong commitment to socialism remained constant, but his political and strategic emphasis shifted on the basis of the real questions of the day. Like the many other socialists who made theoretical and practical contributions to the socialist tradition, Connolly was guided by a consistent attempt to point the way forward for the class struggle.
Ireland’s Great Hunger Refugees
The future leader of the 1913 Dublin Lockout and the 1916 Irish Rebellion was not born in Ireland. Connolly, like his great militant labor collaborator James Larkin, was an immigrant.13 Poverty had forced Connolly’s family, like tens of millions of immigrants and refugees crossing borders and continents today, from their home.
He was born on June 5, 1868, in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Connolly’s parents, originally from County Monaghan, were refugees of the Great Hunger of 1845–51 who left Ireland for Scotland.14 One million people died in Ireland during the traumatizing years of the famine, and millions more were forced to emigrate to Britain, the United States, Australia, and beyond in the succeeding decades.
In Labour in Irish History, Connolly wrote about An Gorta Mór:15
It is a common saying amongst Irish Nationalists that “Providence sent the potato blight; but England made the famine.” … No man who accepts the capitalist society and the laws thereof can logically find fault with the statesmen of England for their acts in that awful period. They stood for the rights of property and free competition, and philosophically accepted their consequences upon Ireland; the leaders of the Irish people also stood for the rights of property, and refused to abandon them even when they saw the consequences in the slaughter of over a million of the Irish toilers.16
The vast majority of Irish migrants were poor and faced extremely challenging conditions in their new homes. Often they worked in the lowest-paid jobs, and settled in rough and crowded Irish neighborhoods. Connolly’s family lived in Edinburgh’s “Little Ireland” slum. The Cowgate area of Connolly’s youth was blighted by tenements, poverty, and disease. In The Life and Times of James Connolly, the biographer C. Desmond Greaves describes the Irish area as presenting “an amazing spectacle” where “occupations, origins, overcrowding, filth, squalor, poverty, drunkenness and disease were illuminated by flashes of philanthropy, heroism and revolt.”17
Connolly’s father, John, worked for the Edinburgh Corporation as a minimum-wage night-shift manure carter and participated in a successful strike for better conditions in 1861. His mother, Mary McGinn, worked as a domestic servant and struggled with chronic bronchitis throughout her life.
Connolly attended St. Patrick’s School, but left formal education when he was just eleven years old, as poverty forced everyone in the family to work. He found employment doing menial tasks at the Edinburgh Evening News, but was dismissed for being too young. He then went on to work as a baker’s apprentice, starting before six in the morning each day. Later in life, Connolly reminisced that, each morning as he sleepily struggled through dark streets to the bakery, he hoped to find it burned to the ground so that he could return home. Donal Nevin describes Connolly’s boyhood in Edinburgh as “one of deprivation, poverty, grim housing conditions and hard toil. He had little schooling and from the age of nine earned paltry wages to help keep the family above the breadline. Such conditions were the common lot of the children of casual laborers in the cities of Britain, as in Dublin and Belfast, in the 1870s.”18
Economic Conscription: The British Army
Another little-known fact about Connolly, given the mythology built around his Irish nationalism, is that his first trip to Ireland was as a British soldier. When he was fourteen, Connolly followed in his older brother John’s footsteps and joined the British Army. To enlist in the 1st Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, he lied about his age and used a pseudonym. He served as private in the army for almost seven years, beginning in 1882. He deserted several months prior to the expiration of his military service contract, in late 1888 or early 1889. Not a great deal is known about the time he spent in the army. He appears never to have spoken much about it, nor written about it directly. It is very possible that he was initially worried that he could be punished if his early departure was noticed and pursued by British Army authorities. He also may have been concerned that his service would be seized upon by political enemies and cynically deployed to undercut his credibility among working-class Irish nationalists. His bitter personal experience is well expressed in a July 1899 Workers’ Republic article he wrote, called “Soldiers of the Queen”:
The soldier then is, no matter in what light we examine his position, a “hired assassin”—his first duty, he is told, is to “obey.” To obey whom? His superior officers, who in turn must obey the Government. When the mandate goes forth, “Kill,” he must kill and dare not ask the reason why…. Whatever be the excuse for ordering out the Army, the soldier has no option but to obey. Whether it be Egyptians revolting against oppression, Boers defending their independence, Indians maddened with famine, or Irishmen hungering for freedom; whether the human being coming within his line of sight be stranger or friend, father, mother, sister, brother or sweetheart, the soldier has no option but to press the trigger, and send the death-dealing instrument on its errand of murder.19
With employment opportunities scarce and very low wages common, enlisting in the British Army was often an economic necessity for the children of impoverished Irish immigrants in Scotland. Later, during the Great War, Connolly described this phenomenon as “economic conscription.” He wrote about it with powerful insight, anger, and compassion:
Of late we have been getting accustomed to this new phrase, economic conscription, or the policy of forcing men into the army by depriving them of the means of earning a livelihood. In Canada it is called hunger-scription. In essence it consists of a recognition of the fact that the working class fight the battles of the rich, that the rich control the jobs or means of existence of the working class, and that therefore if the rich desire to dismiss men eligible for military service they can compel these men to enlist—or starve…. Fighting at the front today there are many thousands whose whole soul revolts against what they are doing, but who must nevertheless continue fighting and murdering because they were deprived of a living at home, and compelled to enlist that those dear to them may not starve…. Recruiting has become a great hunting party with the souls and bodies of men as the game to be hunted and trapped.20
Connolly’s regiment was bound for Ireland, and his arrival there with the British Army would have been his first visit. According to military records, he spent time stationed in Cork, in Castlebar, at the Curragh military camp, and in Dublin, Ireland’s capital city. His regiment may have been sent to Belfast in 1886 to deal with sectarian rioting, and could well have participated in Queen Victoria’s 1887 jubilee in Dublin. Growing up in Edinburgh’s Irish immigrant community, Connolly would have been familiar with Irish history and politics, and his firsthand experience living in Ireland as a soldier could only have deepened and sharpened this knowledge. When stationed in Dublin, he met his future wife and life companion, Lillie Reynolds. Lillie, from a Protestant Church of Ireland background, was employed as a domestic servant for a well-off family in Dublin’s suburbs. There’s some possibility Connolly’s regiment spent time in India, but existing research appears to rule it out.
Connolly Joins the Scottish Socialists
On returning to Scotland, Connolly went first to Perth to visit his father, then on to the industrial city of Dundee, and also, within the year, to Edinburgh. In Dundee, Connolly’s brother John had become a leader in the local socialist movement. There, Connolly joined the Socialist League in April 1889, amid a “free speech” campaign defending the Social Democratic Federation’s right to hold open-air public meetings. He also became active in the trade union movement, writing to Lillie: “If we get married next week I shall be unable to go to Dundee as I promised, as my fellow-workmen on the job are preparing for a strike at the end of this month, for a reduction in the hours of labor. As my brother and I are ringleaders in the matter it is necessary we should be on the ground. If we were not we should be looked upon as blacklegs, which the Lord forbid.”21 Despite a year of separation due to financial hardship, James and Lillie were eventually married in Perth on April 30, 1890.
The late 1880s marked the beginning of a dramatic period of working-class struggle across Ireland and Britain, known as “New Unionism.”22 Previously unorganized groups of unskilled workers engaged in massive and militant strikes for trade union rights, higher wages, and shorter working days. The new unions challenged the craft basis and conservatism of the existing unions. Describing the new unions, Emmet O’Connor writes:
During the first flush of militancy they used tough strike tactics, including violence and blacking. New unionists believed also that labor interests should go beyond purely industrial matters to campaigns for legislative reform and political representation. The demand for an eight-hour day especially, which labor was raising across the world, became a symbol of Labor’s social agenda and of its internationalism.23
Without doubt, Connolly was affected by the explosive growth of new unions and how it shaped working-class consciousness across Britain and Ireland. He found employment as a carter with the Edinburgh City Council, and settled in Edinburgh with Lillie, where he joined the local branch of the Scottish Socialist Federation (SSF). Through SSF study groups Connolly “acquired a grounding in socialist literature including Marx’s Capital; the Communist Manifesto; and writings by Frederick Engels and William Morris.”24
Marxism gained increasing influence in Britain throughout the 1880s and ’90s. An English translation of Marx’s Capital was published in 1888. Britain had become the workshop of the world, and the entire globe was in the process of industrial transformation. Marx made sense of these great changes by unmasking the violent origins of capitalism, how it created and exploited a vast proletarian army, and how the entire system could be seized and transformed into socialism by the laboring majority.
Capitalism had revolutionized the “means of production,” creating fantastic new wealth and material abundance, but human misery and inequality grew in proportion. The economic rulers were tremendously wealthy and powerful, but their secret vulnerability was their system’s persistent capacity to generate crises and collective action by radicalized working masses. In this sense, Marx argued, capitalism had created its own “gravediggers.” His arguments centered on the agency and self-emancipation by workers across the globe, and were profoundly reinforced by the actions of workers constituting what became “New Unionism.” These ideas spoke directly to Connolly’s experience and pointed towards an alternative way of organizing society. It was in this context that Connolly joined the socialists and became a Marxist. Nevin writes:
All of Connolly’s writings on economic and social issues are infused with the basic premises of Marxism as propagated in Britain in the last decade of the nineteenth century when he was imbibing his ideas from Marxist leaders of the British socialist movement in parties which were avowedly Marxist, the Socialist League and the Social Democratic Federation. The language used by Connolly up to the end of his life is replete with Marxist phrases and mottoes. The two issues of socialism, class struggle and international solidarity, were to be the focus of his lifework.25
Building the Socialist Movement in Scotland
Connolly’s tenement apartment on Lothian Street became the hub for SSF meetings. The routines of the SSF included regular political discussion groups and public meetings. In May 1890, the SSF organized a demonstration to support agitation for the eight-hour day. Connolly became branch secretary when his brother John was fired from his job for political activism and was forced to leave Edinburgh in search of employment. Connolly was now assigned to write reports for Justice, the newspaper of the Socialist Democratic Federation.
In July 1893 the SSF sent a delegate to the Socialist International Conference in Zurich. The delegate was given complete autonomy for political decisions at the conference, except on one issue: he was instructed to vote against admission of anarchists into the International. In his “Notes from Edinburgh” for Justice, Connolly wrote: “We feel that at a time when the class-conscious workers of the world are dressing their ranks for the coming grapple with the forces of privilege it would be scarcely less than idiotic, were they to admit to their councils men whose whole philosophy of life is but an exaggerated form of that Individualism we are in revolt against.”26Throughout his life, Connolly followed and participated in the debates of the international socialist movement.
Connolly was selected to stand as a socialist candidate for the St. Giles ward in the 1894 Edinburgh municipal elections. The campaign received enthusiastic support and Connolly went on to win 14 percent of the vote. Writing in Labour Chronicle, he appealed to the many Irish voters in the ward:
Perhaps they will learn how foolish it is to denounce tyranny in Ireland and then to vote for tyrants and the instruments of tyrants at their own door. Perhaps they will begin to see that the landlord who grinds his peasants on a Connemara estate, and the landlord who rack-rents in a Cowgate slum, are brethren in fact and deed. Perhaps they will see that the Irish worker who starves in an Irish cabin, and the Scotch worker who is poisoned in an Edinburgh garret, are also brothers with one hope and destiny. Perhaps they will observe how the same Liberal Government which supplies police to Irish landlords to aid them in the work of exterminating their Irish peasantry, also imports police into Scotland to aid Scotch mineowners in their work of starving Scottish miners. Perhaps they will begin to understand that the Liberals and the Tories are not two parties, but rather two sections of the one party—the party of property.27
Reflecting on his participation in the election, Connolly famously wrote:
The return of a Socialist candidate does not then mean the immediate realization of even the program of palliatives commonly set before the electors. Nay, such programs are in themselves a mere secondary consideration, of little weight, indeed, apart from the spirit in which they will be interpreted.
The election of a Socialist to any public body at present, is only valuable insofar as it is the return of a disturber of the political peace.”28
For Connolly, election campaigns were an opportunity to expose and encourage resistance to an entire political and economic system rigged in favor of the wealthy and powerful. The point was to use the platform as “a disturber of the political peace,” not to manage the system in pursuit of piecemeal reform.
Writing about the era, Greaves argues that the new ideas of socialism penetrated only very slowly, and that a “majority of the people had only the haziest notion what socialism was. Nevertheless, scarcely a week went by without some professor writing in the local newspaper an expert article proving its impossibility.”29
At this stage, Connolly had absorbed the core ideas of Marxism and had gained substantial experience in explaining them to prospective new members of the socialist movement in study groups. He popularized socialist ideas to broad working-class audiences through election campaigns, newspaper articles, demonstrations, and outdoor public meetings. He had very much become a local leader of the socialist movement.
In 1895, the SSF became the Edinburgh branch of the Socialist Democratic Federation (SDF), with Connolly installed as its branch secretary. Connolly met Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling, Henry Mayers Hyndman, Ben Tillet, Tom Mann, and other leading figures of the socialist and labor movement through public meetings organized by the SDF and the Independent Labor Party that year.
The Irish Question
Given his family background and Edinburgh’s large Irish community, Connolly’s application of Marxist ideas to Irish politics developed and deepened. In standing for election, he had to defend his socialist platform against attacks from conservative Catholic Irish nationalists and also from Unionists. A letter offering political advice to Keir Hardie, leader of the Independent Labor Party, provides an insight of Connolly’s growing expertise on Irish issues:
As an Irishman who has always taken a keen interest in the advanced movements in Ireland, I was well aware that neither the Parnellites nor the McCarthyites were friendly to the Labor movement. Both of them are essentially middle-class parties interested in the progress of Ireland from a middle-class point of view. Their advanced attitude upon the land question is simply an accident arising out of the exigencies of the political situation, and would be dropped tomorrow if they did not realize the necessity of linking Home Rule agitation to some cause more clearly allied to their daily wants than a mere embodiment of national sentiment of the people. If you can show them it would be to their interest to politically support us, they will do so. Now, can this now be done? I think it can be done if you would allow me to suggest to you a plan which I think would, if carried out, prove a trump card. There is a nucleus of a strong Labor movement in Ireland, which needs only judicious handling to flutter the doves in the Home Rule dovecot. Now if you were to visit Dublin and address a good meeting there, putting it in strong and straight, without reference to either of the two Irish parties, but rebellious, antimonarchical and outspoken on the fleecings of both landlord and capitalist, and the hypocrisy of both political parties for a finale.30
Connolly’s development on Irish politics was greatly influenced by John Leslie, secretary of the Edinburgh branch of the Social Democratic Federation. In 1892 and 1893 Leslie presented on the Irish Question at a series of meetings in Edinburgh. These lectures were subsequently published in 1894 in a pamphlet titled The Present Position of the Irish Question. Leslie, a former member of the Irish National League, supported political independence for Ireland, but also asked why the Irish “workmen of town and country” who had “furnished nine-tenths of the martyrs and victims of the fight” had no control over the wealth their labor produced. Leslie’s point was that political independence for Ireland was an insufficient goal, and that Irish workers had to maintain control over their movement.31 This became a starting point for arguments Connolly would develop in Labour in Irish History, published in 1910.
Connolly plowed his energy, time, and finances into politics. In 1896, after a struggle to find regular employment and a failed attempt as a cobbler, he was forced to contemplate migrating to Chile. He and Lillie now had three children, and their financial situation had become dire. Leslie, his mentor and collaborator, penned a special appeal, published in Justice, encouraging Connolly’s recruitment by a socialist organization somewhere closer to home. The Dublin Socialist Society responded, and invited Connolly to become their organizer.
Dublin and Founding the Irish Socialist Republican Party
Connolly arrived in Dublin in April 1896. By May, a new organization was founded: the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP). The plan for this was agreed upon in Pierce Ryan’s public house at 50 Thomas Street, and Connolly was elected as the full-time organizer. The new party was officially launched in June at a large public meeting in Dublin’s Custom House. Membership cards were emerald green and imprinted with the famous slogan associated with the French revolutionary Camille Desmoulins: “The great appear great because we are on our knees; let us rise.” The ambition of Connolly and his comrades was to relate the ideas of scientific socialism to Irish conditions in order to build a mass revolutionary workers’ party. Their object was the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a workers’ republic.
Only eight years previously, Frederick Engels, the great collaborator of Marx and author of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, had been asked in an interview: “What about Ireland? Is there anything—apart from the national question—which might raise the hopes of socialists?” Engels replied, “A purely socialist movement cannot be expected in Ireland for a considerable time. People there want first of all to become peasants owning a plot of land, and after they have achieved that mortgages will appear on the scene and they will be ruined once more. But this should not prevent us from seeking to help them to get rid of their landlords, that is, to pass from semi-feudal conditions to capitalist conditions.”32
From the perspective of what constituted the Marxist orthodoxy dominant in the European socialist movement of the day, Ireland’s colonial status, economic underdevelopment, and lack of an industrial proletariat on the scale of England or Germany appeared to prevent it from playing a leading role in the confrontation with capitalism. However, parts of Ireland, notably the northeast, had industrialized apace, and across Ireland an increasingly combative working-class movement had emerged.
In the face of this challenge, Connolly and ISRP members set about their project with mighty energy, enthusiasm, and confidence. Socialism was the inspired message of the age and they were determined to fight for it in Ireland. Despite being a numerically small organization, the party was tremendously effective at carving out an ideological space for its distinct political voice, and in initiating agitation around a wide range of issues. The socialists fought for influence as a broad political and cultural movement emerged that was centered on revival of the Gaelic language, art, and sports. After the trauma of the Great Hunger and mass emigration, a new Ireland was attempting to define itself. Land reform created stability and new wealth for some sections of Irish society, laying the basis for a more confident assertion of Irish identity. These cultural movements became increasingly politicized and radicalized through the impact of the 1913 Dublin Lockout, Home Rule agitation, and the 1914 Great War.
In order to popularize its views, gain support for its positions, and win over more party members, the ISRP immediately set about holding weekly open-air meetings. The public meetings addressed all manner of questions, including “Socialism and Ireland,” “Socialist Ideas Past and Present,” “Are We Utopians?,” “Socialism and Unity,” “The Growth of Monopoly,” “Reform or Revolution,” “Patriotism and Socialism,” “Socialism and Reform,” and “Socialism and State Capitalism.” Connolly, drawing on his training in Scotland, made sure that regular political study groups were also organized to develop the ISRP members’ grasp of theory and the socialist project. For example, weekly meetings were organized to discuss Karl Marx’s Wage-Labor and Capital.
Irish Independence and Socialism: Permanent Revolution
In September, only three months after its founding, the ISRP issued its inaugural manifesto. The object of the new political party was “the establishment of an Irish Socialist Republic based upon the public ownership by the Irish people of the land and instruments of production, distribution and exchange.”
The approach of the new party was unique because of the way it set out to combine the struggle for Irish self-determination with the struggle for socialism. Through this approach, Connolly attempted to answer the specific challenge that Engels outlined socialists in Ireland would face. The ISRP manifesto declared, “The national and economic freedom of the Irish people must be sought in the same direction, viz., the establishment of an Irish Socialist Republic, and the consequent conversion of the means of production, distribution and exchange into the common property of society, to be held and controlled by a democratic state in the interests of the entire community.”33 Crucially, Connolly and the ISRP viewed these two struggles as complementary rather than as unrelated or antagonistic. For some socialists, Connolly’s theoretical breakthrough amounted to heresy. The ISRP’s support for a republic also made clear its opposition to the campaign for Home Rule, a limited form of self-government supported by the politically powerful and dominant Irish Parliamentary Party.
Connolly, situated in colonized Ireland, uniquely grasped the potential of the Irish working-class struggle in and of itself. He believed the popular struggle for national self-determination could spill over into a working-class struggle for socialism. This is a theory of permanent revolution par excellence.
Marx, Engels, and Ireland
Marx and Engels had long championed the struggle for Irish independence. They argued that Ireland’s attempts at economic advance had been “crushed” by Britain; they defended the Irish Republican Brotherhood and collaborated with Fenian activists. The question of Ireland was central for Marx and Engels because they had concluded that a revolutionary upheaval in Ireland was essential to weaken the British ruling class and challenge chauvinism within the British working class. In a letter to Engels in 1869, Marx wrote: “Quite apart from all the phrases about international and ‘humane’ justice for Ireland … it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connection with Ireland… . The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general!”34
Mass emigration by Irish workers to Britain meant that they made up a significant section of the working class in all the major industrial cities and towns. Marx wrote:
And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial center in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.35
Marx’s key point was that the revolutionary potential of the British working class would be paralyzed if it continued to support its own rulers’ domination of Ireland. Therefore, revolution in Ireland could be a “lever” sparking a social revolution in Britain.36 However, because of the small size of the Irish working class and its uneven industrial development, Marx and Engels were primarily concerned with the impact of an Irish revolutionary upheaval on the working class in Britain, the most developed section of the global proletariat—not its impact on the social relations within Ireland itself. Class and social relations in Ireland, however, were precisely what Connolly was most concerned with.
Ireland’s Working Class: “The Repository of the Hopes of the Future”
In his magnificent Labour in Irish History, Connolly demonstrated why the Irish bourgeoisie were completely incapable of leading a determined struggle for complete political and economic independence from Britain. He based his theory for revolution in Ireland on two propositions:
First, that in the evolution of civilization the progress of the fight for national liberty of any subject nation must, perforce, keep pace with the progress of the struggle for liberty of the most subject class in that nation, and that the shifting of economic and political forces which accompanies the development of the system of capitalist society leads inevitably to the increasing conservatism of the non–working-class element, and to the revolutionary vigour and power of the working class.
Second, that the result of the long drawn-out struggle of Ireland has been, so far, that the old chieftainry has disappeared, or, through its degenerate descendants, has made terms with iniquity, and become part and parcel of the supporters of the established order; the middle class, growing up in the midst of the national struggle, and at one time, as in 1798, through the stress of the economic rivalry of England almost forced into the position of revolutionary leaders against the political despotism of their industrial competitors, have now also bowed the knee to Baal, and have a thousand economic strings in the shape of investments binding them to English capitalism as against every sentimental or historic attachment drawing them toward Irish patriotism; only the Irish working class remain as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland.37
The “most subject class” in the nation would be required to lead the Irish political revolution to its completion because other classes, whatever their rhetoric in favor of freedom, had become increasingly conservative and integrated with capitalism. Connolly systematically destroyed the notion that all the Irish were “in it together” with the conclusion that only the Irish working class could be depended upon to lead the struggle for self-determination. In Erin’s Hope, he wrote:
But who are the Irish people? Is it the dividend-hunting capitalist with the phraseology of patriotism on his lips and the spoil wrung from sweated Irish toilers in his pockets; is it the scheming lawyer—most immoral of all classes; is it the slum landlord who denounces rack-renting in the country and practices it in the towns; is it any one of these sections who today dominate Irish politics? Or is it not rather the Irish working class—the only secure foundation on which a free nation can be reared—the Irish working class which has borne the brunt of every political struggle, and gained by none, and which is today the only class in Ireland which has no interest to serve in perpetuating either the political or social forms of oppression—the British connection or the capitalist system? The Irish working class must emancipate itself, and in emancipating itself it must, perforce, free its country. The act of social emancipation requires the conversion of the land and instruments of production from private property into the public or common property of the entire nation. This necessitates a social system of the most absolute democracy, and in establishing that necessary social system the working class must grapple with every form of government which could interfere with the most unfettered control by the people of Ireland of all the resources of their country.38
A Union of All Classes?
On the basis on this perspective, Connolly believed the strategy of a “union of all classes” to achieve independence was a road to disaster. No section of the Irish ruling class could be relied upon, because they feared a challenge to the social order from below more than they despised their subservience to Britain. On this, Connolly was extremely blunt:
This task can only be safely entered upon by men and women who recognize that the first action of a revolutionary army must harmonize in principle with those likely to be its last, and that, therefore, no revolutionists 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. To this category belongs every section of the propertied class, and every individual of those classes who believes in the righteousness of his class position. The freedom of the working class must be the work of the working class. And let it be remembered that timidity in the slave induces audacity in the tyrant, but the virility and outspokenness of the revolutionists ever frightens the oppressor himself to hide his loathesomeness under the garb of reform.39
Connolly documented how patriotic Irish elites had betrayed the national struggle again and again. Indeed, British guns would protect them from any insurgency challenging the “rights of property.” The ISRP manifesto declared that Ireland’s subjection by Britain would “only serve the interests of the exploiting classes of both nations.” The revolutionary struggle of the Irish working class would be not simply for political independence from Britain, but also for social liberation from capitalism. Connolly concluded that the liberation of Ireland would only occur through the working-class struggle for socialism. This was a profound insight. It is all the more profound because scant attention was paid to the role of socialists and workers in parts of the world colonized by the major powers. Connolly and the ISRP were at the forefront of attempting to deal with the relationship between an anti-imperialist struggle and socialism from the perspective of the colonized. The struggle in Ireland for national self-determination and working-class self-emancipation could be a catalyst for revolution in Britain with global ramifications.
The Only Way to Self-Determination
Connolly and the ISRP set out to win “advanced nationalists” and republicans to their strategy of rejecting class alliances, and to support a socialist workers’ republic. They took up the “national question” and gave it a working-class and socialist content. Underpinning this approach was Connolly’s refusal to believe Irish capitalism could revive within a world market dominated by a handful of dominant powers with greater resources. Since Irish capitalism was weak, was late in creating a manufacturing base, and faced competition from the established economic powerhouses, Connolly did not think it could create new markets.40 Therefore, the struggle for an Irish republic, from his point of view, was impossible without socialism.
Connolly hoped that genuine republicans, especially from the working classes, would be drawn to socialism, even if they initially rejected it because they were immediately focused on the anticolonial struggle. The logic of the anticolonial struggle would lead on towards socialist conclusions. On this basis, Connolly and the ISRP sought to incorporate and build upon the best of Ireland’s revolutionary traditions and struggles from previous periods. For example, the party republished The Rights of Ireland and The Faith of a Felon, both by James Fintan Lalor, as pamphlets with an introduction by Connolly. Lalor was a leading member of the revolutionary Young Ireland movement and played a role in the 1848 Rising. He was important for the ISRP because of his attention to social struggles in Ireland over land and poverty, and not just the political question of separation from Britain.
The year 1898 marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the 1798 Irish Rebellion. Inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, the Society of United Irishmen had been founded in 1791 by the Protestant radical Wolfe Tone, aiming “to unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter under the common name of Irishmen in order to break the connection with England.” The rebellion had been savagely crushed by the British government with the support of the Catholic Church.41 Connolly and the ISRP participated in the commemoration committees springing up across Ireland with the goal of uncovering the revolutionary history and politics of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen for a new generation drawn to radical politics. Moderate Home Rule politicians initially abstained from the ’98 Committees, but joined as they became more popular. In the first edition of the Workers’ Republic, published in August 1898, Connolly paid tribute to Wolfe Tone and ridiculed those who claimed to stand in his tradition but rejected his revolutionary aspirations:
Apostles of Freedom are ever idolized when dead, but crucified when living. Universally true as this statement is, it applies with more than usual point to the revolutionary hero in whose memory the Irish people will, on Monday, 15th August, lay the foundation stone of a great memorial.
He was crucified in life, now he is idolized in death, and the men who push forward most arrogantly to burn incense at the altar of his fame are drawn from the very class who, were he alive today, would hasten to repudiate him as a dangerous malcontent.
Wolfe Tone was abreast of the revolutionary thought of his day, as are the Socialist Republicans of our day. He saw clearly, as we see, that a dominion as long rooted in any country as British dominion in Ireland can only be dislodged by a revolutionary impulse in line with the development of the entire epoch. Grasping this truth in all its fullness he broke with the so-called “practical” men of the time, and wherever he could get a hearing he, by voice and pen, inculcated the republican principles of the French Revolution and counseled his countrymen to embark the national movement on the crest of that revolutionary wave.42
Agitation
In 1897 the ISRP took the lead in protesting celebrations organized for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Queen Victoria ruled Ireland during the devastating Great Hunger, and is still remembered as the “Famine Queen.” Connolly penned a manifesto declaring:
Home Rule orators and Nationalist Lord Mayors, Whig politicians and Parnellite pressmen, have ere now lent their prestige and influence to the attempt to arouse public interest in the sickening details of this Feast of Flunkeyism. It is time then that some organized party in Ireland—other than those in whose mouths Patriotism means Compromise, and Freedom, High Dividends—should speak out bravely and honestly the sentiments awakened in the breast of every lover of freedom by this ghastly farce now being played out before our eyes. Hence the Irish Socialist Republican Party—which, from its inception, has never hesitated to proclaim its unswerving hostility to the British Crown, and to the political and social order of which in these islands that Crown is but the symbol—takes this opportunity of hurling at the heads of all the courtly mummers who grovel at the shrine of royalty the contempt and hatred of the Irish Revolutionary Democracy. We, at least, are not loyal men; we confess to having more respect and honor for the raggedest child of the poorest laborer in Ireland today than for any, even the most virtuous, descendant of the long array of murderers, adulterers and madmen who have sat upon the throne of England.43
Under the slogan “Down with the Monarchy! Long live the Republic!” the ISRP organized a mass meeting of six thousand people in Foster Place.44Thousands marched through Dublin behind a coffin emblazoned with the words “British Empire,” and held black flags embroidered with the number of famine dead and evicted. Dublin Castle, the seat of British rule in Ireland, sent out the Dublin Metropolitan Police to greet the procession, and they attacked the marchers at O’Connell Bridge. With the route blocked, Connolly ordered the coffin to be thrown into the Liffey River and shouted: “Here goes the coffin of the British Empire. To hell with the British Empire!” Intense street fighting with police left two hundred marchers in the hospital with injuries. Connolly was arrested and jailed. Later that evening, crowds marched through Dublin, smashing all windows with portraits of the queen and Jubilee decorations. From the perspective of Connolly and his comrades in the ISRP, Dublin had successfully demonstrated to Ireland and the entire globe its disloyalty and refusal to bend the knee to the fictitious superiority of Her Majesty and the British Empire.
Through agitation of this sort against the Boer War, famine in Kerry, child poverty, military recruitment, political corruption, and more, the ISRP gained prominence and grew in size from a small number of founding members to dozens of members.45 To disseminate its ideas more effectively, the party launched publication of the Workers’ Republic, Ireland’s pioneering Marxist newspaper, in August 1898. Connolly edited and wrote regularly on a wide range of theoretical, international, and Irish issues. Through the paper, the ISRP developed positions on many subjects including the Irish language, religion, trade unions, revolution, elections, the use of violence, and how it conceived of socialism.
The Catholic Church
Religion was a very challenging issue for Connolly and the ISRP. Repression of the Catholic religion was part of the process in the conquest of Ireland, creating a strong popular connection between Catholicism and Irish identity. Land reforms in the late decades of the 1800s created a much larger, more secure, and wealthier Irish farming class. On the back of this, the influence of the Catholic Church grew across Irish society. The ISRP was regularly denounced by priests from their Sunday mass pulpits and physically attacked by the Catholic-sectarian Ancient Order of Hibernians. Connolly was concerned that the socialist movement would be cut off from a working-class audience if it was successfully caricatured as antireligious and atheist. For example, when Connolly and other ISRP members stood in the January 1902 municipal elections, priests claimed that they were anti-Christs and threatened to excommunicate anyone who voted socialist.
Consequently, and harshly, discussion of theological matters was deemed off-limits at ISRP meetings. Nevertheless, Connolly was at the fore in defending socialism and the ISRP from clerical criticism. His pamphlet Labour, Nationality and Religion, published in 1910, skillfully exposes the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church’s criticisms of socialism, and sets out to defend Marx’s materialist approach to history.46 Connolly’s strategy sought to draw out egalitarian religious themes and link them with socialism.
However, Connolly and the ISRP’s defensiveness meant they were overly sensitive to and deferential to religious opinion, and unwilling or unable to challenge conservative positions on social issues such as divorce and prostitution.47 A letter Connolly wrote to a comrade sheds light on his ambiguous approach to the issue:
For myself tho’ I have usually posed as a Catholic I have not gone to my duty for 15 years, and have not the slightest tincture of faith left. I only assumed the Catholic pose in order to query the raw freethinker whose ridiculous dogmatism did and does annoy me as much as the dogmatism of the orthodox. In fact I respect the good Catholic more than the average freethinker.48
The ISRP stood for the revolutionary reconstruction of society and was very critical of Fabian socialist efforts to reform capitalism.49 Socialism, for Connolly, meant democratic workers’ control of industry and agriculture. In “State Monopoly and Socialism,” he made it clear that state ownership of the economy did not equate with the ISRP’s vision of socialism:
Therefore, we repeat, state ownership and control is not necessarily Socialism—if it were, then the Army, the Navy, the Police, the Judges, the Jailers, the Informers, and the Hangmen, all would all be Socialist functionaries, as they are State officials—but the ownership by the State of all the land and materials for labor, combined with the cooperative control by the workers of such land and materials, would be Socialism.50
For socialism to be genuine, ownership of the means of production had to belong to the working class.
The ISRP, very much in keeping with the dominant approach of Marxist parties across the world, placed great emphasis on the importance of the “revolutionary ballot” as a means of seizing power. Connolly was very critical of the republican “conspiratorial” and “physical force” tradition in Ireland, but also understood that a struggle that went beyond electoralism would be necessary:
If the time should arrive when the party of progress finds its way to freedom barred by the stubborn greed of a possessing class entrenched behind the barriers of law and order; if the party of progress has indoctrinated the people at large with the new revolutionary conception of society and is therefore representative of the will of a majority of the nation, if it has exhausted all the peaceful means at its disposal for the purpose of demonstrating to the people and their enemies that the new revolutionary ideas do possess the suffrage of the majority; then, but not till then, the party which represents the revolutionary idea is justified in taking steps to assume the powers of government, and in using the weapons of force to dislodge the usurping class or government in possession, and treating its members and supporters as usurpers and rebels against the constituted authorities…. In other words, Socialists believe that the question of force is of very minor importance; the really important question is of the principles upon which is based the movement that may or may not need the use of force to realize its object.51
In 1900, three ISRP members traveled to Paris to participate in the congress of the socialist Second International. Importantly, the ISRP won the right to be seated independently from the British delegation. The most hotly debated question at the congress was the decision of the French Socialist Party leader, Millerand, to join a pro-capitalist Coalition government. The ISRP comrades were among a small minority who were categorically against participation in a government that included a “butcher” of the Paris Commune.52 This debate brought to light differences within the international socialist movement—fundamentally, the question of reform versus revolution that would only fully emerge with the outbreak of imperialist war in 1914.
From the ISRP’s inception, it suffered chronic financial problems, making regular publication of the Workers’ Republic very difficult to sustain. Often, there were no funds to cover the small amount Connolly was supposed to receive as organizer. The Connolly family regularly faced hardship, forcing James and Lillie to pawn their possessions in order to feed their family. To raise subscriptions for the ISRP paper, Connolly spent much of 1901 speaking and organizing in Scotland and England. In 1902 he agreed to go on a speaking tour in the United States hosted by the Socialist Labor Party. The SLP regularly published articles by Connolly in its newspaper, the Weekly People, and had recently distributed sixty thousand copies of a leaflet written by Connolly appealing to Irish Americans to support the SLP in New York municipal elections. Connolly left Ireland from Derry on August 30, 1902. The New York Times greeted his arrival with the headline “Agitator Connolly Here”:
James Connolly, an Irish Socialist agitator, who founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party in Dublin, Ireland, in 1896, arrived here last week on the Allan Line steamship Sardinia. He will start on a tour throughout the United States under the auspices of the Socialist Labor Party.53
The opening meeting of Connolly’s tour was held in Manhattan’s historic Cooper Union on September 15. A resolution welcoming Connolly to the United States was read out to a packed hall:
Whereas James Connolly is visiting the country as the representative of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, for the purpose of enlisting the interest of the Irish Americans in the Socialist Movement, and
Whereas James Connolly in his mission wishes to destroy the influence of the Irish Home Rulers and the bourgeoisie in Ireland, and their allies who trade on the Irish vote in this country to the economic detriment of the Irish workingmen in this country, therefore be it resolved:
That we, the members of the Socialist Labor Party, here assembled to receive James Connolly, cordially welcome him to “our” shores and give his mission our emphatic endorsement.54
In response, Connolly told his audience he was there to represent not all Irish people, but only the Irish working class. The US tour lasted three and a half months, and Connolly visited cities and towns in thirteen states from New York to California. He also spoke at meetings of the Canadian SLP. The tour allowed Connolly to raise subscriptions for the Workers’ Republic and stabilize his own financial situation. In late December 1902, he returned to Ireland.
Debates in the ISRP
The objective challenges facing the ISRP were compounded by political challenges that became exacerbated during the long periods Connolly was out of Ireland. Though his political tour raised some five hundred subscriptions to the Workers’ Republic in the United States and Canada, financial mismanagement by comrades in Ireland meant they struggled to publish and get the paper to subscribers on a regular basis.
Behind the disorganization lay political disagreements among members about the direction of the party. The question of revolution versus reform was being debated in socialist parties across the world, and it also pulled the ISRP in antagonistic directions. The bruising falling-out in the ISRP and his own deteriorating financial situation convinced Connolly to emigrate to the United States with his family.
The ISRP never realized its full potential. It is estimated that the party grew to have eighty members, with some several hundred aligned to its politics, between 1896 and 1904, though the Dublin branch probably had no more than twenty members active at any one time. The party attempted to build branches and win influence across Ireland, but its lack of stability and infrastructure meant that it was mostly concentrated in Dublin. Without doubt, had the party been in existence during the 1907 Belfast dock strike and the 1913 Dublin Lockout, it could have played an important political role and grown to implant itself as a sizeable party in the Irish working class. Had the party continued to exist, the impact of the ISRP in the explosive years after 1916 might have been immense.
Nevertheless, Connolly and the ISRP’s ideas made a profound impact on Irish politics going well beyond the party’s numerical membership and years in existence. Writing from the United States in 1909, Connolly captured the political contribution of the ISRP:
It is no exaggeration to say that this organization and its policy completely revolutionized advanced politics in Ireland. When it was first initiated the word “republic” was looked upon as a word only to be whispered among intimates; the Socialists boldly advised the driving from public life of all who would not openly accept it. The thought of revolution was the exclusive possession of a few remnants of the secret societies of a past generation, and was never mentioned by them except with heads closely together and eyes fearfully glancing around; the Socialists broke from this ridiculous secrecy, and in hundreds of speeches in the most public places of the metropolis, as well as in scores of thousands of pieces of literature scattered through the country, announced their purpose to muster all the forces of labor for a revolutionary reconstruction of society and the incidental destruction of the British Empire.55
Connolly in the United States
Once again Connolly set sail for the United States and arrived to New York City in the autumn of 1903. Unable to find work there, he traveled north to Troy, New York, and found a job with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The cost of ocean travel meant that Lillie and their children were only able to join him in America the following August, almost a full year later. Tragically, only five of James and Lillie’s six children made it to New York. Mona, their eldest daughter, died in a tragic accident on the eve of their voyage; she suffered terrible burns while cleaning a friend’s kitchen, and died in a hospital. She was only thirteen years old, and James and Lillie were left devastated by her premature death. Such was their poverty that Lillie and the other children could not remain in Dublin for the funeral, since they had to accept passage on the next Atlantic sailing. Mona was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Dublin. Connolly heard the terrible news through an official as he waited to greet Lillie and their children on Ellis Island.
Lillie and the Connolly children found work in Troy’s booming textile industry, bringing some stability and joy for a time. Eventually, in 1905, Connolly and family moved to Newark, New Jersey, where he had found work in a Singer sewing machine factory in the nearby town of Elizabeth, earning the decent sum of fifteen dollars a week.
On arriving in the United States, Connolly had joined the American Socialist Labor Party, but six months later he found himself at the center of a bitter debate. Connolly wrote a letter to the SLP paper, the Weekly People, titled “Wages, Marriage and the Church.” In the letter he questioned the SLP’s approach to several issues. First, he argued that some SLP speakers asserted that strikes were useless because they claimed that prices inevitably increased with wages. If this was the case, Connolly pointed out, the SLP’s trade union work was rendered pointless, since it could only offer general propaganda and not practical leadership to struggling workers. Second, Connolly argued that there was unnecessary agitation against monogamy in the SLP. Third, he argued that the SLP was creating unnecessary barriers to membership for workers with religious faith, especially the large numbers of Catholic Irish and Italian immigrants in many northern cities. He argued that the SLP needed to challenge rather than reinforce anti-Catholic prejudices widespread in American society. This theoretical purity was leading to a sectarian practice.
Connolly’s arguments about marriage and religion certainly contained insightful criticisms of the SLP’s approach, but they also reflected some of the challenges he and the ISRP had faced in dealing with the growing influence of the Catholic Church among Irish workers, both in Ireland and in the United States. For example, he wrote:
The abolition of the capitalist system will, undoubtedly, solve the economic side of the Woman Question, but it will solve that alone. The question of marriage, of divorce, of paternity, of the equality of woman with man are physical and sexual questions, or questions of temperamental affiliation as in marriage, and were we living in a Socialist Republic would still be hotly contested as they are today. One great element of disagreement would be removed—the economic—but men and women would still be unfaithful to their vows, and questions of the intellectual equality of the sexes would still be as much in dispute as they are today, even although economic equality would be assured.56
Connolly was a consistent critic of the Catholic Church, but he was also concerned with not allowing socialists to be caricatured by priests as “cranks” preoccupied with issues such as morality, sexuality, free love, or atheism. This resulted, for example, in a reluctance to draw clear positions on full equality for women. Society had yet to be reshaped by the women’s rebellion, so conservatism on these issues was a universal phenomenon in the international socialist and labor movement. When the rebellion came, Connolly was a strong supporter.
Daniel De Leon, editor of the Weekly People, wrote a blistering response condemning Connolly. The most important issue at stake for De Leon was Connolly’s claim that the SLP distorted Marx’s arguments in Value, Price and Profits. Connolly contended that the SLP’s interpretation led people to believe labor struggles for higher wages and better conditions were pointless, because any gains workers made would immediately be undercut by an increase in prices by employers. He pointed out that this was not what Marx argued, and demonstrated why it was not the case. Connolly wrote:
I am afraid that the Socialist Labor Party speaker knew little of Marx except his name, or he could not have made such a remark. The theory that a rise in prices always destroys the value of a rise in wages sound[s] very revolutionary, of course, but it is not true. And, furthermore, it is no part of our doctrine. If it were it knocks the feet from under the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance and renders that body little else than a mere ward-heeling club for the Socialist Labor Party.57
The debate lasted for months, but De Leon refused to print Connolly’s response. Connolly’s branch of the SLP in Troy went so far as to put him “on trial” to determine whether he should be expelled if his criticisms constituted an “attack” on the party. Rather than expelling Connolly, however, the Troy branch requested that the SLP National Executive Committee print Connolly’s statement.
Several years later, De Leon carried his attack further in making the absurd claim, at an Industrial Workers of the World leadership meeting, that Connolly was a “Jesuit spy” working to demoralize the IWW and divide the working class. De Leon also claimed that a “police spy” was active in the New York IWW.58 Connolly was a respected organizer for the New York IWW at the time, and the slanders only served to further undermine De Leon’s standing and deepen the political crisis of the SLP.
Despite this, Connolly remained a member and an active speaker, organizer, and writer for the SLP until 1908, when he formally resigned. He had said from the outset that the party was the place he ought to be because he shared its political outlook. He was extremely critical of opportunist and reformist trends growing in the world socialist movement, and the SLP had played an important role in defending the revolutionary core of Marxism. Connolly shared the SLP’s hostility to the reformist leadership of the Socialist Party of America. He also agreed that the class struggle and socialist project could not be advanced by working in the bureaucratic and class-collaborationist American Federation of Labor (AFL).
However, the bitter experience with De Leon and the SLP’s highly authoritarian internal regime dramatically affected Connolly’s approach to political organization. The debate on wages continued over the next three years and revealed to Connolly the inconsistency between the SLP’s “revolutionary phraseology” and its passivity towards the actual day-to-day struggles of the working class. The fight to win partial gains, such as wage increases, was feared, since it could lead workers away from the need to abolish capitalism. In the United States, Connolly began to focus increasingly on the importance of workplace struggle, strikes, and trade union activism.
1905 and the Wobblies
In 1905 a new militant organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, was founded in Chicago. It was very much inspired by the mass strikes at the heart of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Radical leaders and political and labor organizations, all long frustrated with the conservatism of the AFL and the socialist movement’s emphasis on elections as its principal strategy, joined forces to launch the fight for “industrial unionism.” Among the Wobblies’ founders were William “Big Bill” Haywood, leader of the militant Western Federation of Miners; Eugene V. Debs, organizer of the American Railway Union and the Socialist Party of America’s presidential candidate in 1904; Cork-born Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, organizer of the “Children’s Crusade”; Daniel De Leon, leader of the SLP; Lucy Parsons, writer and labor organizer; and Tom Hegarty, a socialist priest who campaigned for industrial unionism.
The preamble to the IWW Constitution read:
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party.
The rapid gathering of wealth and the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands make the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class, because the trade unions foster a state of things which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars.
The trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These sad conditions can be changed and the interests of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.59
The IWW rejected the practices of the AFL and pledged to organize all workers, regardless of their craft, ethnicity, race, or gender, into “One Big Union.” The Wobblies opposed racist anti-immigration policies backed by the AFL. To win, the IWW promoted direct action, strikes, and working-class solidarity. The revolutionary industrial unionism of the IWW caught Connolly’s imagination and he became an immediate advocate. This led him to fully embrace syndicalism and its vision of workers’ self-activity. At the heart of the syndicalist revolutionary strategy, the working class would need to build up economic control of society, industry by industry, to lay the basis for workers’ control of the economy and the creation of a socialist republic. Every workplace organized for industrial unionism became a fortress for revolution. When workers were organized enough within the industrial economy, they could declare a general strike and lock the employers out. Connolly wrote:
Let us be clear as to the function of industrial unionism. That function is to build up an industrial republic inside the shell of the political State, in order that when the industrial republic is fully organized it may crack the shell of the political State and step into its place in the scheme of the universe.60
A generation of radicals in the United States, in Europe, and beyond gravitated towards revolutionary syndicalism in their disgust with right-wing socialist party leaders’ dismissal of workers’ self-activity at the “point of production,” and with those same party leaders’ “revision” of Marxism, which entailed gradual reform of capitalism through electoral triumph. Instead, industrial unionism put workers’ ability to collectively withhold their labor, rather than their election of socialist candidates, at the center of revolutionary change. Syndicalism envisioned a new form of democracy through mass participation, beginning in the collective process of labor. Connolly envisaged a thoroughgoing form of socialist democracy:
In short, social democracy, as its name implies, is the application to industry, or to the social life of the nation, of the fundamental principles of democracy. Such application will necessarily have to begin in the workshop, and proceed logically and consecutively upward through all the grades of industrial organization until it reaches the culminating point of national executive power and direction. In other words, social democracy must proceed from the bottom upward, whereas capitalist political society is organized from above downward.61
In their reaction to the opportunism of socialist parties, many who were drawn to syndicalism tended to reject the need for political organization. Connolly did not repudiate the need for a socialist political party, as others drawn to syndicalism did, but he did come to a deeper understanding of the centrality of workers’ own actions in the fight for socialism. He wrote that the socialist party “must become the political expression of the fight in the workshop, and draw its inspiration therefrom.”62 Therefore, the building of a socialist party disconnected from the struggle of rank-and-file workers and the labor movement would lead, in Connolly’s estimation, to the creation of a sect. In the “spirit of the Communist Manifesto,” Connolly argued, “socialists are not apart from the labor movement, are not a sect, but are simply that part of the working class which pushes on all others, which most clearly understands the line of march.”63
Shaped by his experience in both the ISRP and the American SLP, Connolly reached the conclusion that a “broader” socialist party with more toleration for theoretical differences was required. He had worked for greater collaboration and unity of the existing socialist parties in his days as an organizer in Newark, New Jersey. His hope was for the IWW to launch a new revolutionary socialist party that would unite class-conscious workers and the best among the American socialist currents. The party’s strength would be based upon its rootedness in industry and workplaces. Its main contribution would be its capacity to assist the class struggle, and not its theoretical purity.
In 1907 Connolly became the organizer of the New York IWW District Council, and he contributed regularly to the IWW’s Industrial Union Bulletin. He also founded IWW Propaganda Leagues to disseminate the ideas of industrial unionism and encourage the broadest participation of all who were sympathetic to its revolutionary aims. Much of his attention focused on the practicalities of union-organizing campaigns across the city.
Songs of Freedom
In the same year, Connolly edited a songbook entitled Songs of Freedom by Irish Authors. The book featured songs by Connolly, John Leslie, and James Connell, author of “The Red Flag.” In the introduction, Connolly wrote:
No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression. If such a movement has caught hold of the imagination of the masses they will seek a vent in song for the aspirations, the fears and the hopes, the loves and the hatreds engendered by the struggle. Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement, it is the dogma of a few, and not the faith of the multitude.64
The collection includes songs by Connolly called “Freedom’s Sun,” “For Labor’s Right,” “Human Freedom,” and “Hymn to Freedom.” In another popular song, entitled “The Watchword,” Connolly writes:
Aye, we who oft won by our valor,
Empire for our rulers and lords,
Yet knelt in abasement and squalor
To that we had made by our swords.
Now valor with worth will be blending,
When, answering Labor’s command,
We arise from the earth and ascending
To manhood, for Freedom take stand.
Then out from the field and the city,
From workshop, from mill and mine,
Despising their wrath and their pity,
We workers are moving in line.
To answer the watchword and token
That Labor gives forth as its own,
Nor pause till our fetters we’ve broken,
And conquered the spoiler and drone.65
Penned by Connolly in 1904, “Be Moderate” is the most memorable of his songs:
Some men, faint-hearted, ever seek
Our program to retouch,
And will insist, when’er they speak
That we demand too much.
’Tis passing strange, yet I declare
Such statements cause me mirth,
For our demands most modest are,
We only want THE EARTH.
“Be Moderate,” the timorous cry,
Who dread the tyrant’s thunder,
“You ask too much, and people fly
From you, aghast, in wonder.”
’Tis passing strange, and I declare
Such statements cause me mirth,
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want THE EARTH.
Our Masters all—a godly crew
Whose hearts throb for the poor—
Their sympathies assure us, too,
If our demands were fewer.
Most generous souls, but please observe,
What they enjoy from birth,
Is all we ever had the nerve
To ask, that is, THE EARTH.
The Labor Fakir, full of guile,
Such doctrine ever preaches,
And, whilst he bleeds the rank and file,
Tame moderation teaches.
Yet, in his despite, we’ll see the day
When, with sword in its girth,
Labor shall march war array,
To seize its own, THE EARTH.
For Labor long with groans and tears
To its oppressors knelt,
But, never yet to aught save fears
We need not kneel; our cause is high,
Of true men there’s no dearth,
And our victorious rallying cry
Shall be, WE WANT THE EARTH.66
Irish Socialist Federation
In March 1907 Connolly, Jack Mulray, Jack Lyng, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Patrick Quinlan, and others founded the Irish Socialist Federation (ISF) in New York. Connolly, Mulray, and Lyng had all been members of the ISRP in Dublin. Flynn was the daughter of Irish immigrants living in the South Bronx and, though only seventeen, was already a full-time organizer for the IWW. The ISF published a “Declaration of Principles” stating the new organization’s purpose:
The Irish Socialist Federation is composed of members of the Irish race in America, and is organized to assist the revolutionary working-class movement in Ireland by a dissemination of its literature, to educate the working-class Irish of this country into a knowledge of Socialist principles and to prepare them to cooperate with the workers of all other races, colors and nationalities in the emancipation of labor.67
The ISF held regular public meetings in New York, and the following year it launched a monthly journal called The Harp, edited by Connolly. As a publication, The Harp was successful, and it helped the ISF to gain a political profile, but the group did not manage to grow significantly. Through it, Connolly was able to develop his thoughts on a number of questions; for example, on the Irish language:
Even on the question of the Irish language, Gaelic, a question on which most Socialists are prone to stumble, I am heartily in accord. I do believe in the necessity, and indeed in the inevitability, of a universal language, but I do not believe it will be brought about, or even hastened, by smaller races or nations consenting to the extinction of their language. Such a course of action, or rather slavish inaction, would not hasten the day of a universal language, but would rather lead to the intensification of the struggle for the mastery between the languages of the greater powers.
I have heard some doctrinaire Socialists arguing that Socialists should not sympathize with oppressed nationalities, or with nationalities resisting conquest. They argue that the sooner these nationalities are suppressed the better, as it will be easier to conquer political power in a few big empires than in a number of small states. This is the language argument over again.68
The ISF’s purpose was propaganda: to win Irish American workers over to supporting the socialist movement in the United States, to encourage participation in the IWW, and to make the case for rejecting Home Rule parties in Ireland.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, in her classic autobiography, The Rebel Girl: My First Life 1906–1926, writes about Connolly:
Connolly worked for the IWW and had an office at Cooper Square. He was a splendid organizer, as his later work for the Irish Transport Workers, with James Larkin, demonstrated. Although the Socialist Labor Party had invited him here in 1902 on a lecture tour and he was elected a member of their National Executive Committee, there was obvious jealousy displayed against him by their leader, Daniel De Leon, who could brook no opposition. Connolly had been one of the founders in 1896 of the Irish Socialist Republican Party in Dublin and editor of its organ. Connolly’s position that the Irish Socialist Party represented a separate nation from Britain was recognized by the International Socialist Congress in 1900, and the Irish delegates were allowed to take their seats as such.
When membership in the SLP became impossible for him here, he joined the Socialist Party and toured the country under its auspices. Connolly was the first person I ever heard use the expression “Workers’ Republic”; in fact, he is called by one biographer “the Irish apostle of the Soviet idea,” though none of us ever heard the word in those days. (Only later did I learn that Soviets first arose in the Russian Revolution of 1905.)
He felt keenly that not enough understanding and sympathy was shown by American Socialists for the cause of Ireland’s national liberation, that the Irish workers here were too readily abandoned by the Socialists as “reactionaries” and that there was not sufficient effort made to bring the message of socialism to the Irish-American workers. In 1907 George B. McClellan, Mayor of New York City, made a speech in which he said: “There are Russian Socialists and Jewish Socialists and German Socialists! But, thank God! there are no Irish Socialists!”69
Joining the Socialist Party of America
In 1908, Connolly decided to formally leave the SLP and join the Socialist Party of America (SPA). About this decision he wrote:
Now if before joining the SP I had to accept the compromising elements, and their political faith, I could never have joined it. But it is not necessary to do so. In the SP there are revolutionary, clear cut elements and there are also compromising elements. Neither can claim the right to be the Socialist Party. Neither attempt to expel the other. Now it was a long time before I could believe this, but at last I made up my mind to join because I felt that it was better to be one of the revolutionary minority inside the party than a mere discontented grumbler out of political life entirely. I would rather have the IWW undertake both political and economic activity now, but as the great majority of workers in the movement are against me on that matter I do not propose to make my desires a stumbling block in the way of my cooperation with my fellow-revolutionists.70
Since he previously had been a severe critic of the SPA, he was very aware of the organization’s shortcomings. However, a vibrant left wing existed within the SPA that included the party’s most prominent member, Eugene V. Debs.
In his time in the United States, Connolly had been forced to grapple with the problem of political organization. The challenge for revolutionaries within the SPA would be how to organize themselves and coordinate their efforts to influence the overall direction of the party as it grew in influence. Revolutionaries like Connolly urged the party to focus its energies on support for working-class struggles and for more principled political positions.
Connolly toured the United States in 1908, speaking to branches of both the SPA and the IWW in order to promote subscriptions to The Harp and build support for Eugene V. Debs, the SPA’s presidential candidate. In that year’s election, Debs received more than 420,000 votes, almost 3 percent of the national total. In 1912 Debs’s support more than doubled, to more than 900,000 votes and almost 6 percent. The SPA was a growing force but still a minority party in the United States, and Connolly went against the grain in attempting to win Irish immigrants and Irish Americans away from the Democratic Party machine.
Socialism Made Easy
The Chicago-based socialist publisher, Charles H. Kerr, published a collection of essays and articles by Connolly from The Harp, the Industrial Union Bulletin, and the International Socialist Review as a pamphlet called Socialism Made Easy. Thousands of copies were sold in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere. Socialism Made Easy continues to be popular today because of the accessible way Connolly puts the case for socialism and answers questions that socialist workers would regularly face, and for its wit:
Would you confiscate the property of the capitalist class and rob men of that which they have, perhaps, worked a whole lifetime to accumulate?
Yes, sir, and certainly not.
We would certainly confiscate the property of the capitalist class, but we do not propose to rob anyone. On the contrary, we propose to establish honesty once and forever as the basis of our social relations. This Socialist movement is indeed worthy to be entitled The Great Anti-Theft Movement of the Twentieth Century.71
In Socialism Made Easy, Connolly also developed his thinking regarding the relationship between the “two wings of the army of Labor,” the industrial and the political:
I am convinced that this will be the ultimate formation of the fighting hosts of Labor. The workers will be industrially organized on the economic field and until that organization is perfected, whilst the resultant feeling of class-consciousness is permeating the minds of the workers, the Socialist 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. But as industrial organization grows, feels its strength, and develops the revolutionary instincts of its members there will grow also the desire for a closer union and identification of the two wings of the army of Labor. Any attempt prematurely to force this identification would only defeat its own purpose, and be fraught with danger alike to the economic and the political wing. Yet it is certain that such attempts will be of continual recurrence and multiply in proportion to the dissatisfaction felt at the waste of energy involved in the division of forces. Statesmanship of the highest kind will be required to see that this union shall take place only under the proper conditions and at the proper moment for effective action…. A Socialist Political Party not emanating from the ranks of organized Labor is, as Karl Marx phrased it, simply a Socialist sect.72
In his time touring, Connolly was also able to finish Labour in Irish History, to be published in 1910. By now, however, he was increasingly in touch with Irish socialists and eager to find the means to return to Dublin. In a letter to William O’Brien, a cofounder of the ISRP, Connolly confessed that he regarded his “emigration to America as the great mistake of my life.”73 As much as Connolly found himself in the thick of working-class struggles in the United States, the founding of the ISF and publication of The Harp allowed him to engage consistently with political developments in Ireland. For one, Connolly was closely following the growth of Sinn Féin.
Sinn Féin, meaning “Ourselves,” had been founded in 1905 through the merger of Arthur Griffith’s National Council and the “Dungannon Clubs” organized by Bulmer Hobson and Denis McCullough in the north of Ireland. The new organization brought together radical nationalists to pose a republican alternative to the Home Rule goal of the Irish Parliamentary Party led by John Redmond. The program of Sinn Féin promoted the revival of Irish capitalism and urged county councils to “invite Irish-American millionaires to promote industrial development in Ireland.”74 This found support among businessmen and the urban middle class. Some on the left also embraced Sinn Féin because of its support for social reforms.
Through The Harp, Connolly welcomed aspects of Sinn Féin’s politics:
It teaches the Irish people to rely upon themselves, and upon themselves alone, and teaches them also that dependence upon forces outside themselves is emasculating in its tendency, and has been, and will ever be disastrous in its results. So far, so good. That is the part of Sinn Féinism I am most heartily in agreement with, and indeed with the spirit of Sinn Féin every thinking Irishman who knows anything about the history of his country must concur.75
However, despite Sinn Féin’s adherence to republicanism, it was exactly the kind of all-class alliance Connolly prophetically warned against. He made it clear that socialists parted ways with Sinn Féin on their support for capitalism. In another article penned in the United States he wrote:
Sinn Féin has two sides—its economic teaching and its philosophy of self-reliance. With its economic teaching, as expounded by my friend Mr. Arthur Griffith in his adoption of the doctrines of Frederick List, Socialists have no sympathy, as it appeals to only those who measure a nation’s prosperity by the volume of wealth produced in a country, instead of by the distribution of that wealth among its inhabitants.76
In the same article, Connolly developed his critique of Sinn Féin further on its inability to reach Protestant workers, writing:
When a Sinn Féiner waxes eloquent about restoring the Constitution of ’82, but remains silent about the increasing industrial despotism of the capitalist; when the Sinn Féiner speaks to men who are fighting against low wages and tells them that the Sinn Féin body has promised lots of Irish labor at low wages to any foreign capitalist who wishes to establish in Ireland, what wonder if they come to believe that a change from Toryism to Sinn Féinism would simply be a change from the devil they do know to the devil they do not know!
Here, Connolly makes the crucial point that Sinn Féin’s capitalist independent Ireland has no appeal to Protestant workers. For Protestant workers to break with Unionism and unite with Catholic workers, it would have to be based on the possibility of improving their conditions as workers. Hence, the potential appeal of a socialist workers’ republic.
Ireland and Irish politics had a gravitational pull on Connolly; his mind was made up and he was determined to find the means to move back. When he broached this with Lillie, she reminded him: “Think of all the misery we had there. How can you want to go back?” Connolly replied, “I love Dublin, Lillie. I’d rather be poor there than a millionaire here.”77 Following a farewell dinner organized by Irish Socialist Federation comrades in Manhattan, Connolly left the United States on July 16, 1910. He arrived in Derry on July 25 and made his way to Dublin the following day.
“Times of Political Change”: Connolly Returns to Ireland
On his arrival in Dublin, Connolly immediately set about building the Socialist Party of Ireland. The SPI had been initially launched in 1904 and then relaunched in 1908, with the goal of uniting Ireland’s disparate socialists in a common organization. Connolly toured Ireland, speaking to large, enthusiastic crowds and setting up new branches. His latest book to have been published, Labour, Nationality and Religion, was popular in effectively challenging an erroneous clerical interpretation of socialism. He wrote:
Is not this attitude symbolic of the Church for hundreds of years? Ever counseling humility, but sitting in the seats of the mighty; ever patching up the diseased and broken wrecks of an unjust social system, but blessing the system which made the wrecks and spread the disease; ever running Divine Discontent and pity into the ground as the lightning rod runs and dissipates lightning, instead of gathering it and directing it for social righteousness as the electric battery generates and directs electricity for social use.78 Socialists in Ireland faced constant ideological attack from the Catholic Church, and ultra-Catholic organizations were whipped into to a frenzy. This made Connolly’s reply widely welcomed.
Later in the year, Connolly and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, socialist and pacifist, wrote a new manifesto for the SPI. The document brimmed with possibility and confidence, but also carried an ominous warning:
We live in times of political change, and even of political revolution. More and more civic and national responsibility is destined to be thrust upon, or won by, the people of Ireland. Old political organizations will die out and new ones must arise to take their place; old party rallying cries and watchwords are destined to become obsolete and meaningless, and the fires of old feuds and hatreds will pale and expire before newer conceptions born of a consciousness of our common destiny. In this great awakening of Erin, Labor if guided by the lamp of Socialist teaching may set its feet firmly and triumphantly upon the path that leads to its full emancipation. But if Labor does not rise to the occasion, and allows itself to be swallowed up in and identified with new political alignments, scattering and dissipating its forces instead of concentrating them upon Socialist lines, then indeed will our last state be worse than our first.79
A more confident and experienced Connolly carried this message to his comrades and to the thousands who attended SPI-organized meetings across the country. He sensed that something new was developing in Ireland, and that revolutionaries needed to prepare.
However, the socialist message was not welcomed everywhere. Following a series of successful meetings in Cork, Connolly and his comrades hosted a meeting in nearby Cobh. The ultra-Catholic Ancient Order of Hibernians was determined to make sure no meeting happened. The police looked on as Connolly and his socialist comrades were violently attacked and were forced to flee the town.
Belfast: Sectarianism and Class Struggle
In May 1911 the Connolly family moved to Belfast, where James Larkin appointed Connolly secretary and Ulster district organizer for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU). Living and organizing in Belfast, Connolly directly confronted sectarianism, which was often violent, dividing the city’s working-class communities. Belfast was the most industrially developed city in Ireland. The major employers there viewed their prosperity as being best served and protected by remaining firmly integrated within the expansive British Empire. This made them ardent defenders of the Empire, of Ireland’s Union with Britain, and of the sectarian Orange Order.
The Orange Order was formed as a secret organization in 1795 to defend the Protestant Ascendancy and British rule in Ireland. Ideologically, it was extremely hostile to Catholicism and promoted Protestant supremacy. Practically, the Order came to link Protestant employers and Protestant workers in a common defense of the Union with Britain against Catholic Ireland. The Order, combined with segregated skilled craft trade unionism, kept Catholic workers in mostly manual employment in Belfast as it industrialized. When Protestant and Catholic workers did manage to fight together on shared interests, despite their sectarian prejudices, the “Orange Card” was consciously introduced by employers and trumpeted through the media, church, and schools to create distrust and undermine class solidarity. Unionism and the Orange Order became skilled in manipulation and scaremongering, warning that unity with Catholic workers would lead to poverty and rule by the pope.
The ITGWU had developed out of the magnificent 1907 dockworkers’ strike that challenged Belfast’s powerful employers and the city’s sectarian order. James Larkin, then an organizer for the British-based National Union of Dock Laborers, was assigned to Belfast to recruit dockworkers into that union. The story of the struggle is brilliantly described by John Gray in City in Revolt: James Larkin and the Belfast Dock Strike of 1907. Catholic and Protestant dockworkers living in Belfast’s Sailortown area struck for union recognition and gained support from working-class areas across the city. British troops were deployed to control the insurgency. Connolly would have been very familiar with the strike, and he grasped its revolutionary potential. For those who claimed that working-class unity was an impossibility, the strike provided tangible evidence to the contrary.
Though Connolly was intransigent in his opposition to the reactionary influence of Orangeism on the Protestant working class, he consistently attempted to reach Protestant workers through propaganda specifically shaped to take up their concerns. For example, in “July the Twelfth,” Connolly thoroughly challenged the reactionary pro-Union and anti-Catholic history that Protestants were taught, but concluded:
The Irish Catholic was despoiled by force,
The Irish Protestant toiler was despoiled by fraud,
The spoliation of both continues today under more insidious but more effective forms, and the only hope lies in the latter combining with the former in overthrowing their common spoilers, and consenting to live in amity together in the common ownership of their common country—the country which the spirit of their ancestors or the devices of their rulers have made—the place of their origin, or the scene of their travail.
I have always held, despite the fanatics on both sides, that the movements of Ireland for freedom could not and cannot be divorced from the worldwide upward movements of the world’s democracy. The Irish question is a part of the social question, the desire of the Irish people to control their own destinies is a part of the desire of the workers to forge political weapons for their own enfranchisement as a class.
The Orange fanatic and the Capitalist-minded Home Ruler are alike in denying this truth; ere long, both of them will be but memories, while the army of those who believe in that truth will be marching and battling on its conquering way.80
With this perspective guiding his efforts, and the memory of the 1907 strike still alive, Connolly returned to the Belfast docks in 1911 to appeal for class solidarity and common action. Writing in the ITGWU’s newspaper, The Irish Worker, Connolly described the conditions workers on the docks faced:
Accidents were common, as is always the case when men are pushed to the breaking point, and physical break down as so prevalent that it was but rarely that men were able to finish three days’ work in succession, the inevitable consequences of their exhausting labors compelling men to remain idle in order to recruit their strength, followed in the complete demoralization of the workers.81
Connolly’s daily campaigning on the docks paid off. Six hundred men came out on strike in August, forcing employers to make significant concessions on wages and working conditions. Reporting on the strike in The Irish Worker, Connolly was jubilant:
We have just had, and taken, the opportunity in Belfast to put into practice a little of what is known on the Continent of Europe as “Direct Action.”
Direct Action consists in ignoring all the legal and parliamentary ways of obtaining redress for the grievances of Labor, and proceeding to rectify these grievances by direct action upon the employer’s most susceptible part—his purse. This is very effective at times, and saves much needless worry, and much needless waste of union funds.
Direct Action is not liked by lawyers, politicians, or employers. It keeps the two former out of a job, and often leaves the latter out of pocket. But it is useful to Labor, and if not relied upon too exclusively, or used too recklessly, it may yet be made a potent weapon in the armory of the working class.82
A few months later, Connolly was contacted by women workers who were participating in a spontaneous spinners’ strike in the Belfast linen mills.83 When hundreds of spinners struck in October against part-time work, the employer responded with a lockout. Connolly urged the women to form a strike committee, and went on to organize them into the newly formed Irish Textile Workers’ Union, affiliated with the ITGWU. He described the mills as “slaughterhouses for the women and penitentiaries for the children.”84
Even though the strike and the mass outpourings of support it received gained little in terms of wage increases, Connolly was optimistic about the strike’s overall impact: “The whole atmosphere at the mill is changed. The slave-driving is checked, laughter and songs and pleasant chat can be heard, and the work is in nowise interfered with. Taking our advice the strikers grew into a solid, compact body, animated by one spirit, and standing unitedly together.”85
These strikes were powerful examples of what was possible in Belfast. But in a city deeply shaped and scarred by sectarian conflict, tremendous challenges to ongoing class solidarity existed. The question of Home Rule, the dominant political issue in Ireland, would soon emerge to divide and stiffen political divisions across the city and across the entire island. Belfast’s pro-Union manufacturing and shipbuilding magnates opposed it, and would not hesitate to play the “Orange Card” in the face of working-class solidarity.
Founding the Irish Labor Party
As a delegate for the Belfast branch of the ITGWU to the May 1912 Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Connolly proposed a resolution calling for “independent Labor representation.” The resolution passed overwhelmingly, and effectively established the Irish Labor Party. Connolly and others were anticipating the establishment of a new Home Rule parliament and wanted to ready the labor movement to fight for its political voice in opposition to moderate Nationalists and Unionists.
Connolly envisaged the Labor Party as being necessary to give political representation to the growing influence of the “One Big Union” through the ITGWU. The new party “would keep a place for those who are not as far as advanced as themselves, but whose interest would bring them into line.”86 The politics of the party were to be broad enough to gain the support of nonsocialist workers, but the party was clearly committed to a fundamental transformation of society, and not gradualist or piecemeal reform.
Connolly wrote a series of articles in The Irish Worker in 1912 under the title “Labor and the Re-Conquest of Ireland.” Expanded and with additional material, this series was republished by the ITGWU as a pamphlet, The Re-Conquest of Ireland, in 1915 as an expression of the Labor Party’s “final aim” of “taking possession of the entire country, all its wealth production and all its natural resources, and organizing these on a cooperative basis for the good of all.”87 Though Connolly viewed the trade union movement as being committed to forging a political body for the working class, the Irish Labor Party never became an active factor until after his death.
Connolly and the Women’s Movement
Connolly dedicated a chapter of The Re-Conquest of Ireland to the struggle for women’s equality. He was greatly affected by the rising struggle of women, and his thinking on the issue demonstrated a tremendous theoretical advance. Though often written out of Irish history, women were very active in Ireland’s Gaelic Revival, in the nationalist and labor movements, and in the demand for suffrage. Working with numerous women’s organizations, Connolly was a very vocal advocate of their participation and supporter of their demands. He wrote:
The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave. In Ireland that female worker has hitherto exhibited, in her martyrdom, an almost damnable patience. She has toiled on the farms from her earliest childhood, attaining usually to the age of ripe womanhood without ever being vouchsafed the right to claim as her own a single penny of the money earned by her labor, and knowing that all her toil and privation would not earn her that right to the farm which would go without question to the most worthless member of the family, if that member chanced to be the eldest son… .
The daughters of the Irish peasantry have been the cheapest slaves in existence—slaves to their own family, who were, in turn, slaves to all social parasites of a landlord and gombeen-ridden community. The peasant, in whom centuries of servitude and hunger had bred a fierce craving for money, usually regarded his daughters as beings sent by God to lighten his burden through life, and too often the same point of view was as fiercely insisted upon by the clergymen of all denominations… .
So, down from the landlord to the tenant or peasant proprietor, from the monopolist to the small business man eager to be a monopolist, and from all above to all below, filtered the beliefs, customs, ideas establishing a slave morality which enforces the subjection of women as the standard morality of the country.
None so fitted to break the chains as they who wear them, none so well equipped to decide what is a fetter. In its march towards freedom, the working class of Ireland must cheer on the efforts of those women who, feeling on their souls and bodies the fetters of the ages, have arisen to strike them off, and cheer all the louder if in its hatred of thraldom and passion for freedom the women’s army forges ahead of the militant army of Labor.
But whosoever carries the outworks of the citadel of oppression, the working class alone can raze it to the ground.88
In Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism, Margaret Ward writes: “The writings and political practice of James Connolly have only been accepted when they have not conflicted with nationalist orthodoxy and nowhere is this more clearly evident than over the controversial issue of women; Connolly’s unconditional support for the suffrage movement has in consequence been completely obscured.”89 The founders of the Irish Women’s Franchise League, Francis and Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, described Connolly as “the soundest and most thorough-going feminist of all the Irish labor men.”90
Deeply sympathetic to the oppression women faced, Connolly believed women had the right to determine what constituted a “fetter” on their lives, and advocated that their struggle should be supported by the entire working-class movement. Connolly grasped how the women’s liberation struggle could give impetus to the working-class struggle, and how the genuine liberation of women could only come through a revolutionary upheaval embracing the entire working class.
During the 1916 Rising, Connolly encouraged his female comrades to participate; he was insistent that the proclamation declaring the new republic would give women status equal to that of men:
The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.91
The Great Dublin Lockout of 1913
While Belfast began to seethe with Orange reaction and sectarian violence, Dublin was on the eve of the most important labor struggle in Irish history. Some form of self-governance for Ireland was anticipated, but the conflict over who would govern was far from settled. The battle between Irish capital and Irish labor reached fever pitch in the late summer of 1913. Connolly wrote, “The Dublin fight is more than a trade union fight; it is a great class struggle, and recognized as such by all sides.”92
The Great Dublin Lockout of 1913 was an unprecedented insurgency by the workers of Dublin challenging their employers and political masters. Anticipating the eruption of discontent, Connolly wrote in late December 1912:
No one at all acquainted with Ireland at the present can doubt that the country is feeling the throbs accompanying the birth of great movements. Everywhere there are stirrings of new life—intellectual, artistic, industrial, political, racial, social stirrings are to be seen and felt on every hand, and the nation is moved from end to end by the yeast-like pulsations of new influences… .
With a people degraded, and so degraded as to be unconscious of their degradation, no upward march of Ireland is possible; with a people restless under injustice, conscious of their degradation, and resolved, if need be, to peril life itself in order to end such degradation, though thrones and empires fall as a result—with such a people all things are possible—to such a people all things must bend and flow… .
It is, therefore, a matter of sincere congratulation to every lover of the race that the workers of Ireland are today profoundly discontented, and, so far from being apathetic in their slavery, are, instead, rebellious, even to the point of rashness. Discontent is the fulcrum upon which the lever of thought has ever moved the world to action. A discontented Working Class! What a glorious promise for the future! Ireland has today within her bosom two things that must make the blood run with riotous exultation in the veins of every lover of the Irish race—a discontented working class, and the nucleus of a rebellious womanhood.93
Poverty, unemployment, ill health, and overcrowding were rampant in Dublin, and a blight on the lives of its working-class residents. Dublin employers made fortunes paying some of the lowest wages in Europe. It was the mission of the ITGWU to challenge and transform this state of affairs. A wave of industrial struggle, known as the “Great Unrest,” engulfed Britain and Ireland between 1910 and 1914.
In 1911, the “number of workers taking industrial action was almost 962,000, and in 1912 it soared to 1.46 million.”94 In 1912, some 42 million production days were lost to strike action. Trade union membership exploded from 2.1 million to 4.1 million. In 1911, “the workers from one end of Ireland to the other made demands on their employers. From Jacob’s biscuit factory in Dublin to the bacon factories in Limerick, from the dock laborers in Belfast to the Urban Council employees in Cork, spontaneous demands were made and quickly conceded.”95 As the strike wave appeared to slow in Britain, it gathered pace in Dublin. In the lead-up to the Dublin Lockout, “between 29 January and 14 August 1913 there were thirty major disputes in Dublin, and most of them involved the ITGWU.”96
In this period the ITGWU grew rapidly, earning significant wage increases and dignity for its members by utilizing the “sympathetic strike.” In 1911 its membership grew from five thousand to eighteen thousand. Irish employers fumed at “Larkinism” and hypocritically wished for “ordinary trade unions of the English type” with which they could negotiate. The leadership of the ITGWU viewed the trade union struggle as the vehicle for social revolution in Ireland. From his time organizing with the IWW in the United States, Connolly concluded that revolutionary unionism was the key to workers’ power. James Larkin embodied the militant spirit of the ITGWU and was a powerful advocate of Ireland’s variety of revolutionary syndicalism. Through its newspaper, The Irish Worker, launched in 1911, the ITGWU espoused the goals of “One Big Union,” solidarity, and a workers’ republic to a mass audience of attentive working-class readers.
Dublin’s leading employers believed the militancy of the ITGWU was out of control and needed to be checked. On August 15, 1913, workers at The Irish Independent were fired for refusing to renounce their membership of the ITGWU. The Independent was owned by William Martin Murphy, one of Dublin’s wealthiest employers, the founder and leader of the Dublin Employers’ Federation, a prominent Irish nationalist, and a supporter of Home Rule and the Irish Parliamentary Party. In fact, to confirm his patriotic credentials, Murphy declined King Edward VII’s offer of a knighthood in 1907.
In response to Murphy’s terminations, newspaper boys, followed by Dublin tram drivers and conductors, struck in solidarity. Murphy was also the largest shareholder in and chairman of the Dublin United Tramways Company (DUTC). In July, aware of the ITGWU’s efforts to recruit DUTC workers, Murphy sacked seven prominent union supporters and organized a mass meeting of his employees to let them know that he supported their right to form a “legitimate” union but would completely oppose Larkin, “the labor dictator of Dublin.”97
As the fight began to escalate, Connolly arrived from Belfast. After speaking at a mass rally with Larkin, he was arrested for sedition and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, where he began a hunger strike to win his release. Soon after, Larkin was also arrested and jailed for speaking at a prohibited rally. Connolly pointed out the hypocrisy of violence faced by the Irish labor movement in comparison to the failure of authorities to lift a finger towards the law-defying Ulster Unionists. He wrote that the “government allowed the Orange aristocracy to arm and drill the Orange mobs, to supply them with the instruments of war, and to inflame them with the passions of war.”98
In an attempt to break the growing solidarity of labor through intimidation and violence, the Dublin Metropolitan Police unleashed a wave of terror in working-class areas of Dublin, leaving hundreds hospitalized. Gangs of police officers beat two workers, James Nolan and James Byrne, to death, and injured hundreds with indiscriminate baton attacks. Another victim of police violence, John McDonagh, was left paralyzed in his bed, and later died.
Connolly described the police “as servants of Bureaucracy, and when it is remembered that the said bureaucracy in Ireland has for generations been solely recruited from, and filled with traditions of, the Irish landlord class, the most hateful, antidemocratic, soulless body of oppressors in Europe—we can well understand what the practice of the Irish police is likely to be. They are in fact a body of traitors who have sold themselves to the enemies of their race, and are rewarded in proportion as they develop expertness as informers, spies, and bullies.”99
With the courts, press, police, and government officials firmly on his side, Murphy organized a meeting of the Dublin Employers’ Federation. Four hundred Dublin employers agreed to his proposal to lock out any employee who refused to resign their membership of the ITGWU. Connolly, in response to the provocation, declared, “Let them declare their lock-out; it will only hasten the day when the working class will lock-out the capitalist class for good and all.”100 With violence and propaganda failing to break the will of Dublin’s risen labor movement, the political and economic establishment of the city decided on the strategy of starving workers and their families into submission. But the “mood of the people was completely new. They had rebelled, and heaven had not fallen in on them. A new air of confidence that they had power and could use it affected the entire working class.”101
The solidarity campaign escalated with support from Britain. The British Trade Union Congress (TUC) had earlier sent a delegation to Dublin to investigate the labor dispute, and found the city “under a semi-military regime with the whole population terrorized.”102 The TUC also began sending shipments of food to Dublin to feed locked-out workers and their families. Mass protests were held in London, and solidarity meetings were organized by the British Socialist Party in Newcastle, Coventry, Bristol, Bradford, Leicester, Portsmouth, and many other cities. Rank-and-file workers across Britain also responded to the call for solidarity from Dublin with militant action. Railway workers in Liverpool, Birmingham, Derby, Sheffield, and beyond refused to handle Dublin goods. Connolly, moved by the tremendous display of solidarity from British workers, wrote:
We are told that the English people contributed to help our enslavement. It is true. It is also true that the Irish people have contributed soldiers to duly crush every democratic movement of the English people from the deportation of Irish soldiers to serve the cause of political despotism under Charles to the days of Featherstone under Asquith. Slaves themselves the English people helped to enslave others; slaves themselves the Irish people helped enslave others. There is no room for recrimination.
We are only concerned now with the fact—daily becoming more obvious—that the English workers who have reached the moral stature of rebels are now willing to assist the working-class rebels of Ireland, and that those Irish rebels will in their turn help the rebels of England to break their chains and attain the dignity of freedom. There are still a majority of slaves in England—there are still a majority of slaves in Ireland. We are under no illusions as to either country. But we do not intend to confound the geographical spot on which the rebels lie with the political government upheld by the slave.
For us and ours the path is clear. The first duty of the working class of the world is to settle accounts with the master class of the world—that of their own country at the head of the list.
To that point this struggle, as all such struggles, is converging.103
However, British trade union officials, feeling threatened by the spread of “Larkinism” and the militancy of their own members, forced an end to sympathetic strike actions, and even allowed workers who had participated to be victimized by their employers. Connolly and Larkin both understood that if the struggle did not spread to shut down ports across Britain, Dublin would be left isolated. Money and food shipments could sustain the workers’ resolve, but that would not defeat the employers. The united political and economic actions of the employers, in Connolly’s opinion, had to be met with equal unity by trade unions and conducted as a military confrontation. All battalions of the working class had to be ready for battle. A defeat in Dublin would weaken the entire working class in Ireland, but also in Britain.
Dublin became increasingly militarized. Thousands of British troops were brought in to quell rioting, there was indiscriminate police violence, and scabs were armed with revolvers. In response, Connolly and Larkin supported the creation of a “labor army,” made up of trained and disciplined members of the ITGWU, to defend picketing workers from police attacks. Unionists and Nationalists were arming, and Connolly believed that the Irish labor movement needed to do the same. This was the embryo of the Irish Citizen Army that went on to play a leading role in the 1916 Rising under Connolly’s leadership.104
Under duress, the Liberal government was forced to release Larkin from a seven-month prison sentence. On his release, Larkin toured England, Scotland, and Wales, appealing for solidarity action at massive meetings, and he found a very receptive audience. He called on rank-and-file workers to demand that their union leaderships support the Dublin working class by refusing to handle Dublin traffic, and by refusing to transport scabs.
As the struggle was prolonged, Connolly, Larkin, and ITGWU militants came under intense pressure to fold. Locked-out workers and their families struggled with poverty, imprisonment, injuries, and vilification. As Dublin employers began to import scabs to replace locked-out workers, British trade union leaders pressured Connolly to abandon Larkin and settle the lockout without the involvement of the ITGWU. Unsurprisingly, Connolly rejected these approaches, and made it clear that he and Larkin were committed to the same goal and strategy.
Fanatical priests and Catholic militants rioted when union supporters found temporary homes for the children of locked-out workers in Belfast and Britain. Meanwhile, Larkin was accused of religious proselytizing and being a member of the Orange Order. Arthur Griffith’s newspaper, Sinn Féin, denounced the solidarity food ships from Britain as a plot to destroy Irish business. The Irish Republican Brotherhood refused to take a stand on the side of the workers.
Connolly wrote bitterly, “Practically, every official element in Nationalist circles has striven hard all through this struggle to make capital against labor.”105 The Dublin working class refused to wait for Ireland’s independence to press its demands. The viciousness of “green” employers and political nationalists underscored Connolly’s opposition to any form of all-class alliance in which socialists would play down working-class demands for the sake of unity.
Others rallied to the cause of the workers. Patrick Pearse and Tom Clarke, future leaders of the 1916 Rising, publicly sided with the workers’ struggle. Leading intellectuals, artists, and feminist activists such as George “Æ” Russell, W. B. Yeats, Charlotte Despard, Sylvia Pankhurst, Dora Montefiore, and George Bernard Shaw responded to the call for solidarity with locked-out workers. And “Big Bill” Haywood, a founder of the American IWW, visited Dublin to speak at Liberty Hall, the ITGWU’s headquarters.
In January 1914, another martyr of the lockout was buried. Sixteen-year-old Alice Brady, a member of the Irish Women Workers Union (IWWU), was shot by a scab and died a month later from tetanus. Thousands attended the funeral, including five hundred members of the IWWU. Connolly walked behind Brady’s parents in the funeral procession, along with James Larkin, Delia Larkin (sister of James and leader of the IWWU), and the prominent political activist Constance Markievicz.
Despite their tremendous heroism, the locked-out workers were defeated. The strike action did not spread far enough throughout Britain to defeat the determined, united onslaught of employers with deep financial means and the full backing of the state. Connolly and Larkin were forced to advise ITGWU members to return to work if their employer was not forcing them to renounce their union membership. Eventually, workers drifted back to work, with many facing severe victimization.
Explaining Dublin’s isolation, Connolly wrote:
We asked our friends of the transport trade unions to isolate the capitalist class of Dublin, and we asked the other unions to back them up. But no, they said they would rather help you by giving you funds. We argued that a strike is an attempt to stop the capitalist from carrying on his business, that the success or failure of a strike depends entirely upon the success or non-success of the capitalist to do without the strikers.106
Defeat was not inevitable. The union officials who refused to back all-out action feared rank-and-file militancy and the ITGWU’s revolutionary mission. They preferred to see the ITGWU defeated and Larkinism replaced with trade union methods similar to their own. These conservative union leaders had no interest in overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with socialism. Their strategy was dictated by their acceptance of capitalism and the union’s role as a negotiator to improve conditions for workers within its confines. In “Old Wine in New Bottles,” Connolly explained his strategy:
Our attitude always was that in the swiftness and unexpectedness of our action lay our chief hopes of temporary victory, and since permanent peace was an illusory hope until permanent victory was secured, temporary victories were all that need concern us. We realized that every victory gained by the working class would be followed by some capitalist development that in the course of time would tend to nullify it, but that until development was perfect the fruits of our victory would be ours to enjoy, and the resultant moral effect would be of incalculable value to the character and to the mental attitude of our class towards their rulers.107
Even though they faced tremendous odds, Connolly and Larkin opted to lead a fight, rather than avoid battle and be defeated anyway. The ITGWU was defeated and bankrupted, but the union was not destroyed and would rise again. Therefore, even in defeat there were important lessons from the lockout and the potential for working-class struggle. Connolly summarized the working-class radicalization that took place during the lockout when he wrote:
There are times in history when we realize that it is easier to convert a multitude than it ordinarily is to convert an individual; when indeed ideas seem to seize upon the masses as contra-distinguished by ordinary times when individuals slowly seize ideas. The propagandist toils on for decades in seeming failure and ignominy, when suddenly some great event takes place in accord with the principles he has been advocating, and immediately he finds that the seed has been sowing is springing up in plants that are covering the earth. To the idea of working class unity, to the seed of industrial solidarity, Dublin was the great event that enabled it to seize the minds of the masses, the germinating force that gave power to the seed to fructify and cover these islands.108
The 1913 labor war profoundly affected working-class consciousness in Dublin, and its legacy persists in Ireland. Today, all trade unions and trade union leaders continue to be measured against the class leadership and courage of Connolly, Larkin, and their supporters. In his address to the Irish Trade Union Congress, Connolly drew further meaning from the battle in Dublin:
Never did Ireland in her most heroic moments rise to higher altitudes in the estimation of all lovers of progress than she was raised to by the fact of her working class—although surrounded by the most unclean pack of wolves that ever yelped at the heels of honor, and threatened by the most unscrupulous coalition of tyrants known to industrial and political history—by their own strength had forced forward to the front the question of the moral responsibility of all the degradations of each. That responsibility which the teachers and rulers of all the ages have been engaged in evading or denying was at last raised by the Dublin Working Class into its true position, and forced upon the consciousness of an unwilling public compelled by the events of a great dramatic industrial war to consider its portent. To the Dublin Working Class belongs the honor of making the sentiment of AN INJURY TO ONE IS THE CONCERN OF ALL one that all Labor Organizations and all political parties must henceforth be measured by.109
Larkin, exhausted by the lockout, decided to travel to the United States to raise funds for the depleted ITGWU. In Larkin’s absence, and for the role he played in the lockout, Connolly was assigned the roles of acting general secretary for the ITGWU and commander of the Irish Citizen Army.
Home Rule for Ireland?
In the aftermath of the 1798 Irish Rebellion, the Act of Union of 1800 abolished the Irish Parliament and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The “Home Rule” movement gathered strength in the 1860s, demanding increased self-governance in Ireland. Backed by the Irish bourgeoisie, Home Rule was counterposed to the demand for complete separation and independence for Ireland. The Home Rule movement relied on constitutional reform, over the “physical force” strategy of the Fenian movement aiming for complete separation.110 The first Home Rule Bill was introduced and defeated in the House of Commons in 1886. It was fiercely resisted by the Orange Order, who fomented very serious sectarian violence in Belfast. Connolly, like most people, was convinced that some form of Home Rule was inevitable for Ireland, but the violence of 1886 was a prescient warning of what would unfold.
A third Home Rule Bill was introduced in April 1912. Its backdrop was the constitutional crisis in Britain between the Liberal Party and the Conservative (Tory) Party. The Liberal Party won support based on a social reform program demanded by an increasingly assertive working-class movement. The Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) held the balance of political power and was promised home rule in exchange for supporting the Liberal Party, led by Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith. Connolly viewed John Redmond’s IPP as the Irish Tory party, representing Irish capitalists. Though Connolly was for complete separation of Ireland from Great Britain and the Empire, he argued that Ireland’s socialist and labor movements should support Home Rule because it would deliver a blow to supporters of the British Empire. He also believed it would positively influence the development of class politics in Ireland. In “Sweatshops behind the Orange Flag,” Connolly wrote:
The question of Home Government, and the professional advocacy of it, and the professional opposition to it, is the greatest asset in the hands of reaction in Ireland, the never-failing decoy to lure the workers into the bogs of religious hatred and social stagnation.
The Protestant workers of Belfast are essentially democratic in their instincts, but not a single Belfast loyalist M.P. voted for the Old Age Pensions Act. The loyalist M.P.s knew that beating the orange drum would drown out every protest in their constituencies.
The development of democracy in Ireland has been smothered by the Union. Remove the barrier, throw the Irish people back upon their own resources, make them realize that the causes of poverty, of lack of progress, of arrested civic and national development, are then to be sought within and not without, are in their power to remove or perpetuate, and ere long that spirit of democratic progress will invade and permeate all our social and civic institutions.111
Connolly was optimistic that some form of home rule was certain to be introduced, and he believed it would allow for class divisions to be drawn more sharply as the pull on working-class communities towards sectarianism weakened with the fragmentation of Orange reaction and Green nationalism. He hoped a Home Rule Ireland would bring Orange and Green employers together as a ruling class bloc, and negate their ability to hide behind prejudice and historical tradition in appeals for working-class support. The moment a Home Rule government was established, argued Connolly, the socialist movement would go into opposition.112
There was a clear logic to Connolly’s method, but events unfolded differently. Connolly’s debate with the Belfast socialist William Walker on the issue of socialist unity and Irish independence, carried out in the pages of Forward between May and July in 1911, underlined the depth of division on the issue of home rule even within the ranks of the socialist and labor movement. Walker, posing as an internationalist, claimed Connolly’s support for Irish self-determination from Britain and self-government was incompatible with Marxism.
From Connolly’s perspective, without self-determination and freedom from empire, genuine democracy and socialism would be impossible. This was a crucial debate, since Belfast was the island’s most industrialized region, giving the large concentration of workers in the northeast region potentially tremendous leverage.
Reaction Mobilized: Beating the Orange Drum
In September 1911, Unionists and Orange lodges met in Belfast to formulate the demand for a “Provisional Government of Ulster.” They concluded that home rule spelled disaster, “recognizing that the public peace of this country is in great and imminent danger by the reason of the threat to establish a parliament in Dublin and knowing that such a step will inevitably lead to disaster to the Empire and absolute ruin of Ireland.”113
Sir Edward Carson became the leader of the Ulster Unionist Council and beat the Orange drum to whip Protestants into a violent anti–Home Rule frenzy.114 Unionists described Ulster as a “Protestant province,” even though the population of its nine counties was evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants. In 1912, Carson and the leader of the British Conservative Party, Bonar Law, led the mass mobilization of 100,000 members of the newly formed Ulster Volunteer militia. Later that year, more than 450,000 men and women signed the Ulster Covenant, pledging their opposition to home rule.
With the unleashing of sectarianism, thousands of Catholics, socialists, and Liberals were taunted, physically attacked, and expelled from their workplaces in Belfast. The organized attacks were also directed at Protestant workers who supported the movement for home rule.115 In response, Connolly courageously organized an ITGWU-initiated mass demonstration against the expulsions.
Amid the rising tensions, Connolly stood as a candidate in Belfast’s municipal elections for the Dock Ward, receiving more than nine hundred votes. His appeal to voters was centered on class demands, but he continued to make a principled stand for home rule, despite the unpopular way in which it would be portrayed in a mixed Catholic and Protestant ward. He explained:
Believing that the present system of society is based upon the robbery of the working class, and that capitalist property cannot exist without the plundering of labor, I desire to see capitalism abolished, and a democratic system of common or public ownership erected in its stead. This democratic system, which is called socialism, will, I believe, come as a result of the continuous increase of power of the working class. Only by this means can we secure abolition of destitution, and all the misery, crime, and immorality which flow from that unnecessary evil. All the reform legislation of the present day is moving in that direction even now, but working-class action on above lines will secure that direct, voluntary, conscious, and orderly cooperation by all for the good of all, will more quickly replace the blundering and often reluctant legislation of capitalist governments.
As a lifelong advocate of national independence for Ireland, I am in favor of Home Rule, and believe Ireland should be ruled, governed, and owned by the people of Ireland.116
Rather than simply demonizing Protestant workers as a reactionary bulwark, Connolly attempted to explain why many could be mobilized by atavistic prejudices. And of course, from the violence he faced from ultra-Catholics, he understood that reactionary ideas were not simply the keep of Protestant workers. Later in 1913, he wrote:
If the North-East corner of Ireland is, therefore, the home of a people whose minds are saturated with conceptions of political activity fit only for the seventeenth century; if the sublime ideas of an all-embracing democracy as insistent upon its duties as upon its rights have as yet found poor lodgment here, the fault lies not with this generation of toilers, but with those pastors and masters who deceived it and enslaved it in the past—and deceived it in order they might enslave it.
But as no good can come of blaming it, so also no good, but infinite evil, can come of truckling to it. Let the truth be told, however ugly. Here, the Orange working class are slaves in spirit because they have been reared up among people whose conditions of servitude were more slavish than their own. In Catholic Ireland the working class are rebels in spirit and democratic in feeling because for hundreds of years they have found no class as lowly paid or as hardly treated as themselves.
At one time in the industrial world of Great Britain and Ireland the skilled laborer looked down with contempt upon the unskilled and bitterly resented his attempt to get his children taught any of the skilled trades; the feeling of the Orangemen of Ireland towards the Catholics is but a glorified representation on a big stage of the same passions inspired by the same unworthy motives.117
Connolly put the blame for reactionary ideas where it belonged: with employers, politicians, the media, and the pulpit. Nevertheless, he thoroughly opposed “temporizing in front of a dying cause of Orange ascendency,” and insisted that a real socialist movement could only be built by challenging support for British rule, the Orange Order, and anti-Irish Catholic prejudice among Protestant workers.118
With the full support and encouragement of Bonar Law and the British Tory Party, Ulster Unionists threatened rebellion against the British government. In March 1914, as the crisis heightened, British army officers in Ireland mutinied against the government order to move troops north to enforce constitutionally agreed Home Rule. To make clear Unionism’s threat of violence, the Ulster Volunteer Force armed itself with twenty thousand smuggled German guns and three million rounds of ammunition. Unionist saber rattling and the defiance of the British military brass triumphed. Prime Minister Asquith put an amended Home Rule bill before the House of Commons, allowing for six northern counties to opt out. This laid the basis for Ireland’s partition.
In Labour in Irish History, Connolly had forewarned that Irish bourgeois nationalists would compromise the struggle for Irish independence. Reality proved him correct. John Redmond and the IPP, after claiming they would refuse to allow the “mutilation” of Ireland, agreed to partition. As cover for his betrayal, Asquith claimed he had come to embrace the so-called doctrine of “two Irelands,” whereby two distinct peoples and cultures had to be accommodated. The outcome suited the British ruling class, since Ireland’s wealthy industrial north would remain firmly in the Empire. The Home Rulers’ supposed ally, the Liberal government, had the means and authority to face down Unionist rebellion, but it chose not to do so.
Connolly issued “An Appeal to the Working Class,” calling for urgent action and cutting to the heart of Redmond’s compromise:
The statement that the counties excluded would come in automatically at the end of six years is deliberately misleading because, as was explained in the House of Commons, two General Elections would take place before the end of that time. If at either of these General Elections the Tories got a majority—and it is impossible to believe that the Liberals can win the other two elections successively—it would only require the passage of a small Act of not more than three of four lines to make the exclusion perpetual. And the Tories would pass it.119
His response to partition was categorical, he wrote in The Irish Worker:
Such a scheme as that agreed to by Redmond and Devlin, the betrayal of the national democracy of industrial Ulster, would mean a carnival of reaction both North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labor movement and paralyze all advanced movements whilst it endured.
To it Labor should give the bitterest opposition; against it Labor in Ulster should fight even to the death, if necessary, as our fathers fought before us.120
Connolly’s argument that partition would result in “a carnival of reaction both North and South” remains prophetic to this day. From his point of view, the British ruling class, along with Green and Orange elites, had combined to weaken the Irish labor movement and set back its struggle for socialism. By dividing the working class through partition, the ruling classes, nationalist in the South and unionist in the North, were strengthened.
1914: Global War and Revolution
Following the defeat of the Great Dublin Lockout and the inevitability of Ireland’s partition, Connolly now had to contend with the outbreak of World War I. On August 4, 1914, when German troops crossed into Belgium territory, Asquith’s British government declared war, using the pretext of “defending civilization from barbarism.” Soon the entire globe would be convulsed for years by slaughter on an industrial scale as competing imperial powers attempted to pulverize each other into submission. In the decades leading up to 1914, the world’s dominant political, military, and economic powers carved up the entire world. Their geopolitical rivalry and economic competition gave way to all-out imperialist confrontation. Connolly located the roots of the calamity:
Every war is now a capitalist move for new markets, and it is a move capitalism must make or perish. The mad scramble for wealth which this century has witnessed, has resulted in lifting almost every European nation into the circle of competition for trade.
Neither gods nor men could imagine a more grotesque spectacle. That which ought to benefit all the race now sets us at each other’s throats. Raising their parrot cries about “national honor” the financiers, through their control of press and purse, grasp the reins of power in every country, and use the governing forces and state organizations of each nation as so many weapons with which to
beat their competitors out of our market, and to supplant them in the struggle for supremacy over another. So it is China today. The great industrial nations of the world, driven on by their respective moneyed classes, now front each other in the far East and, with swords in hand, threaten to set the armed millions of Europe in terrible and bloody conflict, in order to decide which shall have the right to force upon John Chinaman the goods which his European brother produces, but may not enjoy.121
Ultimately, seventeen million people were killed and another twenty million wounded.
The unleashing of World War I witnessed previously unknown levels of death, destruction, and barbarity. Every region of the world was pulled into the vortex of violence and carnage. The promise of technological advance and progress evaporated into blood-soaked trenches and the dark abyss of industrial slaughter. The arrogant and belligerent great powers were eagerly sending thousands to certain death on a daily basis. As the war dragged on, the powers’ appetite for more raw recruits grew ever greater and more hysterical. Immediately after the outbreak of the war, Connolly outlined his response in “A Continental Revolution,” published in Forward:
Civilization is being destroyed before our eyes; the results of generations of propaganda and patient heroic plodding and self-sacrifice are being blown into annihilation from a hundred cannon mouths; thousands of comrades with whose souls we have lived in fraternal communion are about to be done to death; they whose one hope it was to be spared to cooperate in building the perfect society of the future are being driven to fratricidal slaughter in shambles where that hope will be buried under a sea of blood.
I am not writing in captious criticism of my continental comrades. We know too little about what is happening on the continent, and events have moved too quickly for any of us to be in a position to criticize at all. But believing as I do that any action would be justified which would put a stop to this colossal crime now being perpetrated, I feel compelled to express the hope that ere long we may read of the paralyzing of the internal transport service on the continent, even should the act of paralyzing necessitate the erection of socialist barricades and acts of rioting by socialist soldiers and sailors, as happened in Russia in 1905. Even an unsuccessful attempt at social revolution by force of arms, following the paralysis of the economic life of militarism, would be less disastrous to the socialist cause than the act of socialists allowing themselves to be used in the slaughter of their brothers in the cause.122
In all the belligerent countries, socialists came under intense pressure and often faced severe repression to support the national war effort. Jingoist appeals went into overdrive, rallying large sections of the population into active support for the war. In every country, including the imperial powers, small networks of revolutionary socialists and other radicals held firm to principles committing them to opposing imperialist war, but for the time being they were a minority. Among them, Connolly also stood firm. In the face of chauvinism he wrote,
In the first place, then, we ought to clear our minds of all the political cant which would tell us that we have either “natural enemies” or “natural allies” in any of the powers now warring. When it is said that we ought to unite to protect our shores against the “foreign enemy” I confess to be unable to follow that line of reasoning, as I know of no foreign enemy of this country except the British Government and know that it is not the British Government that is meant.123
This is how Connolly described the British Empire:
At the present moment this Empire has dominions spread all over the seven seas. Everywhere it holds down races and nations, that it might use them as its slaves, that it might use their territories as sources of rent and interest for its aristocratic rulers, that it might prevent their development as self-supporting entities and compel them to remain dependent customers of English produce, that it might be able to strangle every race or nation that would enter the field as a competitor against British capitalism or assert its independence of the British capitalist.
To do this it stifles the ancient culture of India, strangles in its birth the newborn liberty of Egypt, smothers in the blood of ten thousand women and children the republics of South Africa, betrays into the hands of Russian despotism the trusting nationalists of Persia, connives at the partition of China and plans the partition of Ireland.124
The Socialist Response
Devastatingly, the leading mass socialist parties of the Second International network collapsed into support for the war effort. In previous years, powerful socialist parties across Europe had pledged to mobilize working-class action in the event of such a war. Connolly was stunned at the betrayal. He wrote:
What then becomes of all our resolutions; all our protests of fraternization; all our threats of general strikes; all our carefully built machinery of internationalism; all our hopes for the future? Were they all as sound and fury, signifying nothing? When the German artilleryman, a socialist serving in the German army of invasion, sends a shell into the ranks of the French army, blowing off their heads, tearing out their bowels, and mangling the limbs of dozens of socialist comrades in that force, will the fact that he, before leaving for the front, “demonstrated” against the war be of any value to the widows and orphans made by the shell he sent upon its mission of murder? Or, when the French rifleman pours his murderous rifle fire into the ranks of the German line of attack, will he be able to derive any comfort from the probability that his bullets are murdering or maiming comrades who last year joined in thundering “hochs” and cheers of greeting to the eloquent Jaures, when in Berlin he pleaded for international solidarity?125
For Connolly, the powerful international socialist movement that had been built patiently and with tremendous sacrifice over the preceding decades appeared to be self-destructing. The socialist force capable of actually civilizing society was disappearing into the cauldron of violence and human suffering. Amid the confusion and chaos, Connolly remained loyal to a working-class internationalist viewpoint. An alternative existed, and there was a duty to fight for it. Connolly proclaimed, “The signal of war ought also to have been the signal for rebellion, that when the bugles sounded the first note for actual war, their notes should have been taken as the tocsin for social revolution.”126
Connolly believed it was the duty of socialists in each of the warring nations to seize the opportunity for initiating a revolutionary civil war. This course of action, he argued, was better no matter what the ultimate outcome. With it, there was a possibility the great barbarism could be arrested. This was the path Connolly would chart in the coming years. He made his position transparent:
I believe that the socialist proletariat of Europe in all the belligerent countries ought to have refused to march against their brothers across the frontiers, and that such a refusal would have prevented the war and all its horrors even though it might have led to civil war. Such a civil war would not, could not possibly have resulted in such a loss of socialist life as this international war has entailed, and each socialist who fell in such a civil war would have fallen knowing that he was battling for the cause he had worked for in days of peace, and that there was no possibility of the bullet or shell that laid him low having been sent on its murderous way by one to whom he had pledged the “life-long love of comrades” in the international army of labor.127
In attempting to comprehend the socialist movement’s failure to oppose the imperialist war, Connolly argued that a tremendous gap existed between socialist electoral support and working-class organization in the workplace. In his view, the European proletariat lacked a rooted revolutionary industrial organization led by a revolutionary socialist party with the capacity and will to call for mass strikes against war and conscription, to seize collective control over workplaces and the entirety of the economy. The large socialist vote did not automatically translate into confidence, self-activity, and power in the workplace.
Much of the leadership of the European socialist movement used revolutionary Marxist terminology, but their practice had become increasingly moderate and reformist. Socialist advance through elections was given precedence, while the militancy of mass strikes and workers’ self-initiative was feared. Incremental change, using increasingly constitutional methods, was prioritized over revolutionary action by workers themselves. The British trade union officials opposed all-out strike action to defeat employers during the 1913 Dublin Lockout. In 1914, along with their European counterparts, they opposed calling for all-out opposition to the war, with horrendous consequences.
Connolly was shocked and dejected at much of the socialist movement’s betrayal, but he refused to be paralyzed by it. He wrote:
Should a German army land in Ireland tomorrow we should be perfectly justified in joining it if by doing so we could rid this country once and for all from its connection with the Brigand Empire that drags us unwillingly into this war.
Should the working class of Europe, rather than slaughter each other for the benefit of kings and financiers, proceed tomorrow to erect barricades all over Europe, to break up bridges and destroy the transport service that war might be abolished, we should be perfectly justified in following such a glorious example and contributing our aid to the final dethronement of the vulture classes that rule and rob the world.128
Ireland and World War I
The eruption of hostilities on the continent had an enormous and immediate impact on Irish politics. Civil war loomed on the horizon in response to the ultimate ruling on Home Rule, Ireland’s cardinal political issue. A majority of seventy-seven voted in favor of the Third Home Rule Bill, in an amended form, on May 25, 1914. Though it was again defeated in the House of Lords, Asquith’s Liberal government overruled it, using the Parliament Act. In September, Home Rule was given royal assent but its enactment was postponed until after the war.
Connolly believed the outcome of the Home Rule struggle was a “carefully-staged pantomime to fool Nationalist Ireland.” Castigating the Home Rule leaders, he wrote:
Meanwhile the official Home Rule press and all the local J.P.s, publicans, land-grabbers, pawnbrokers and slum landlords who control the United Irish League will strain every nerve in an endeavor to recruit for England’s army, to send forth more thousands of Irishmen and boys to manure with their corpses the soil of a foreign country, to lose their lives and their souls in the work of murdering men who never harbored an evil thought of Irish men or women, to expend in the degradation of a friendly nation that magnificent Irish courage which a wiser patriotism might better employ in the liberation of their own.
Yes, ruling by fooling, is a great British art—with great Irish fools to practice on.129
Unionism was fully committed to the war effort and to defense of the British Empire. Ironically, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), initially formed and armed to threaten civil war against the British Army and the British government’s democratically mandated Home Rule for Ireland, would become the 36th (Ulster) Division of the British Army. Tragically, thousands from the division were sent out to be slaughtered in the opening days of the Battle of the Somme.
John Redmond, leader of the powerful Irish Parliamentary Party, committed the Home Rule movement to the British war effort. Redmond believed that sacrificing Irish blood for the Empire would demonstrate loyalty and guarantee support for Home Rule. In The Irish at the Front, published in 1916, Redmond appealed for recruits, saying that Irish soldiers were “offering up the supreme sacrifice of life with a smile on their lips because it was given for Ireland.”130
The Irish Volunteers—with a membership of more than 190,000 by the summer of 1914, and initially formed as a response to the creation of the UVF—split over the question of support for Britain’s war aims. Volunteers who were opposed to enlisting in Britain’s fight, numbering more than thirteen thousand, remained in the Irish Volunteers. Connolly sought to influence the debate among the Volunteers, writing: “Face to face with such unscrupulous opponents the Volunteers must recognize their fight is a struggle to the death, that the prize at stake is the soul of a Nation, and that therefore every ounce of energy, every bright coinage of the brain, must be flung at once into the struggle. The Volunteers must realize that against the shamelessly vile methods of the politician there is but one effective weapon—the daring appeal of the Revolutionist.”131
Irish Volunteers still swayed by Redmond, constituting the vast majority, joined the newly established National Volunteers. More than two hundred thousand Irishmen fought for Britain in World War I; nearly fifty thousand were killed in the conflict. Disgusted, Connolly wrote, “Alas that I should live to see it! North, South, East and West the Irish Volunteers are marching and parading with the Union Jack in front of them, their bands playing ‘God Save the King’ and their aristocratic officers making loyalist speeches.”132
Ireland, War, and Rebellion
The outbreak of war was all-consuming, and it transformed global, European, Irish, British, and socialist politics. Connolly’s Marxist theoretical lens viewed this interconnected totality and shaped his political and strategic response. Only four days after the announcement of what would become a cataclysmic war, Connolly, writing in The Irish Worker, argued, “Starting thus, Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shriveled on the funeral pyre of the last warlord.”133 This captures Connolly’s profound revolutionary perspective, which guided him from the outbreak of global war toward the 1916 Irish Rebellion.
Connolly held a complex view of the impact an insurrection in Ireland could have. First, Britain was overstretched by the war effort, and this provided an opening to strike for Irish freedom. The moment had to be seized. The Irish movement for independence had been betrayed by Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party’s willingness to accept partition and support Britain’s imperial war. In Connolly’s view, thousands of Irishmen, Catholic and Protestant, would die in combat for their oppressor. He worried that Irish support for the war effort would destroy the struggle for self-determination, and turn Ireland into a mere “province” of Britain. The weakening of the Irish independence movement would weaken the struggle for socialism in Ireland. These factors drove his sense of urgency. Connolly’s strategic thinking did not end with Irish freedom, since he had always viewed the struggle for self-determination as a means to the ultimate goal of a workers’ republic. Only the Irish working class could win Irish independence by asserting its full demands for socialism. The time was now, and Connolly was determined to act.
He grasped how a rebellion in Ireland could impact the global struggle against war and empire. Ireland’s close proximity to Britain meant that rebellion there would be particularly damaging to the prestige and psychology of the world’s most powerful state. Rebellion would demonstrate that some of the Empire’s subjects had lost their fear and had become disloyal. This would signal the Empire’s weakness, and could inspire other colonized people to rise against their masters. Therefore, the Irish struggle could act as a catalyst to the overthrow of capitalism and imperialism across Europe, and to a working-class fight for socialism. Connolly’s strategy was not limited to ending the “carnival of reaction” on the continent, but was intended to destroy the social order responsible for breeding war and barbarism.
Toward this goal Connolly directed all his energies. He formed the Irish Neutrality League with Constance Markievicz, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, William O’Brien, and Arthur Griffith to demand that Ireland remain neutral in the conflict between the imperial powers. He successfully campaigned for Ireland’s labor movement and trade union bodies to take the lead in opposing the war. The ITUC, the ITGWU, and the Dublin Trades Council all took positions opposing the war and opposing support for Britain. With socialist, republican, labor, pacifist, and suffragette allies, and under the nose of British authorities, Connolly organized mass meetings in Dublin in opposition to war and conscription. He consistently challenged pro-Britain war propaganda published by the Irish nationalist, Unionist, and even “socialist” press. He ridiculed Britain’s claims to be defending “poor little Belgium” and its claims to be protecting democracy. And by discussing what British rule meant in Ireland, Egypt, and India, he mocked Britain’s claims to be a “friend of small nations.” He wrote:
Yes, I seem to remember a small country called Egypt, a country that through ages of servitude has painfully evolved to a conception of national freedom, and under leaders of its own choosing essayed to make that conception a reality. And I think I remember how this British friend of small nationalities bombarded its chief seaport, invaded and laid waste to its territory, slaughtered its armies, imprisoned its citizens, led its chosen leaders away in chains, and reduced the newborn Egyptian nation into a conquered, servile British province.134
Connolly exposed how employers had created a pact with the government to drive up army enlistment, by firing and refusing to employ men of military age:
As soon as the war broke out the responsible heads of this firm of pious sweaters and soul murderers joined hands with the recruiters in the attempt to swell the ranks of the British Army. They who had outrivaled the lowest in their methods of warfare upon the rights of the workers of Dublin became clamorous that the men of Dublin should go out to fight and die to protect them from the Huns.
By every means they could devise they strove to swell the British Army, and turned up their eyes in horror at the atrocities retailed in the newspapers—were as horrified at the atrocities supposedly committed by the Germans in Belgium as they had been happy and exultant over the atrocities committed by the police in Dublin.
For some time back this firm has had its reward by being kept going with Government orders, and its male employees mostly resisted the attempt to seduce them into the army that keeps the Messrs Jacobs upon the necks of Labor. But within the past two weeks the firm is reported to have summarily dismissed every man of military age.
Messrs Jacobs in 1913–14 used their power over the means of livelihood of their employees to coerce them out of the trade union of their choice on the pain of starvation; now that same firm is again using its power over the means of livelihood of the workers to coerce them into an army that stood ready to shoot them down in 1913–14.135
We Serve neither King nor Kaiser!
In October 1914, Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the ITGWU and the Irish Citizen Army, was emblazoned with a banner reading “We serve neither King nor Kaiser! But Ireland.” The same slogan appeared on the front page of the October 24 issue of The Irish Worker. Connolly rallied his allies and supporters to oppose conscription in Ireland, writing:
The resistance to the Militia Ballot Act must of necessity take the form of insurrectionary warfare, if the resisters are determined to fight in Ireland for Ireland, instead of on the Continent for England. Such insurrectionary warfare would be conducted upon lines and under conditions for which textbooks made no provision.
In short, it means “barricades in the streets, guerilla warfare in the country.”
To all who are prepared to face that ordeal rather than shed their blood for the tyrant and exploiter we appeal to join our Citizen Army.136
Connolly systematically challenged pro-British war propaganda saturating Irish popular culture demonizing the German enemy. His views on Germany were shaped by his understanding of capitalist development and the fight for socialism. Britain, as the dominant world power, feared the rise of economic and military rivals, and British power depended on holding back German industrial and economic advance. He wrote:
Understand the game that is afoot, the game that Christian England is playing, and when you next hear apologists for capitalism tell you of the wickedness of Socialists in proposing to “confiscate” property remember the plans of British and Irish capitalists to steal German trade—the fruits of German industry and German science.
Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class. The British capitalist class have planned this colossal crime in order to ensure its uninterrupted domination of the commerce of the world. To achieve that end it is prepared to bathe a continent in blood, to kill off the flower of the manhood of the three most civilized nations of Europe, to place the iron heel of the Russian tyrant upon the throat of all liberty-loving races and peoples from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and to invite the blessing of God upon the spectacle of the savage Cossack ravishing the daughters of a race at the head of Christian civilization.
Yes, this war is the war of a pirate upon the German nation.
And up from blood-soaked graves of the Belgian frontiers the spirits of murdered Irish soldiers of England call to Heaven for vengeance upon the Parliamentarian tricksters who seduced them into the armies of the oppressor of their country.137
Influencing his thinking, the theoretical framework of much of the Socialist International held that the full spread of capitalism was a step toward the realization of socialism. Though a distorted representation of Marx’s ideas, it was quite influential. Therefore, in Connolly’s view, a British defeat should be welcomed, because it could speed the further expansion of capitalism, which would develop the proletariat and create the economic basis for socialism on a world scale. The position Connolly developed on Germany in the lead-up to the 1916 Rising is better understood with a grasp of this mechanical framework.
Connolly was certainly sympathetic to Germany’s position. He viewed Germany as the victim of the British ruling classes’ attempt to hold their status as the primary global powerhouse. Nevertheless, Germany was very much an imperial power, with its own colonial “possessions” and an eagerness to have more. The strength of Connolly’s argument was not his position on Germany, but his demolition of the British propaganda presenting Germany as the primary danger to civilization, and Britain as its guarantor.
Connolly was fully aware of the efforts of socialists in Germany opposing the efforts of their own government. In “Socialists and the War,” Connolly applauded the stand made by the German revolutionary socialist Karl Liebknecht, the only deputy in the Reichstag to vote against war credits in December 1914.138 Connolly’s article “America and Europe” captured the complex thinking evident in his approach to Germany. He wrote:
Finally, as a word of warning this week. Do not let anyone play upon your sympathies by denunciation of the German military bullies. German military bullies, like all tyrannies among civilized people, need fear nothing so much as native (German) democracy. Attacks from outside only strengthen tyrants within a nation. If we had to choose between strengthening the German bully or the Russian autocrat the wise choice would be on the side of the German. For the German people are a highly civilized people, responsive to every progressive influence, and, rapidly forging weapons for their own emancipation from native tyranny, whereas the Russian Empire stretches away into the depths of Asia, and relies on an army largely recruited from amongst many millions of barbarians who have not yet felt the first softening influence of civilization. German thought is abreast of the best in the world; German influences have shaped for good the hopes of the world, but the thought and the hopes of the best in Russia were but the other day drowned in blood by Russia’s worst.139
The complexity of Connolly’s approach is captured in the complaint of his fellow insurrectionist Patrick Pearse, who was also executed after the Rising:
Connolly is most dishonest in his methods. In public he says the war is a war forced on Germany by the Allies. In private he says that the Germans are just as bad as the British, and that we ought to do the job ourselves. As for writings in his paper, if he wanted to wreck the whole business, he couldn’t go a better way about it. He will never be satisfied until he goads us into action, and then he will think most of us are too moderate, and want to guillotine half of us. I can see him setting up the guillotine, can’t you? For Hobson and MacNeill in particular. They are poles apart. What can he do now anyway? Riot for a few days.140
For Connolly, the socialist movement now required strategies for what had become exceptional circumstances; the strategies pursued during “times of peace” were no longer applicable. Politics in Ireland and Europe had become militarized. As the acting general secretary of the ITGWU, he worked hard to rebuild the union’s membership, finances, and strength following the challenge of the 1913 Dublin Lockout. However, believing as he did that the opportunity for a rising against British rule in Ireland had become ripe, he poured most of his political energies into building the Irish Citizen Army. The ICA now constituted an organized revolutionary vanguard. To push others into action, Connolly made it clear that the ICA was prepared to initiate a military rising.141
The ICA attracted many of the best and most committed radical activists, drawing together socialists, revolutionary nationalists, anti-imperialists, feminists, and trade union militants into an organized force. Though much smaller than the Irish Volunteers and other nationalist organizations at the time, the ICA played an important political role as a visible alternative led by socialists and connected to the labor movement. Enhancing this reputation, Margaret Ward writes, “There was far less sex segregation within the ICA: first aid lectures, for example, were given jointly to women and men by Dr Kathleen Lynn. This had the effect, Frank Robbins recalled, of binding the men and women much closer to each other. Connolly’s influence was also important in achieving a fair measure of acceptance of women as comrades-in-arms.”142
According to Ward, while a “majority of the prominent women within the ICA were middle-class—Nellie Gifford, Madeleine French-Mullen, Kathleen Lynn—the rank and file mostly consisted of young women who had been dismissed from Jacob’s factory for being members of a trade union, and women like Rosie Hackett, who was a newspaper seller.”143 During the 1916 Rising, ICA members played a prominent leadership role, well beyond their numbers, and were courageous in the struggle.
The Tide Begins to Turn
Though he was frustrated and enraged at the number of working-class Irishmen who enlisted for the war effort, including members of the ITGWU who had played a heroic role during the lockout, Connolly also understood how much a factor poverty and relentless propaganda was in shaping their options. However, the tide, as in much of Europe, was beginning to turn.
Such was the scale of growing opposition that when the British government introduced conscription in January 1915, Ireland had to be excluded. Military enlistment numbers plummeted. The early enthusiasm for signing up—generated through the mainstream media, the pulpit, state institutions, Home Rule, and Unionist political parties—had already begun to wane. Protests against the war were beginning in Ireland and across Europe, as the number of war dead mounted, more atrocities were reported, and the savage conditions on the front became more widely known.
In his quest to find allies, Connolly was heartened by the commitment of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) to strike at British rule before the end of the war. Fearing the opportunity would be squandered, he publicly advocated for insurrection. Towards the end of 1915, the conspiratorial IRB Supreme Council agreed upon plans for a rising on Easter Sunday, April 23, 1916. In January 1916, Connolly joined the IRB’s Military Council; since IRB leaders had feared that Connolly and the ICA would act alone, they co-opted him onto the body. Connolly had earlier made this commitment in The Irish Worker:
There are certain elements in Ireland today, and notably in important offices in Dublin, which under the guise of caution, are disguising a timorous shrinking from the ugly realities of their position and are attempting to masquerade as astute diplomatists in the endeavor to hide from their followers their own reluctance to advance. Whilst their fate and the fate of the potential liberties of their country hangs upon the swing of the balance, these leaders who will not lead idly speculate upon possible plans of the enemy, hatch schemes it would take a generation to mature, and pray for the coming of opportunities that are already worn weary with standing unrecognized at their elbows.
With them or without them the Irish working class goes forward to the conquest of the future.144
As the agitational message of Connolly and other antiwar forces began to connect with a growing audience, the repressive arm of the British state, in the form of the Defense of the Realm Act, began to hit more aggressively. Publications such as The Irish Worker, Sinn Féin, and Irish Freedom were all forcibly stopped from printing. To get around this, Connolly’s comrades in the Scottish Socialist Labor Party printed The Worker and smuggled it into Ireland for distribution. In May 1915, the second edition of Workers’ Republic was launched. For it, Connolly wrote a series of articles on “Insurrectionary Warfare,” commencing with the Moscow Insurrection of 1905. His study of 1905 concluded:
Lacking the cooperation of the other Russian cities, and opposed by the ignorant peasantry, the defeat of the insurrection was inevitable but it succeeded in establishing the fact that even under modern conditions the professional soldier is, in a city, badly handicapped in a fight against really determined civilian revolutionists.145
Connolly had begun to envision an insurrection in Ireland amid the war and how it could be victorious. As a member of the IRB’s Military Council, he was now directly involved in preparations for a rising. By March 1916 he was feeling increasingly optimistic about its prospects. He wrote:
The celebrations of the last week in Ireland are a welcome reminder of the indestructible nature of the spirit of freedom. Who would have thought in August 1914 that in March 1916 the principle of a distinct and separate existence for Irish Nationality would evoke such splendid manifestations of popular support and popular approval. In August 1914, it seemed to many of the most hopeful of us that Ireland had at length taken its final plunge into the abyss of Imperialism, and bade a long farewell to all hopes of a separate unfettered existence as a nation… .
But slowly, gradually, but persistently, the forces standing for the social and national freedom of Ireland won the people back to greater sanity and clearer visions. Despite imprisonment, despite prosecution, despite suppression of newspapers, despite avalanches of carefully framed lies, the truth made headway throughout the country.
All through Ireland last week the manhood and womanhood of the nation have gladly, enthusiastically proclaimed their realization of those truths. This 17th of March will be forever memorable for that reason. The magnificent abandon of the Irish gatherings of all descriptions, and above all the exultant rebel note everywhere manifest, all, all were signs that the cause of freedom is again in the ascendant in Ireland.146
Crises and Challenges
Without doubt, Connolly was rocked by a series of political defeats and crises. The defeat of the Dublin Lockout forced him to reevaluate his strategic orientation in the midst of global war. He made clear that he would have chosen a different political and strategic path had the ITGWU not been so severely weakened by the great struggle. Strike action by the ITGWU to oppose the war effort would have been the pivot for revolutionary action.
The capitulation of moderate Home Rule leaders into support for partition, and their willingness to become recruiting sergeants for the British Army in Ireland, would not have surprised Connolly in the least. However, the backsliding into warmongering by much of the international socialist movement, and the confusion it caused among its ranks in Ireland, left him isolated. Connolly had initially envisioned a working-class uprising involving mass strikes followed by a struggle led by the “party of progress” against the forces of reaction. In this context, Connolly was realistic about the role of violence. Now, however, a severe combination of challenges forced him to make concessions to the type of republican conspiratorial militarism he had long counseled against. In the circumstances he faced, no road map existed for socialist revolution in a British colony during a cataclysmic global war.
Forced to think on his feet rather than go along with the bankruptcy of the Second International, Connolly attempted to chart a course. The industrial barbarism of World War I was an unprecedented event, leaving Connolly and others in uncharted theoretical, political, and strategic territory. This is often not appreciated enough by those who analyze his decisions. Unlike Connolly, many Marxists and socialists became imprisoned by their theoretical heritage, disappearing into the dustbin of irrelevance through their support for murderous imperialism, or through their passivity in the face of its challenge.
The Cause of Ireland
In April, in one of his last articles, approaching the planned date for the Rising, Connolly reiterated his core objective:
We are out for the Irish. But who are the Irish? Not the rack-renting, slum-owning landlord; not the sweating, profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman—the hired liars of the enemy. Not these are the Irish upon whom the future depends. Not these, but the Irish working class, the only secure foundation upon a free nation can be reared.
The cause of Labor is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labor. They cannot be dissevered. Ireland seeks freedom. Labor seeks that an Ireland free should be the sole mistress of her own destiny, supreme owner of all material things within and upon her soil. Labor seeks to make the free Irish nation the guardian of the interests of the people of Ireland, and to secure that end would vest in the free Irish nation all property rights as against the claims of the individual, with the end in view that the individual may be enriched by the nation, and not by the spoiling of his fellows.147
The 1916 Rising
In planning the Rising, Connolly and his co-insurrectionists in the IRB aimed to mobilize the entire sixteen thousand members of the Irish Volunteers across Ireland. They would be armed with twenty thousand rifles, landed from a German ship to be distributed nationwide. Rebel forces would seize control of strategic buildings and positions in Dublin and other major cities, leaving British combat troops and the Royal Irish Constabulary stretched and ultimately overwhelmed. This was no plan for an irrational “blood sacrifice,” as the Rising is often caricatured as having been. In response to some of Pearse’s writings alluding to such a sacrifice, Connolly responded: “We are sick and the world is sick of his teaching.”148 This was a plan for victory, not for symbolic martyrdom.
The Rising, once begun, would draw upon the support from the growing numbers of the Irish population who had turned against Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party, against Ireland’s partition, and against the slaughter of the Great War. The Rising would also tap into the very deep social divisions existing across Ireland, and into the class bitterness that was further sharpened by the impact of the war. Connolly believed Ireland was a powder keg awaiting a spark. The goal was to defeat the British Army in Ireland and establish a provisional government. This would not constitute an end, but, in Connolly’s vision, could be the beginning of a European-wide uprising against imperialism and capitalism. There was a chance of victory, and, in his estimation, it was one worth taking.
The plans for the Rising were undone when, only two days before its planned launch, a German ship, the Aud, was sighted off the coast of Cork by the British Navy. The ship, along with its load of twenty thousand rifles and one million rounds of ammunition, was scuttled to avoid capture. In response, cautious and worried Volunteer leaders published an order in the Sunday Independent instructing their members not to mobilize on Easter Sunday.
Faced with this situation, Connolly and IRB leaders deliberated at Liberty Hall on whether or not to proceed. Even though the odds were much less in their favor, they decided to go ahead with the uprising on Easter Monday. As leaders of a planned rebellion against British rule with German military assistance, they surmised that they would be charged with high treason, and likely executed. Certain also would be the attempt by the British authorities to repress, imprison, and smash the organizations and forces involved in the uprising. In these circumstances, it is likely that Connolly believed a defeated rising would be preferable to a crushing defeat without even an attempt at revolution.
On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the ICA assembled outside Liberty Hall before marching to different positions in Dublin’s city center with the Irish Volunteers and Cumann na mBan, the woman’s auxiliary unit of the Volunteers. Before setting off, Connolly distributed revolvers to the ICA’s female members. His battalion went down O’Connell Street and seized control of the General Post Office. From the steps of the GPO, Patrick Pearse, with Connolly at his side, read the Proclamation of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic to the People of Ireland:
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.
Having organized and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organization, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organizations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment, and supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.
We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people.
In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades in arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.
The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.
Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.
We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonor it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine. In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valor and discipline, and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.
Signed on behalf of the Provisional Government:
THOMAS J. CLARKE
SEAN MacDIARMADA
THOMAS MacDONAGH
P. H. PEARSE
EAMONN CEANNT
JAMES CONNOLLY
JOSEPH PLUNKETT
The Rising lasted for six days and involved more than 1,500 insurgents, including some 200 members of the ICA. Exhausted and surrounded by thousands of British troops and facing bombardment from heavy weaponry, including machine guns, 18-pounder Howitzers, and a British Navy ship, the Helga, the rebels were forced to surrender unconditionally on Saturday, April 29. Dublin was ablaze, and much of the city center had been razed to the ground. The dead bodies of civilians and rebels lay on Dublin streets. In many cases, British troops treated civilians as combatants. In rebel-held areas the situation for civilians, who were trapped and without access to food, had become desperate. For the Rising’s leaders, avoiding further civilian suffering and death was an important factor in the decision to surrender. Thousands were injured and hundreds dead, including 64 rebels and 116 British troops.
Following the uprising, British repression was ferocious across Ireland. Houses were raided for guns and thousands of suspected rebels were interned in camps without trial. Many who were not involved in the insurrection were seized and imprisoned in Ireland, England, and Wales. Courts-martial of rebels were carried out from the beginning of May, resulting in more than ninety death sentence convictions. Fourteen rebel leaders, including all seven signatories of the Proclamation, were executed between May 3 and May 12. In August, Roger Casement was hanged for treason in Pentonville Prison, England. Seventy-four women surrendered or were arrested, and were described by British General Maxwell as “silly little girls.”149 Ireland’s ruling generals believed that Constance Markievicz was the most dangerous among them and deserved to be shot, but they ultimately decided against it, fearing the response.
Connolly, shot and severely injured at the General Post Office, was taken to the hospital in Dublin Castle in a much weakened state. After he had received successive morphine injections, his court-martial was held around his bed on May 9, 1916. He had a final visit from his wife, Lillie, and his daughter Nora on May 11. Nora recollected their final exchange:
“Well, Lillie. I suppose you know what this means?”
“James, James. It’s not that—it’s not that,” mama wailed.
“Yes, Lillie,” he said, patting her hand. “I fell asleep tonight for the first time. I
was awakened at eleven and told I was to be shot at dawn.”
Mama was kneeling, her head on the bed, sobbing heartbreakingly.
Daddy laid his hand on her head.
“Don’t cry, Lillie,” he pleaded. “You’ll unman me.”
“But your beautiful life, James,”’ mama sobbed. “Your beautiful life.”
“Hasn’t it been a full life, Lillie,” he said. “And isn’t this a good end?”150
Connolly slipped into Nora’s hand a copy of the statement he had written for his court-martial. It read:
We went out to break the connection between this country and the British Empire and to establish an Irish Republic. We believe that the call we thus issued to the people of Ireland was a nobler call in a nobler cause than any call issued to them during this war, having any connection with war.
We succeeded in proving that Irishmen are ready to die endeavoring to win for Ireland their national rights which the British Government has been asking them to die to win for Belgium. As long as that remains the case, the cause of Irish freedom is safe. Believing that the British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the presence in any one generation of even a respectable minority of Irishmen ready to die to affirm that truth makes that Government forever a usurpation and crime against human progress. I personally thank God that I have lived to see the day when thousands of Irishmen and boys, and hundreds of Irish women and girls, were equally ready to affirm that truth and seal it with their lives if necessary.151
The following morning, on May 12, Connolly was taken to Kilmainham Jail by ambulance, strapped to a chair, and executed by firing squad at dawn. Before this, the British government had come under increasing pressure to end the executions. With Ireland under military rule, revulsion was growing at the harsh and arbitrary character of sentences and British vengeance. British generals considered Connolly among “the worst of the lot” and were determined to see him killed. As the campaign opposed to Connolly’s execution grew, the Irish Independent, owned by William Martin Murphy, hysterically editorialized for his death: “Let the worst of the ringleaders be singled out and dealt with as they deserve.”152 Irish elites were as hostile to Connolly and the uprising as was the British state.
Responses to the Rising
The mythology surrounding the 1916 Rising insisted that an overwhelming majority of Irish people opposed it and despised the rebels. Supposedly, captured rebels were jeered and spat at as they were marched through Dublin to imprisonment by the British Army. There’s no doubt that the well-to-do in Dublin viewed Connolly and his comrades as enemies who deserved to be hung for treason. These same people starved the Dublin working class into submission during the 1913 Lockout. Others, less well off, financially dependent on husbands and family members risking their lives on the continent, may also have viewed the rebellion as an act of treachery.
The militarization of Dublin, the hounding out of rebels and their supporters by the authorities, meant it was extremely difficult for anyone who supported or sympathized with the rebellion to demonstrate that support openly. However, some did. At the time, a Canadian journalist, F. A. Kenzie, challenged reports of support for British troops: “What I myself saw in the poorer districts did not confirm this. It rather indicated a vast amount of sympathy with the rebels.”153 This should come as no surprise, since hostility to the British war effort had been deepening and spreading in the period before the Rising. This myth, like much of the mythology created to explain 1916, was designed by the new ruling class of Ireland to portray the Irish people as generally conservative. Therefore, the reactionary Irish “Free State” born out of the struggle against British rule could be justified as simply reflecting the innate conservatism of the Irish people.
In Ireland and Britain, there were few in the labor and socialist movements who gave their unequivocal support to the Rising. Many condemned it as madness, and viewed Connolly’s role with dismay. Breaking from this, Sylvia Pankhurst, editor of Woman’s Dreadnought, wrote, “We understand why rebellion breaks out in Ireland and we share the sorrow of those who are weeping today for the Rebels whom the government has shot.”154 Others found their voice by campaigning against the government execution of the rebel leaders and its imposition of military rule.
Across Europe, revolutionaries debated the meaning and significance of the Rising. The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin rejected the notion that the rebellion was a putsch, and added, “It is the misfortune of the Irish that they rose prematurely, before the European revolt of the proletariat had had time to mature.”155
However, every revolutionary movement must start somewhere, and the first action is often premature.
European Revolution
Connolly believed that Ireland and all of Europe had become ripe for revolution. In “Notes on the Front,” published in Workers’ Republic in October 1915, he had written:
Who can believe that the peoples of Europe in general, of Ireland in particular, will consent to pay the leeches whose money has made this war possible after having made it inevitable, will consent to pay in sweated labor after having paid in the blood of their bravest and best.
It is unthinkable! The people of Europe have held back from violence because bloodshed and armed strife had grown repulsive as a result of years of socialist propaganda. The war madness has swept away that humanitarian feeling, and revealed our rulers as what they are: Monsters, red in tooth and claw.
Yes, revolution is no longer unthinkable in Europe; its shadow already looms upon the horizon.156
Connolly was absolutely right. In February 1917, Russia’s centuries-old Romanov dynasty was destroyed through a revolutionary upheaval involving workers, soldiers, and peasants. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils, or soviets, sprang up across Russia as an alternative power to the newly formed provisional government. Soldiers mutinied at the front, and returned home to strengthen and spread the soviets. In Russia, the revolutionary process advanced inexorably towards the 1917 Bolshevik-led October Revolution. Inspired by the Russian example, revolt spread across Europe. In Germany the Kaiser was toppled, to be replaced by workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Revolution from below involving masses of people threatened to tear down the entire global social, economic, and political order and replace it with a new egalitarian order free of class privilege and imperial barbarism.
Revolutionary Ireland
In Ireland, ten thousand rallied in Dublin to show their support for the Russian Revolution. In 1918 revolution began to engulf the entire island. This period of revolt is often referred to as the War of Independence or the Anglo-Irish War. Historians tend to emphasize the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) guerilla war against British rule in forcing the Empire’s eventual expulsion from twenty-six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties. By focusing only on the military aspect of the struggle, the depth of Ireland’s revolutionary process is played down, and so is the scale of mass participation.
In fact, to defeat the British state, a full combination of armed struggle, strikes, and mass boycotts involving hundreds of thousands of workers was necessary. By 1920, the Royal Irish Constabulary “had retreated from five hundred police barracks and huts,” creating liberated zones all over Ireland.157 Conor Kostick writes:
It was in the urban centers that the working class displayed the greatest militancy and in addition to an almost continuous sequence of strikes and local general strikes there were five crucial turning points in these revolutionary years created by urban working-class activity: firstly, a general strike against conscription; secondly, a general strike at the beginning of 1919 in Belfast; thirdly, the Limerick Soviet of 1919; fourthly, in April 1920 a soviet takeover of the major towns of Ireland for the release of hunger strikers; and fifthly, throughout 1920, the refusal of transport workers to move British troops or army equipment.158
The British government retaliated viciously with targeted assassinations, burning of towns, collective punishment, and imprisonment. Nevertheless, Ireland had become ungovernable, and a British exit had become inevitable.
The dynamics of the struggle vindicated what Connolly had envisioned. An increasingly radicalized Irish working class mobilized for an end to British rule, but simultaneously demanded higher wages and land distribution. As the working class gathered confidence in its own demands, its actions threatened Ireland’s entire social order. Irish and British elites alike were terrified that Ireland would follow the path of revolutionary Russia.
However, the struggle did not culminate in an insurrection aiming to establish a socialist workers’ republic. Absent from the fight was an organization infused with Connolly’s revolutionary socialist ideas and vision, of sufficient reach and capable of giving leadership to the increasingly militant working class. Large numbers of workers across Ireland supported the goal of a workers’ republic, and were inspired by the workers’ revolution in Russia. Such a political force could have drawn together the most militant and socialist-inclined workers across Ireland, to contend with those republicans focused exclusively on military conflict and national independence, as a means of shaping the general direction of the struggle against British rule and capitalism.
As a result, Sinn Féin was able to dominate political leadership of the struggle, and used it to curtail the development of independent workers’ demands and the sharpening class conflict. For example, Kieran Allen writes, “As the IRA cracked down on seizures, the big landowners began to look to the republican courts for protection rather than the British courts. But this also meant there was a marked decline in enthusiasm for the national struggle in parts of Connaught that had been most severely hit by land hunger. When the IRA took up the policeman’s baton to protect the big farmers, there were many who asked if the Republic was really worth fighting for.”159
To contain the Irish working-class insurgency, a counterrevolution was necessary. The Anglo-Irish Treaty, concluded on December 6, 1921, granted limited independence for twenty-six counties but also included partition. The treaty was immediately supported by the wealthiest elements of Irish society and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Republican Treaty supporters agreed to collaborate with the British government to crush their former comrades-inarms in a counterrevolutionary civil war. The Catholic upper-class leaders of the post-treaty Irish Free State moved quickly to reimpose the social order of the British Empire under an Irish flag. And, “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.”160 This was the counterrevolutionary “carnival of reaction” Connolly forewarned of when he insisted that socialists and the labor movement must oppose partition.
Tragically, Connolly was once again vindicated: “If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain.”161
Conclusion
James Connolly made a tremendous contribution to the international socialist movement as a party builder, organizer, agitator, trade union militant, theorist, propagandist, and anti-imperialist. Throughout his political life, his ideas and strategies evolved and changed as he grappled with the challenges faced by the struggles in which he was directly involved. Certainly, he was not always right. However, his commitment to a more equal society never altered or faltered.
Today’s Ireland, north and south, shares none of the goals Connolly spent his life fighting for. Many in the establishment claim to stand in his tradition, but he stood for the revolutionary overthrow of the existing capitalist order and its replacement with socialism, not for piecemeal reform and accommodation to the status quo. The new Ireland Connolly envisioned was a socialist Ireland.
In 1898, Connolly castigated Irish nationalists who celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the 1798 Irish Rebellion but belittled Wolfe Tone’s revolutionary aspirations. He wrote, “False as they are to every one of the great principles to which our hero consecrated his life, they cannot hope to deceive the popular instinct, and their presence at the ’98 commemorations will only bring into sharper relief the depth to which they have sunk. Our Home Rule leaders will find that the glory of Wolfe Tone’s memory will serve, not to cover, but to accentuate the darkness of their shame.”162
Much the same could be said today of political leaders claiming to honor the 1916 Rising and the contribution of Connolly. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn observed, “None of the prosperous professional Irish, who shouted their admiration for him after his death, lent him a helping hand at that time. Jim Connolly was anathema to them because he was a ‘socialist.’”163
The “prosperous professional Irish” today are terrified at any discussion of rebellion, and are just as hostile to socialism as they were in Connolly’s day. The wealth and power of Ireland’s political and corporate elite, in the north and south, derives from integrating Ireland into the neoliberal global order dominated by the United States and the European Union as a low-wage and low-corporate-tax economy. As the rich prosper, inequality and deprivation relentlessly grow on both sides of the border.
In the north of Ireland, austerity increasingly blights working-class communities, making Connolly’s call for Catholic and Protestant workers to unite to challenge sectarianism and capitalism all the more necessary and essential. The struggle for a socialist Ireland is the key to destroying the reactionary legacy of partition.
Across the island of Ireland, and across the world, austerity and injustice face tremendous challenges. Refugees and migrants demand the right to escape poverty and war. Women demand full control of their bodies, and genuine equality. The people of Ireland have struck a blow against homophobia by voting in favor of equal marriage. Workers are beginning to find their voice and the confidence to use their collective power. Many people understand the urgency of taking action to stop climate change. The marginalized and the dispossessed are finding their voice. This awakening is also finding expression politically, through the emergence of new parties and the election of radicals and socialists. In Ireland and across the world, large numbers are questioning capitalism, and justly feel that they have been left behind.
Capitalism has generated grotesque inequality, vicious conflicts across the globe, ecological disaster, and massive levels of uncertainty. The system’s instability and violence are leaving great numbers of people ever more desperate, confused, and angry. Dark political forces that must be confronted are growing through scapegoating of the vulnerable, but offer nothing but more violent authoritarianism and inequality. This is why Connolly’s alternative is necessary and urgent. Real change is necessary and possible. What we do collectively matters.
Connolly’s vision of a socialist alternative; his refusal to be compromised into defeat; and his confidence in the capacity of the downtrodden, exploited, and dispossessed to emancipate themselves and give birth to a new kind of society is not only inspirational, but is profoundly vital politically. It is the answer we are looking for. It is this part of Connolly that has been most obscured since his death, and which is most urgent for us to recover now for a new generation of rebels and freedom fighters rising against injustice in Ireland and across the globe. This is Connolly’s vision that we should celebrate, honor, and struggle to make a reality:
The day will come, and perhaps like a bolt from the blue, when the frontiers and lines of circumvallation drawn around the countries of the world will not be sufficient to prevent the handclasp of friendship between the peoples. But that day will only come when the kings and kaisers, queens and czars, financiers and capitalists who now oppress humanity will be hurled from their place and power, and the emancipated workers of the earth, no longer blind instruments of rich men’s greed, will found a new society, a new civilization, whose corner stone will be labor, whose inspiring principle will be justice, whose limits humanity can alone bound.164