CRISIS Part Six Irish Labour and Connolly's failure

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There is a myth that Irish labour was taken by William O'Brien after the 1916 rising in a rightward and different direction from that adopted by James Connolly before his execution.

But in fact Connolly's entire practice laid the basis for separating the national question from the class question. With the struggle for independence against Britain, the fruit of that practice was born out by labour abdicating the field completely to the petty bourgeois Sinn Fein party of Arthur Griffith.

As the national resurgence brought a clash with Britain nearer it became clear to Connolly that in the Labour Party based on the Irish Trade Union Congress he had helped to create an instrument which was totally inadequate to lead the national struggle in a socialist direction.

He swapped horses in midstream and went over to the nationalists.

Obscure

Various alleged 'Marxists' have attempted to obscure the lessons that should have been drawn from this by claiming that through Connolly labour participated in the 1916 Rising.

Labour's political relationship to the Rising and the subsequent struggle against the British however is well expressed in Connolly's decision to raise not the red but the green flag over Liberty Hall, headquarters of Connolly's Transport Union.

When a majority of the Executive objected, Connolly secured their reluctant acquiescence by informing some of them that an insurrection was about to take Place!

Such was the reality of labour's participation in the Easter Rising. It should not be thought that the Executive majority were opposed to Ireland's right to separate from England.

Far from it: in fact when union leader James Larkin spoke to the Dublin Trades Council just before his departure in October 1914 on a fund-raising tour of America he told them that "he hoped to bear a pike for Ireland before he died"

Yet when he heard of Connolly's growing nationalism and military preparations Larkin intervened from America to say "the boys are not to move"

Gesture

The Rising was essentially a gesture. Connolly, the most clear sighted of the insurrectionists, knew it had no chance of success and made no serious preparations for it to be successful.

Three months earlier in his paper the Workers' Republic he had said that:

"The power of the enemy to hurl his forces upon the forces of Ireland would be at the mercy of the men who controlled the transport system."

The truth of this observation was to be acknowledged by General Macready, the British commander-in-chief in Ireland during the Independence war.

Precedent

A munitions transport strike begun in May 1920 seized on the precedent set by British dockers, who refused to load munitions on the ship "Jolly George" because the arms were for the use of the Polish government against the Soviet Union.

When British soldiers moved in to do the dockers work, railwaymen refused to move what the troops had unloaded.

This stoppage seriously disrupted British attempts to put down the Irish revolt. In his memoirs, Annals of an Active Life, Macready conceded that:

"This state of affairs was a serious set back to military actions during the best season of the year."

This was 1920 when the working class that Connolly had despaired of was bearing the brunt of the British offensive.

But the understanding that Connolly had had of the strategic importance of transport in January 1916 appears to have deserted him by April.

Although his union did not dominate transport totally (there were also members of the British based NUR) Connolly's failure to call a transport strike-calling out the union which (in Larkin's absence in America) Connolly himself led-can only be explained by seeing the Easter Rising as a blood sacrifice, a romantic nationalist symbol to inspire a future generation, and not at all as a serious attempt at proletarian insurrection.

Executed

Besides Connolly, other labour leaders executed included Michael Mallin, Richard O'Carroll and Paedar Macken.

William Partridge, tortured in an English jail, died a year later. As well as those dead, a whole layer of the trade union leadership was arrested and incarcerated.

In short the aftermath of the Rising was to see Irish labour enter the Independence struggle and play the decisive part. But it played it as a decapitated movement.

It fought but the fight was carried on under the banner of Sinn Fein. And it was the petty bourgeois nationalists who reaped where labour had sown.

Tragically Irish labour had been developing to the stage where it could consider insurrection.

When the bourgeois press labelled the Easter Rising as a 'Larkinite-Labour' affair as they did, this was not simply middle class malevolence on their part.

No other torce seemed capable of offering such a challenge, and the idea that labour should subordinate itself to petty bourgeois nationalism appeared to cut completely across the grain of development up to 1916.

While Sinn Fein's paper sold 2,000 copies a week, the Irish Worker sold 30,000 While Labour had candidates on council's throughout the country, Sinn Fein was limited to two councillors on the Dublin corporation.

Popular

While the leaders of Irish labour could call strikes and lead thousands on demonstrations, Sinn Fein had next to no popular support.

As a national party Sinn Fein had been in decline since 1910, and in 1916-on the very eve of the Rising that was to propel it to power-it had so shrunk as an organisation that it was confined to one central branch in Dublin.

Only the efforts of British imperialism on his right and James Connolly on his left raised Sinn Fein leader Arthur Griffith to a political height that was quite beyond his own exertions, not to mention those of his near non existent national organisation.

The process whereby Connolly could abandon his socialist colleagues and throw in his lot with confused dreamers like Patrick Pearse and an old Fenian conspirator like Tom Clarke has been adequately described by Sean •'Casey • in his little booklet on the Irish Citizen Army:

"It is difficult to understand the almost revolutionary change that was manifesting itself in Connolly's nature. The labour movement seemed by him to be regarded as a descrescent force, while the essence of nationalism began to assume the finest element of his nature the high creed of Irish nationalism became his daily rosary, while the bigher creed of international humanity, that had so long bubbled from his eloquent lips, was silent forever and Irish labour lost a new leader."

An accurate description is not however an explanation.

That must be sought in Connolly's politics. And not only Connolly's since the Labour Party that was created was not only the work of Connolly but if anything was primarily Larkin's.

Connolly was to turn away from what he had helped to build, while Larkin, when he returned from America too late to guide events, was to both reject and be rejected by the party he had largely created.

The Irish Labour Party developed out of the Irish Trade Union Congress and in fighting for its creation Connolly and Larkin had to do battle with those trade unionists who argued that labour in Ireland did not need its own party as long as the Irish Parliamentary party of Parnell, now led by John Redmond, was so. active at Con Westminster on cause of labour!

To prevent the Congress moving towards setting up an Irish Labour Party, these advocates were prepared to enter into a bloc with a group of trade unionists in Belfast led by William Walker.

Walker and his supporters agreed with Larkin that the working class needed its own party but they claimed it was more "international" for Irish labour to affiliate to the British Labour Party than to set up their own nationally limited organisation.

At the 1912 Congress Larkin and Connolly finally overcame the opposition to the formation of an Irish Party by forty-nine votes to nineteen with another nineteen abstentions.

Not until the following year's Congress were serious moves made to implement the resolution and the Party structure and rules were revealing for the Party's future problems.

Whole Class Connolly and Larkin both shared the view of Karl Kautsky that the national sections of the Second International should be parties of the whole class.

This was a conception that Lenin too gave formal adherence to-while in practice building a very different kind of party, a programmatically homogeneous vanguard.

Lenin had fought against the ideology of the bourgeoisie whenever he saw it in the working class movement. He traced a line of continuity from the Economists through the Mensheviks and, after the

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lames Larkin: "The boys are not to move' he said from America when he heard Connolly was naking military preparations and turning towards nationalism. purely proletarian character party itself is no more than a that the Irish revolution must barometer of agitation?

part are marched under armed guard to Richmond Barracks. lefeat of the 1905 Revolution, through the Liquidators.

Lenin regarded these as organisationally representing the influence of bourgeois deas within the workers movement.

Kautsky however saw opportunism not as something that could have material base within the working class itself (ie a abour aristocracy) but merely a survival, a hangover from pre-capitalist times that would be corrected with the development of capitalism by the growth of the proletariat.

To Connolly and Larkin, with their syndicalist backround, this conception of a party, like one big union for the whole. class was self evidently the way forward.

And it reflected itself in the kind of party that Congress had set up.

Arguing in the Dublin Trade and Labour Journal in 1909 why Irish labour needed its own Larkin was pare Party had ao clear that the nad no separate and distinct function to play different from a trade union.

It was merely another working class organisation to hit the capitalists with:

"I am an industrialist and at the same time appreciate the fact that Labour can iccomplish a great deal through the intelligent use of the ballot. Why use one arm when we have two? Why not strike the enemy with both economic political arms-the and the Нете the possibility of setting up a party is no more than an index of the class's evolving strength.

Despite the militancy of its leading advocates this party from its birth would only act as a passive barometer reflecting the ebbs and flows of the class's strength and consciousness.

If it raised that consciousness it could only be inside reformist framework.

Transform

It lacked the programme hat could transform that consciousness into revolutiontry consciousness.

And it lacked it because it lid not set for the proletariat task. of reconstructing society anew. For such İrastic work the proletariat's party must have a programme or all the oppressed.

Significantly the Irish party limited membership to those who were members of affiliated trade unions. The small farmers organised in their cooperative societies were denied membership.

It was argued by the party's founders that the trade union base would be swamped it co-operative societies were allowed to join.

The same restrictions were ipplied to the various socialist groups as well, ncluding even the Indepenlent Labour Party of Ireland -of which the leading ¡upporters of a Congress based party, Connolly, William O'Brien, Campbell ind Johnson were actually nembers!

While the British Labour Party was established by both he Trade Union Congress ind various socialist bodies, n Ireland the Party was based on Congress alone-the execative for both being one and the same.

Connolly declared that his would keep out:

"The professional politician who was doing as much harm as good in the British movement; by confining party membership to trade unionists the Irish Labour members would be responsible to the workers ust as their leaders in the ndustrial fight were responible."

Irish Worker, June 20, 1914)

It must be said in mitigaion that lrish labour at the reginning of the century had peen most unfortunate in some of its representatives. Yet the fact that Connolly couldn't envisage a professional politician that wasn't corrupt, and that he believed representatives could escape such temptation not under party but only trade union control reveals Connolly's rigid idealisation of the working class and its trade union consciousness.

This was at a time when his syndicalist prejudices were supposed to be far behind him.

This confidence that trade union consciousness flowed in an untroubled way into socialist consciousness partly explains why Connolly could fight for the party to be based directly on the trade unions yet take a complacent view of the importance of program matic clarity.

Endorsed

The Party didn't adopt a socialist programme until 1918, six years after Congress had endorsed the need for a Where Connolly did fight for a line of political demarcation it was against introducing into the working class ideas that he thought might undermine its fighting capacity and create division in the ranks.

The year 1904 was the one in which the Second International at its congress in Amsterdam adopted the resolution of 'one class, one party' and James Connolly America having recently arrived from Ireland combatted opinions which he beileved were positively harmful for realising the ideal of creating a party for the whole class.

As the Amsterdam gress put it;

'In order that the working forth all its strength in the struggle against capitalism it necessary that in every coun try there exist vis a vis the bourgeois parties only one social party as there exists only one proletariat. Therefore it is the imperative duty of all comrades and socialist organisations to make every effort to bring about this unity on the basis of the principles established by the international congresses, a unity necessary in the interests of the working class before which they are responsible for all fatal consequences of a continued breach.

Whether Connolly was aware of the resolution when he polemicised against Daniel de Leon the leader of the American Socialist Labour Party is perhaps less impor tant than the fact that he acted entirely in its spirit.

He felt compelled to protest at harmful preoccupations within the SLP which he was sure expressed the pressure of alien class forces.

One was the time given over by the Party to sexual questions, especially the general hostility to monogamic marriage and the other was the difficulty these days of picking ap a copy of the Weekly People (the SLP's paper) without finding an attack on religion contained in it.

Absurdities

He objected to attacks on clergymen which were not, claimed Connolly, attacks on their economic absurditiesthat would be proper for the "bui at his theology, with which we have nothing to do"

The issue is complicated by the fact that Connolly aimed some very pointed barbs at his opponents. De Leon was becoming anti-Catholic in an unprincipled way.

It is one thing to be anti-Catholic in Ireland where the dominant culture is Catholic, but in America, where it is not, such hostility could well represent a susceptibility to the ruling class's ideology.

Connolly thought correctly that he detected in this an American chauvinism in the SLP that resisted the importance of doing work with the foreign immigrants from Europe, many of whom were Catholics.

Connolly's response was to prohibit the religious question. The party should have nothing to do with it, he declared, because it would divide the American trom the immigrant worker.

He based his position on the Erfurt programme of 1891 which declared:

"Religion is a private matter for members of the Unknown to Connolly, Engels had opposed this but Kautsky had suppressed his protest. Lenin a year later put forward the very different view that:

"So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned religion is not a private matter. Our party is an association of class conscious advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious belief."

What a difference in outlook this little quote expresses. It tells us in its compressed way everything we need to know about the two very different parties that these two men built.

Connolly starts from and remains at the existing consciousness of the working class, believing that to maintain a relationship with that class, its lack of class consciousness must be confronted.

*The Socialist Party of Ireland prohibits the discussion of theological or antitheological questions at its meetings public or private. This is in conformity with the chief socialist parties in the world which have frequently in Germany, for example, declared religion to be a private matter and outside the scope for socialist action."

(James Connolly, The New Evangel)

Again on the question of women, Connolly regarded De Leon quite wrong when he claimed that a book by the German social democrat August Bebel on women, could win middle class women over to socialism and the cause of the working class:

... on the contrary, getting involved in the sex question was going to weaken the political and economic strucale as was anino nutcide their own class for support .. Bebel's "Women" is popular because of the quasi-prurient revelations of the past and present degradation womanhood, but I question if you can find one woman who was led to socialism by it, but you can find hundreds who were repelled from studying socialism by judicious extracts from its pages." The uprising fails. Some of those taking Few of Connolly's friends supported him in this fanciful claim and it is difficult not to conclude that Connolly's knowledge of Bebel's book never went beyond as he put it, a few 'judicious extracts' Lenin gave his opinion in an interview with Clara Zetkin when he described the book as "gripping agitation that strikes out at bourgeois society"

These views Connolly brought from Ireland … to America and he returned to Ireland with them quite unaltered-if anything more firmly entrenched.

His fear of going outside his own class for support meant, in anl agricultural society like Ireland, having no perspective for socialist revolution at all.

At one and the same time he both overestimated the assume, while underestimating the political tasks that that proletariat must carry out.

The key to Connolly's failure was his complete misunderstanding of the role of the party. He tied the Irish party to the trade unions because very simply that was the best . way to ensure it accurately registered the rising spontaneity of the class.

As he passed through Liberty Hall on his way to insurrection his close friend and trade union collaborator William O'Brien asked him if there was any hope of success.

Connolly emphatically assured him that there was "none whatever"

But then what importance can be attached to the sacrifice of party leaders when the if however the role of the party is seen differently, as the bearer of the class consciousness of the proletariat, as the conscience of its historic vocation then not only are its leaders valued rather less fecklessly-that is the least of it-but the party's tasks in relationship to the class are seen in a less passive, less fatalistic light.

Fortress That homogenous mass that rises up the wall of the capițalist fortress until it laps over the citadel is recognised not at all as homogenous but composed of quite diverse elements that can only be won through the most advanced layers.

Only with such a vanguard party can the class constitute itself as a class. Only by going beyond spontaneous trade union struggles can the working class develop the consciousness of being the protagonist of a revolution which emancipates not only the workers but the whole of society.

Exclusion

Connolly defended the exclusion of farmers' cooperatives and socialist groups from the . Congress-based Labour Party not because of programmatic differences but because of a fear that trade union affairs might fall into non-trade union hands.

In this way he showed how far away • he was from Lenin's conception, and illustrated instead, by negative and tragic example, that Leninism is the Marxism of this epoch.

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Mike Higgins reviews two pamphlets on the Grunwick struggle. 'Battle of Gru by Socialist Challenge at 30p. 'Grunwi UN SI COVLE) sSS Socialist Worker at 10p, (16pp). recently nwick' is k' is put published published lished by 5/2 BRAN KON THATS CONNOR PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report

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