“If you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the
green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation 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. England would still rule you to your
ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that
Freedom whose cause you had betrayed. Nationalism without Socialism – without a
reorganisation of society on the basis of a broader and more developed form of
that common property which underlay the social structure of Ancient Erin – is
only national recreancy.[a disloyality to a belief]” – James Connolly,
“Socialism and Nationalism”
There have been 29 general elections to the Dàil, Ireland’s
parliament, since independence. Ireland’s Labour Party have won precisely none.
When socialism goes up against nationalism in a country where all civic
politics is about the nation, then Labour doesn’t stand a chance. Eamon de
Valera’s specific strategy – was to smother the Labour movement in the embrace
of Fianna Fáil. His nationalist party talked the language of social democracy
with enough rhetoric to rob Labour of a distinctive voice, while never
delivering the goods.
After one week of fighting, the 1916 Dublin Uprising was
bloodily suppressed. Lacking any real basis of support, the insurgents did not
have the slightest chance of victory. Connolly was wrong when he thought that
it would ignite the class movement in Europe. The idea that any group of
workers can be incited into action by heroic example and martydom is a false
one. Only when the conditions for struggle actually exist, only when the
majority of people are prepared to do battle and make enormous sacrifices, can
a revolution movement take place. Many of those who advocate the false tactics
of the barricades and street-fighting today draw, in part, their inspiration
from the Easter rising. If they removed their blindfolds they would discover
that the actual experience of the rising proved the futility of such action.
The conditions for revolution action expressly did not exist in 1916. They did
not exist in Ireland and they did not exist in Europe. In Ireland, the IRB and
the Citizen Army were only a handful in number. As a self-avowed Marxist,
Connolly forgot that it will take the working class to change society, not a
handful of individuals to do it for them
Connolly used his charismatic authority as a party leader,
and a trade union organiser, to drag his men behind him. He ignored criticism
from the other leaders of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union
because his sights were set on action, no matter how futile. A large section of
the of the workers’ movement was destroyed and into the vacuum stepped in
bourgeois opportunists ready to lavish praise Connolly, in order to divert the
working class struggle. It was made all the more easier because Connolly had
not fought for a workers’ demands on the question of hours of work, of wages,
of factory conditions, and of the ownership of the land and industry but a
purely nationalist proclamation.
Those who advocate alliances between the workers’
organisations and pro-capitalist political parties on the basis of Connolly’s
participation in the 1916 rising should heed the consequences. Connolly himself
ignored his own advice. On January 22, 1916 he made a statement which many in
the Left in Scotland who hang on to the coat-tails of the pro-independent
nationalists should understand to-day: “The labour movement is like no other
movement. Its strength lies in being like no other movement. It is never so
strong as when it stands alone.” At the turn of the century the French
socialist leader, Millerand, accepted a position in the French cabinet.
Connolly denounced this betrayal, on the basis that a workers’ party should
“accept no government position which it cannot conquer through its own strength
at the ballot box”. He denounced Millerand’s stand by saying that “what good
Millerand may have done is claimed for the credit of the bourgeois republican
government: what evil the cabinet has done reflects back on the reputation of
the socialist parties. Heads they win, tails we lose.”
Post-war Ireland saw the Limerick Soviet in the south and,
in the north, the Belfast 40-Hour Strike where “Bolsheviks and Sinn Feiners”
were leading astray many“good loyalist protestants” to the dismay of the Orange
Lodge, where the composition of the strike committee was a majority of
Protestant, but the chairman was a Catholic. Sectarianism was being challenged.
Working class militancy had entered the Shankill Road and Sandy Row. The
National Union of Railwaymen in a resolution at a conference in Belfast
stated:“without complete unity amongst the working classes, (we should not
allow either religious or political differences to prevent their emancipation)
which can be achieved through a great international brotherhood the world over,
no satisfactory progress could be made.”
Instead of a Connolly to seize the opportunity for working
class unity and solidarity, we had De Valera declaring “Labour must wait”, the
interests of the nation must come first (read “the interests of the
capitalists”). It was to be national unity, not class unity. By pressing their
interests the workers were said to be “endangering” the unity of the republican
forces! On the land where the tenants were seizing the estates only to find
themselves held back by Sinn Fein and the IRA, who even went to the lengths of
carrying out evictions in order to break the back of the land-seizure movement.
The labour movement and working-class unity were the real
victims of the 1916 Dublin Rising by subordinating their class interests to the
nationalist interests of the capitalist.
The following is the
text of a leaflet that dates from 1949, and was produced by the Dublin
Socialist Group for distribution at events organised in the city to commemorate
the 33rd anniversary of the execution of James Connolly. The socialists who
made up the Dublin Socialist Group later helped form the World Socialist Party
of Ireland.
FELLOW-WORKERS !
TRADE UNIONISTS !
May the 15th, 1949 – thirty-three years after his death
which you now commemorate, and less than thirty-three days after the roar of
guns ushered in “The Republic of Ireland”. What relationship is there between
these two events? That is the question which, on this day, it is only fitting
that you should ask yourselves. Once a year you can march through the streets
in your thousands to commemorate his death yet every other day of the year your
actions – your very ideas – are, apparently, in violent conflict with all that
the man lived for. Is that an unwarranted assumption? Emphatically, we reply:
NO. The truth remains the truth, however unpalatable it may be.
We have not the least desire to advance any claim to James
Connolly, nor do we consider ourselves the especial inheritors of all of his
ideas. But to-day, when everybody acclaims him and sings his praise, we think
it very necessary to re-state the simple but vital fact, namely, that JAMES
CONNOLLY WAS OF THE WORKING CLASS. His ideas are not, and never will be, the
sole preserve, nor in the custody, of any particular section BUT THE WORKING
CLASS. Here it is as well to recall – when many are clamouring to bask in the
light of the but recently-discovered glory of Connolly – that his ideas were
vehemently denounced, and his very person attacked, by the representatives of
those interests who, to-day, so anxiously press their claim to his name. We
would not be so much concerned at this were it not for the fact that the
workers have been “taken in” by these spurious claims. You, fellow-workers,
have been duped; for you have supported political parties which have acted in
the interests of any and every class in and out of this county but the working
class. And you have supported them and placed them in power mainly on the
strength of their nationalism and Republicanism. You, who now march to-day in
memory of James Connolly, have you forgotten his “Labour in Irish History”?
Have you forgotten the thoughts he put on paper in order that you might the
better be able to wage your struggle against a social system which condemns you
to poverty and insecurity? We think you have forgotten. At the cost of
remembering the symbolic moment of his death in a national struggle you’ve
forgotten the toiling years of his life on behalf of the working class.
Connolly didn’t struggle, and write and speak, and organise, in order that the
workers might adhere to this or that Republican constitutional formula; no, not
for that. There was no James Connolly if such a man did not desire and work to
change the world, not its paper constitutions.
And you, fellow-workers, who, in your Trade Unions and
political parties stoutly maintain that you strive to follow in his footsteps,
do you direct your efforts towards changing the world? Evidence that you do is
certainly very much lacking; for on every occasion you’ve entered the polling-booth
you’ve either returned you out-going set of masters or merely changed them for
a new set. Not yet have you evinced any great desire to get rid of the master
class AS A WHOLE. And that, simply, is what is meant by “changing the world”.
FELLOW-WORKERS ! As you may march, as you may stand at the
meeting-place, to-day, why not summarise your present position in your own mind
– after twenty-seven years of native government, and after twenty-seven days of
“The Republic of Ireland”? Line up your wage-packet (assuming you’re not one of
“the 75,000”) alongside the cost-of-living figure: which is higher? Dwell a
little on the plight of the thousands “living” in the tenements – that is, of
course, if you happen to be blessed (!) with a suburban (!!) “working class
house”. Recall the thousands who are unemployed (if you’re not one of them, of
course), and remember they’re the ever-present threat of capitalism which hangs
over your head – you may join their ranks to-morrow. Again, tuberculosis and
other medically-classified poverty diseases are capitalism’s constant threat to
the health and happiness of your children. And topping these and the other
social evils you know only too well the experience is the threat of another
capitalist war – yes, another, and promising to be everything (and much more)
that all the previous wars of history weren’t together.
That is the real world you live in. Say – if you wish – that
you reside in a portion of that world known as “The Republic of Ireland”. So
what? Does that alter your position one bit? Of course not. And that world,
reflected in the capitalist system of that country and the conditions of the
Irish working class, surely deserves to go. And it will go WHEN THE WORKING
CLASS WILLS IT. If James Connolly can be said to have left a message for the
working class, it is this: THE WORKING CLASS MUST ACHIEVE ITS EMANCIPATION
ITSELF AND IT CAN ONLY DO SO THROUGH THE ABOLITION OF THE CAPITALIST SOCIAL
SYSTEM.
We are not given to lip-service, and much (judicious)
quoting of Connolly, but the following, we think, is by no means out of place,
and we especially commend it, on this particular occasion, to those who – to
put it bluntly – have made a good thing out of such practices.
“Ireland as distinct
from her people is nothing to me; and the man who is bubbling over with love
and enthusiasm for ‘Ireland’ and yet can pass unmoved through our streets and
witness all the wrong and suffering and the shame and the degradation wrought
upon the people of Ireland: aye, wrought by Irishmen upon Irishmen and women
ithout burning to end it, is a fraud and a liar in his heart, no matter how he
loves that combination of chemical elements he is pleased to call ‘Ireland’”.
'The Coming Generation' 1900 [our emphasis]
Fellow-workers, there is but one way to really commemorate
Connolly, and all those – whoever and wherever they may been – who have fought
and died for and on behalf of the world’s workers, and that is by striving to
abolish capitalism and establish SOCIALISM, THE COMMON OWNERSHIP AND DEMOCRATIC
CONTROL OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION (the factories, mills, mines, railways,
etc.), BY AND IN THE INTERESTS OF THE WHOLE OF THE COMMUNITY WITHOUT ANY
DISTINCTION WHATSOEVER. By devoting your time and energy to the achieving of
such an aim you will be truly commemorating Connolly and all those of his kind
every day.
THE DUBLIN SOCIALIST
GROUP
No comments:
Post a Comment