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Home , Eamon Gilmore, James Connolly, Joan Burton, Labour Party

James Connolly and the Irish

Donal Mac Fhearraigh

100 years of celebration? to which White replied, ‘Put that furthest of all1’ . White was joking but only just, 2012 marks the centenary of the founding and if Labour was regarded as conservative of the Irish Labour Party. Like most politi- at home it was it was even more so when cal parties in Ireland, Labour likes to trade compared with her sister parties. on its radical heritage by drawing a link to One historian described it as ‘the most Connolly. opportunistically conservative party in the On the history section of the Labour known world2.’ It was not until the late Party’s website it says, 1960s that the party professed an adher- ence to , a word which had been ‘The Labour Party was completely taboo until that point. Ar- founded in 1912 in , guably the least successful social demo- County Tipperary, by James cratic or Labour Party in Western , Connolly, and the Irish Labour Party has never held office William O’Brien as the polit- alone and has only been the minority party ical wing of the Irish Trade in coalition. Labour has continued this tra- Union Congress(ITUC). It dition in the current government with Fine is the oldest political party Gael. Far from being ‘the party of social- in Ireland and the only one ism’ it has been the party of austerity. which pre-dates independence. The founders of the Labour The Labour Party got elected a year Party believed that for ordi- ago on promises of burning the bondhold- nary working people to shape ers and defending ordinary people against society they needed a political cutbacks. Instead they have attacked the party that was committed to most vulnerable in our society. They have serving their needs; they knew utterly betrayed those who voted for them. that there is only so much that They have championed the EU-IMF pro- trade unions and community gramme as the only possible solution to the organisations can do, an effec- crisis and now advocating for the Fiscal tive political party is needed to Treaty that will see further cuts inflicted create a fair society’. on families. Lone parents and those on social wel- The Labour Party has never lived up to fare are suffering the brunt of the at- the rhetoric about its radical roots. During tacks from Labour Party Ministers like the 1950s, Jack White, the deputy editor . Threats to cut welfare pay- of was asked by a foreign ments and force people into unpaid in- colleague to explain the irrelevance of the ternship work abound while the rich are left-right cleavage in Irish politics. ‘Draw molly-coddled with tax breaks and suffer a line, and put all the parties well to the no surveillance on their tax returns. right,’ he explained. ‘But what about the Struggling single parents will see their Labour Party?’ his companion inquired, income slashed by e1,000 a year. The up- 1Niamh Puirseil: The Irish Labour Party, p408 2As above.

37 per age limit of the youngest child for new services; closure of public nursing homes; claimants of the one-parent family pay- a 5 percent cut to home helps; and cuts ment is to be reduced to 12 and it will to the State subvention for prescription then be further reduced on a phased basis. drugs. Child benefit for families with three and Instead of creating jobs this govern- more children was cut by e19 a month for ment has slashed more jobs in the public the third child and e17 a month for the sector. Pensions have been attacked and fourth and further subsequent children - people will now be forced to work until the hitting the poorest families in the State. age of 68. They are being scapegoated for a reces- But it’s a different story for the rich: sion they did not cause.They hiked the top The top 1 percent has recovered all their rate of VAT from 21 percent to 23 percent, losses since the crash in 2008. The top 5 which impacted most on poorer people. percent are sitting on assets worth e219 The back-to-school clothing and Billion according to the Central Statistics footwear allowance was cut by e55 for chil- Office. There is no talk of taxing those dren aged 12 or more and e50 for children assets; rather in the last budget the super- aged between four and 11 - the eligibility rich were given more tax breaks with some age of this allowance was raised from two highly paid executives on e500,000 a year to four years. Special needs assistants in expected to pay only 30 percent income schools have been cut, third level students tax. face increased fees and small rural schools Rather than creating a ‘fair society’ are being closed. Labour have helped increase inequality in The fuel allowance payment is to be re- Ireland. duced by almost a fifth, in the context of a report by the Institute of Public Health The founding of the Labour which found that levels of fuel poverty on the island of Ireland remain ‘unacceptably Party high’ and that these are responsible for ‘among the highest levels of excess win- ter mortality in Europe, with an estimated 2,800 excess deaths on the island in the winter months’. The community sector faces a reduc- tion in funding of 35 percent by the end of 2013. This will devastate the poorest com- munities in the country. Affordable child- care will be stopped and a route out of deep poverty through education and train- ing will be removed. They have continued the deep cuts on health expenditure: e2.5 billion over three years, over 8,000 fewer staff resulting in The Labour Party is a million miles away closure of hospital wards and beds, lead- from where James Connolly, one of its ing to more public patients waiting longer founders, envisioned it could be. for hospital treatment; poor, inadequate or As one of the delegates to the annual non-existent community and primary care meeting of the Irish Congress

38 of 1912 at Clonmel, Connolly moved the These views were expressed most resolution ‘that the independent represen- clearly in Connolly’s pamphlet The Re- tation of labour upon all public boards be, Conquest of Ireland which he wrote for the and is hereby included ,among the objec- new Labour Party. tives of this congress3.’ It was carried by Connolly articulated this perspective 49 votes to 19, with another 19 delegates at the 1913 congress of the ITUC where not recorded. he stressed the extent to which the Labour Connolly’s attempt to form a broader Party was ‘above national divisions’. He ‘labour party’ linked to the trades unions claimed that in the past ‘the English was an attempt to sharpen class struggle Labour Party was the natural ally’ as it in Ireland and not a move towards consti- was better to ‘appeal to our own class tutional reformist politics. across the water than appealing to our en- It was an attempt by him to form a mil- emies in the master class in our country6’. itant class struggle based party to fit the However, far from the Home Rule Bill specific needs of the Irish working class at ending the national question in Irish poli- the time. Connolly proposed that an Irish tics and clearing the way for class politics, Labour Party be formed, its purpose being it precipitated a new crisis in Ireland as ‘to fight the capitalist parties of Ireland on Unionists organised against it. Connolly their own soil4.’ was forced to re-assess his political per- Connolly saw the Labour Party ini- spective. tially as a broad non-socialist movement. The Labour Party remained a stalled He insisted that the new party ‘must keep project. The Irish TUC put little resources a place for those who are not as far ad- or time into it. At the first meeting of the vanced as themselves, but whose class in- Labour parliamentary committee in 1913 terests would bring them into line5’. The Larkin resigned the chair and Connolly re- Labour Party would be the municipal and fused to take it up, believing it would not parliamentary wing of the trades unions. work without Larkin at the helm. There- Connolly was absolutely right to try to after the Labour Party remained a vehicle give workers an independent voice in Irish for issuing statements and lobbying gov- politics. Only a year later all the nation- ernment ministers until its rebirth after the alist rhetoric about all the Irish standing First World War. together against British exploitation was The Labour Party never became the exposed by the great lock-out when working class political force Connolly Irish employers sought to smash the trade hoped for, not because of organisational union movement in Dublin. failings but because it became the mouth- Connolly’s perspective was that the piece of the trade union bureaucracy. It Home Rule Bill would soon be passed in sought at most to represent workers, not the British parliament and therefore the to break capitalism. question of nationalism would recede in Connolly believed it was possible to Irish politics. What was needed in his view safeguard against by having the was a party for Irish workers to be able to party tied to militant industrial unions. He act independently of Irish employers. underestimated the need for independent 3James Connolly: A full life, , p424 4 James Connolly, Forward, July 1st, 1911 5ITUC report 1914, p43 6ITUC report 1913, p34

39 socialist political organisation inside the In 2008 at the Labour party’s annual trade union movement to combat the re- James Connolly Commemoration held in formist political ideas of the trade union Arbour Hill, Dublin, even , bureaucracy. leader of the Labour Party, said ‘Con- Instead Connolly argued that a social- nolly’s legacy has been claimed by many. ist party only needed to make general pro- But his life’s story, and the many writ- paganda in society and that the unions ings he left behind, make it impossible to would do the rest. depart from the compelling truth. That He thought the union bureaucracy James Connolly was, first and foremost, a could become a force for revolution under socialist8 ’. Which is much more than can the pressure of working class militancy. He be said for Eamon Gilmore. did not conceive of the bureaucracy as a But Connolly was not just a socialist distinct conservative social layer inside the he was a revolutionary socialist. He recog- workers’ movement. nised the need to participate in elections This meant the ideas of the develop- but only as a tactic for agitation. ‘The ing trade union bureaucracy were not chal- election of a socialist to any public body lenged and the way was left open for them ’, he wrote, ‘is only valuable in so far as to compromise with the new nationalist it is the return of a disturber of the po- ruling class. litical peace’9. Connolly was completely Labour refused to contest the 1918 clear on the need for revolutionary change general election or the 1921 Parliamen- to achieve socialism. Far from the creation tary elections under the mistaken slogan of the Labour Party being his life’s work, it of ‘labour must wait’ and thus left an un- is his unswerving commitment to working contested field for the nationalists. It was class self-emancipation that shines through after this that the party was revived in it’s all his writings. modern safe parliamentary from - a million Connolly was first and foremost a revo- miles away from the class struggle party lutionary. In January 1913, a year after the Connolly had envisioned. formation of the Labour Party, he stood as a candidate. in the municipal election in .In one of his speeches he said, Labour: Connolly’s life work? ‘Believing that the present sys- Joanna Tuffy TD, criticising RTE’s ‘Ire- tem of society is based upon land’s Greatest’ show in 2010 about James the robbery of the working Connolly that had forgotten to mention his class, and that capitalist prop- role in setting up the Labour Party, said, erty cannot exist without the ‘It was his life’s work to set up such a plundering of labour, I de- party’7 . sire to see capitalism abolished, Was the founding of the Labour Party and a democratic system of common or public ownership really his life’s work? Only someone who 10 has never read any of Connolly’s writings erected in its stead’ . could utter such words. In 1912, the previous year, Connolly 7 http://www.labour.ie/joannatuffy/blogarchive/2010/10/05/james-connolly-founder-of- the-labour-party/ 8http://www.labour.ie/blog/category/james+connolly/ 9K.Allen, The Politics of James Connolly, London 1990, p.11 10http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1913/01/dockward.htm

40 waged a polemic with the leading social- Far from abandoning revolutionary so- ist in Belfast, if not Ireland, at the time, cialism for a reformist approach based on William Walker, on the need for social- parliamentary change it is clear Connolly ists to have a revolutionary and not just remained a revolutionary socialist. More a reformist perspective. Connolly labelled over his commitment to revolution intensi- Walker’s politics ‘gas and water socialism’ fied, rather than waned, with the outbreak because of his sole focus on municipal ser- of the First World War, which he opposed vices instead of the achievement of work- on internationalist grounds. He denounced ers’ power. both those ‘socialists’ (like the German So- While supporting greater state inter- cial Democratic Party) who supported the vention he was against ‘mere government imperialist slaughter and those who (like socialism’. Every reform would be won by and ) who took workers militancy. Reforms and socialist a passive, or pacifist attitude to it. ‘When policies would be achieved by the increas- the bugle sounded the first note for actual ing power of the industrial unions on the war, their notes should have been taken as factory floor. He wrote: the tocsin for social revolution’12. Someone whose politics were further State ownership and control is away from those of Eamon Gilmore and the not necessarily socialism - if it current Irish Labour Party would be hard were, then the army, the navy, to imagine. Unfortunately, as we shall see, the police would all be social- there were weaknesses in his understanding ist functionaries an immense of what was needed to defeat the influence gulf separates the ’national- of reformism in the working class. ising’ proposals of the mid- dle class from the ’socialising’ demands of the revolutionary The roots of reformism working class’11. Connolly’s concept of a Labour Party that During the great lock-out of 1913 Con- he proposed in 1912 was rooted in his expe- nolly formed the Irish Citizens Army. It rience of the revolutionary American trade was created to protect the workers from union tradition, the syndicalists. any groups that might have been employed The Industrial Workers of the World by the employers to ‘rough up’ any strik- (known as the Wobblies) were a militant ing worker. The ICA later played a central revolutionary union who sought to over- role in the . come the divisions in the working class by In Belfast as in Dublin he was a organising everyone in ‘One Big Union’. strong supporter of the militant sections They had a vision of taking power within of the Suffragette campaigners for votes for capitalism one factory at a time until they women. controlled all the economy. They there- It was also at this time that James fore didn’t need to engage in any political Connolly revived a newspaper called The struggle with the capitalist class, it would Worker’s Republic. Up to this year, all all be decided at the economic level. of Connolly’s work had been orientated This approach meant Connolly didn’t around socialism and developing the rights worry about the politics of the Labour of the working class. Party, it only mattered that it was strongly 11Cited in C.Desmond Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly, London, 1976, p.130 12Cited in K.Allen, as above, p.126

41 bound to the industrial unions, he thought ciety the socialists split between the re- that would guarantee militant politics formists and revolutionary camps. The dominated the new party. resulting weakness of revolutionary social- Connolly’s idea that you could guard ist forces meant Connolly was in a much against reformist politics by tying political weaker position when the national crisis organisation to a militant industrial base erupted in 1916. proved wrong. He lacked a clear analysis of reformism and its social base. 100 years on: Is the labour Tony Cliff, the founder of the SWP international tradition, helped develop a party finished? clear Marxist understanding of the social The question of reformism is still one base of Labour and social democratic type on which socialists need political clarity . parties. Some socialists argue that all Labour and Labourism is the political expression of Social Democrats across Europe have now the politics of the trade union bureaucracy. become social liberal parties and therefore The trade union bureaucracy forms a dis- the question of reformism is now dead. tinct social layer in society. Their aim is These socialists connect reformism to to achieve a compromise between workers particular organisational forms and are and employers. Left-wing trade union of- confused when reformism re-emerges in ficials may fight harder for a better deal, other forms- whether as left reformist splits but in the end of the day they too seek to from traditional labour parties -like Syriza cut a deal with the bosses - they don’t try in Greece, Die Linke in Germany or the to get rid of the bosses altogether. Front de Gauche in France, or in the form Lenin described reformist Labour type of Sinn Fein in Ireland. parties accurately as ‘capitalist workers’ Getting it wrong on how to relate to parties’. They are capitalist in the sense these movements and parties can be disas- that they do not seek to break from cap- trous for socialists as can be seen from the italism but rather seek only to curtail its experience of socialists in France. worst excesses. They are workers’ parties Combating reformism cannot be done because they draw their support from the simply be launching a new party with working class and are organically linked to a ‘socialist program’. parties, the trade unions. like the United Left Alliance in Ireland, Therefore socialists need to organise in- will be sites of struggle between reformist side the unions independently of the trade and revolutionary ideas; they will not ex- union bureaucracy. But it’s not enough to clude reformist ideas just by declaring it. just be a militant trade unionist, a socialist How these parties develop depends on the must be, as Lenin put it, a tribune of the course of the class struggle and on how so- people. That is a socialist must fight the cialists operate inside them. If they are system on an ideological and political level too sectarian they can become moribund, as well as economically. Socialists must of- if they are too opportunist they can be in- fer a clear political alternative not just to corporated into the system. capitalist parties but to reformist parties Up to the very moment of successful as well. socialist revolution revolutionary socialists Connolly’s model of socialist organisa- will need to adopt methods of organis- tion downplayed this and therefore when ing that draw non-revolutionary workers major political questions emerged in so- into common struggle. This will primar-

42 ily mean united fronts with members and and begin to get a sense of their potential supporters of reformist parties. power. Often this starts to happen during Reformist consciousness also has deep strikes or other forms of collective strug- roots in the everyday experience of workers gle. But as class struggle is uneven this under capitalism. Reformism is the ‘com- insight is discovered by different sections mon sense’ of the working class under cap- of the working class at different times and italism and therefore will be with us until places. It is the central role of the rev- the moment of socialist revolution. It is olutionary party to gather together these rooted in the alienation and commodifica- most militant sections of the class that un- tion of capitalism13.Under capitalism ev- derstand the power and potential of the erything can be bought and sold, includ- working class, in order to wage an ideolog- ing workers’ . The exploita- ical and political struggle against the in- tion of the system is hidden under a seem- fluence of bourgeois and reformist ideas in ingly equal exchange of goods - the abil- the class as a whole. ity to work for a wage. It is summed up The working class, in its majority, only in the phrase ‘a fair days work for a fair comes to socialist consciousness in the pro- days wage’. This seemingly equal exchange cess of social revolution. It is during this hides the exploitative basis of the system - period that the active and focused inter- that each worker produces more than they vention of a revolutionary party is decisive. get paid in their wage packet, while the This is why the revolutionary party rest goes to the bosses as profit. must maintain its political and organisa- This ‘common sense’ only starts to tional coherence at the same time as work- break down when workers understand their ing in broader movements and alliances central role in feeding the system’s profits like the ULA.

13Marx developed his analysis of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and of the fetishism of commodities in , Chapter 1 , Section 4

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