Connolly: a Marxist Analysis

Published by the Irish Workers Group, 1990. Irish Workers Group, 12 Langrishe Place, Dublin 1, Ireland. © Irish Workers Group Connolly: A Marxist Analysis ISBN 0 9508133 4 6 2 The Irish are not philosophers as a rule, they proceed too rapidly from thought to action –James Connolly (Labour in Irish History, p. 69) 3 INTRODUCTION THE LEGACY OF JAMES CONNOLLY To this day James Connolly remains the central figure in the history of working class struggle in Ireland. He lives on in the consciousness of the working class movement as a revolutionary opponent of capitalism, martyr in the insurrection against British colonial rule, organiser of the Citizen Army workers’ militia, advocate of economic emancipation for the working class woman, and as internationalist. He remains the embodiment of the aspiration of generations for the Workers’ Republic. Most enigmatically, he remains also the only Marxist in the pantheon of modern Ireland. During his own lifetime, Connolly was the most important Irish representative of the Social Democracy of the Second International. Indeed, his political career spans the history of that international almost exactly. He was a contemporary of Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg and a generation of Marxists who addressed in various ways the crisis of theory which unfolded with the transition of capitalism into the epoch of imperialism. His attempt to apply his understanding of the canons of Marxism to Irish conditions in this changing international context that marks him out as an innovative thinker and that elevates him above any other Irish Marxist then or since. Yet this innovation within the socialist movement led him to become a leader and martyr of the nationalist rebellion of 1916. And this is only one paradox, albeit the central one, in the written corpus and practical legacy he has left us. For here, too, is a revolutionary who was committed to a syndicalist objective of the transfer of power to the workers through the general strike which would paralyse the capitalist class, he believed, and effect a peaceful transfer of power to the working class party. Yet, his involvement in the 1916 insurrection appears to refute this perspective completely.2 4 Here, too, is a man who is understandably hailed as an exponent of the emancipation of women, and who stands out even today as such. And yet, one cannot but be struck by his negative attitude towards the right to divorce and his denial of the elementary duty of socialists to defend this right. Paradoxes arise also in his attitude to the Catholic Church, and to religion generally. Although a part of Social Democracy, Connolly took the view that socialists should accept a self imposed ban on discussions of religion and the defence of freedom of conscience. And finally, here was someone whose lifetime objective was to bring the working class to the head of the national struggle, overcoming sectarian divisions and uniting workers of all creeds, yet patently failed to grasp the nature and importance of the obstacles that stood in the path to this goal, namely the respective holds of northern Protestant Unionism and Catholic bourgeois nationalism on vital sections of the rural masses and the working class itself. Given these paradoxes, it is strange that to date, nobody has presented a consistent and rounded critique of Connolly’s legacy. The central work of scholarship for many years was Greaves’ biography, a work limited by the crude dictates of Stalinist ideology. Connolly is cast in the mould of an Irish Lenin, or worse, in a Stalinised version of “Leninism”. From this perspective, his final act is seen as the embodiment of the more ‘mature’ Marxist approach, where a place is reserved for the native capitalist class in the Irish revolution and the political independence of the workers is subordinated in a ‘popular front’. The real weaknesses in Connolly’s theory are either presented as strengths or, as in Greaves’ discussion of religion, women, etc., cosmetically hidden from view. The later treatment of the subject by Bernard Ransom was the first to acknowledge the innovative manner in which Connolly sought to come to terms with the Irish question. Yet Ransom is content to view Connolly’s theoretical concessions to populist nationalism as a successful “hibernicisation” of Marxism. He seeks to justify this by arguing that “orthodox” Marxism was not a complete method but required a speculative and imaginative addition and that Connolly was simply supplying this dimension as did many others such as the Austro-Marxists in particular. Ransom does, indeed, hit upon a central issue in the whole understanding of Connolly’s thought here, namely Connolly’s historiography. It is a theme that we deal with in the context of his understanding of nation and class in Irish history. However, in contrast to him, we show that Connolly’s theory is quite easily refuted from the standpoint of an “orthodox” Marxist historiography. Some of these themes are touched upon by Austen Morgan in his recent biography of Connolly. Morgan rejects Connolly as a serious thinker and, in an apparent attempt to satisfy the revisionist book market, presents him as 5 eclectic in thought and pragmatic in deed, breaking suddenly from syndicalism, becoming a nationalist almost overnight with the outbreak of war. While only too ready to deny any consistency in Connolly, he is unable to render the components of his politics coherent for want of a method himself. Morgan’s liberal revisionist critique adds nothing to our understanding of Connolly. (See review of Morgan by Joe Larragy, ‘Connolly, Myth and Reality’ in Saothar, Journal of the Irish Labour History Society, No. 13, 1988, pp. 49-53). Those claiming the mantle of Trotsky in Ireland (Militant, Socialist Workers Movement, Peoples Democracy) who might have been expected to critically investigate his legacy, have instead sought to interpret him in defence of their respective and rival positions. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to examine the roots, influences and developed ideas of Connolly’s thought from an unashamedly Marxist standpoint. Not the “Marxism” of Greaves or of Stalinists generally, but that of the classical tradition upheld and developed by Trotsky from the mid 1920’s, when Stalin’s grip began to tighten on the neck of the October revolution and all its historic aspirations. Now that Stalinism is being ground between the upper wheel of imperialism and the nether wheel of working class revolution, as predicted by Trotsky, it is all the more relevant for Marxists to re-examine Connolly’s legacy in a clearer light. Every serious attempt since 1916 to develop a socialist programme which addresses also the National Question has looked to Connolly’s legacy. His ‘socialist republicanism’, because it is ambiguous on key questions of class and nation, remains an obstacle to developing independent working class politics. From Apprenticeship to Martyr The presentation of our arguments centres on the view that Connolly’s early apprenticeship to Marxism in Edinburgh was conditioned and constrained by the rigid economic determinism and ethical relativism that made do for a more worked out materialist method. In Chapter 1 we show the range and limits of the Marxism of the British, and more specifically the Scottish, left and the way this shaped Connolly’s views on the economics of capitalism, as well as on nationalism, religion and party organisation. The relevant ‘orthodoxy’ of the Scottish and British left, together with the dynamic tensions between the Celtic fringe and the metropolitan British centre set the scene for Connolly’s break with the underlying Marxist orthodoxy on the Irish national question. In Chapter 2 we show how Connolly effected this break and laid the groundwork for his theory on the Irish question. Here lies the root of his fusion of nation and labour and hence his confusion of Irish revolutionary 6 republicanism and international socialism. We show the centrality of the influence of the revolutionary populism of James Fintan Lalor in this innovation, and draw out the striking parallels between Lalor’s ideas and those of the Russian Narodniks of the mid to late 19th century. It was against narodnism that Russian Social Democracy had to ferment itself clear in the 1880s and 1890s. Connolly went to considerable lengths to justify his view that the ‘real’ Irish nation and ‘real’ national struggle were essentially the struggle for the historic interests of collective labour. He developed this principally through his central works, Labour in Irish History and The Re-Conquest of Ireland. The first component of Connolly’s historiography as outlined in these works relies on the view that Ireland was a communist clan society until English conquest, which imported a foreign system of private property. In Chapter 3, we present the first complete refutation of this characterisation by drawing on the Ethnological Notebooks of Marx which deal with the same topic but characterise pre- Norman Ireland as feudal society. The second component of Connolly’s historiography is his characterisation of the bourgeois democratic reform and revolutionary movements spanning the last decades of the 18th century. In Chapter 4, we argue that Connolly rewrote the history of this period to suit his theory of an essentially communal labour democracy of Ireland pitted against a foreign capitalist—aristocratic interest, and that Tone did, literally, speak for the men of ‘no property’. Once again, drawing on the detailed notes of Marx on Ireland 1780-1800, we show that this view is quite inaccurate. Tone, as is now widely acknowledged, was a bourgeois democratic revolutionary, albeit with Jacobin tendencies. The core values in Connolly’s synthesis as applied to religious and social life, women and the family are treated in two chapters.

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