Connolly’s flawed Marxism exploited by republicans for their own ends
Perhaps significantly, neither made much reference to the role of James Connolly or the Irish Citizen Army in the Rising, or to the fact that the Citizen Army (described by Lenin as the first workers’ militia in western Europe) was not originally founded as a republican organisation. Rather, it was founded as a workers’ militia to defend members of the labour movement from attacks by scabs during the Dublin Lockout of 1913.
Neither the playwright Sean O’Casey, who was the first secretary of the Citizen Army and the most important figure in 20th century Irish literature, nor Jim Larkin endorsed the commitment of the Citizen Army to Pearse’s blood sacrifice in the GPO, and it may be time to ask a few hard questions about why James Connolly committed himself to this path?
While Connolly’s achievements as a socialist and trade union agitator in Ireland are beyond dispute, his attempts to synthesise an interpretation of Marxism with an Irish republican project raise certain problems for socialists in the 21st century. As an example, the Labour Party (and to a lesser extent, the Workers Party and Socialist Party) tend to play down Connolly’s role in the Rising as against his role as a Marxist thinker and activist.
On the plus side, at least these people have read Connolly. By contrast the wider public tends to perceive Connolly less as an important original (but also deeply flawed) Marxist thinker than as yet another ‘Irish martyr’ from 1916.
This latter perception is also central to the manner in which Connolly’s role in the Rising has also been seized upon by Sinn Féin to vindicate their claim (made selectively, depending on their audience) that republicanism and socialism are not just compatible but inexorably linked.
In this way, Connolly has been invoked to afford left cover to an often fascistic republican movement, especially among guilt-ridden English liberals sympathetic to the republican project and in denial of IRA crimes.
While the Workers Party and Socialist Party simply argue that Connolly is being misrepresented by Sinn Féin, I think it’s time to take the argument further. Basically, I think we now have to make the argument that there was something intrinsically wrong with Connolly’s Marxism. After all, if we can make this claim about Lenin and Trotsky, then we can say it about Connolly, too.
This was, suffice to say, not entirely Connolly’s fault as he had comparatively limited access to the works of Marx.
In particular, key works like The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The Grundrisse weren’t published until the 1950s and even Rosa Luxembourg (probably the greatest Marxist thinker among Connolly’s contemporaries, and certainly on the so-called national question) never grasped that Marxism was an unfinished work in progress.
In Connolly’s case, however, the problem was amplified by his schooling in the crudely determinist interpretation of Marxism handed down to him by the Second International - particularly through Hyndman’s SDF and the Scottish Socialist Federation.
This reduced Marxism to a crude question of trade union issues meaning that Connolly looked outside Marxism on other issues, what we might call issues of democratic rights. He thus wasted time engaging in theological debates with Jesuit priests and had some incredibly reactionary views, eg, on divorce. This limited interpretation of Marxism also found Connolly looking outside the Marxist tradition when it came to the so-called Irish national question.
What Connolly basically did in The Role of Labour in Irish History was to apply Engels’ ideas about Celtic communism in The Origins of the Family to the populist ideas of James Fintan Lalor about a peasant road to socialism in Ireland.
What we can now say, I think, is that Engels’ idea that private property in land was only introduced into Ireland by the British was seized upon by Connolly. In this way he vindicated the republican myth that the British stole the land - hence justifying the republican struggle in pseudo-socialist terms. In fact, Engels’ prognosis is rubbish.
Marx wrote to Engels saying that an indigenous feudalism was already developing in Ireland and that the ethnicity of the feudal aristocracy was of no consequence.
In much the same way, the land question is meaningless to urban proletarians (who nowadays account for the majority of Ireland’s population), but is still trotted out via Connolly to afford left cover to the republican project.
For all his efforts to reconcile republicanism and socialism, Connolly grew very alarmed at the reactionary nature of the Irish nationalism fuelled by the second Home Rule Bill.
He even wrote in Forward that the Irish bourgeoisie would be worse than their British counterparts in exploiting and oppressing Irish workers. This observation (quietly overlooked by Shinners and social republicans alike) was quickly proved correct in Ireland - as both Sean O’Casey and Jim Larkin recognised.
It has since been amplified by the role of a partly globalised international capitalism in Ireland.
Finally, given his observations in Forward about the reactionary nature of the Irish bourgeoisie, it seems likely that Connolly only committed the Citizen Army to the Easter Rising because the Second International (and particularly Ramsay MacDonald) had collapsed into support for imperialist carnage during World War 1.
One of Connolly’s most important articles is that where he describes workers and socialists from Germany, Britain and Ireland killing each other in their thousands on the battlefields of France.
This is why Connolly was in the GPO, but it is still unlikely that he would have been there, had the Russian revolution happened first.
As for the contemporary situation, there is no way that Easter commemorations are going to be interpreted by Northern unionists as anything other than an ongoing threat to their position in the UK. This is particularly true when they are being threatened that if they don’t accept IRA terrorists in government, they will have dual administration from Dublin and London eroding their position in the UK still further.
This just drives loyalist workers into the arms of reactionaries like Ian Paisley and thus makes talk of a united Ireland a barrier to the very socialist politics that Connolly, Larkin and O’Casey advocated.
In the Republic meantime, Fianna Fáil and the gangster capitalist class that they represent simply hide behind the republican paraphernalia of Easter 1916, the white lilies and flags, while joining with international finance capital in exploiting the Irish working class.
It’s time that people wised up that pageants, symbolism and traditional iconography have nothing to do with historical analysis and no place in the refounding of a political labour movement.
Roger Cottrell
School of English
Queen’s University
Belfast
