James Connolly’s Contribution to International Socialism
by Peter Urban
James Connolly is often spoken of as ‘Ireland’s greatest Marxists’ but this description fails to adequately express Connolly’s stature. James Connolly was a revolutionary working class activist, leader, and theorist on an international level and should be recognized as one of the world’s greatest Marxists. In part, the cooptation of Connolly by the forces of Irish nationalism after his death in 1916 has tended to render Connolly far more parochial than is appropriate and has contributed to Connolly’s contribution to international socialism not having been generally recognized. James Connolly was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was active in the socialist movement in Scotland and thereby was active in the British socialist movement. His first party in Ireland, the Irish Socialist Republican Party counted Eleanor and Edward Marx-Aveling among its supporters. The ISRP participated in the Paris Congress of the Socialist International in 1900, where they won the right to be seated as the representatives of a distinct nation. At that congress, they were one of only two nation’s representatives who voted consistently with the Left-wing of the International. Connolly actively followed the debates within the international in the socialist press of Britain, continental Europe, and North America. In 1902, he went on a five-month lecture tour of the United States sponsored by the Socialist Labour Party, after which he returned not to Ireland, but finding the IRSP moribund, he returned to Edinburgh. Back in Scotland he worked for the Scottish District of the Social Democratic federation. In 1903 he chaired the inaugural meeting of the Scottish Socialist Labour Party. Shortly thereafter, however, he returned to the United States for a five year period, during which time he helped to found the Industrial Workers of the World, worked first with the SLP and subsequently with the Socialist Party and his own Irish Socialist Federation. Accordingly, while his contribution to the Irish national liberation movement was significant, it in no way overshadowed his role as a socialist on the international stage.
Another reason for Connolly’s contribution to international socialism having been undervalued has been the profound influence of the Russian Revolution in transforming the international socialist movement. This influence has had the impact of obscuring the contribution of all those revolutionary figures whose interpretation of Marxism was at odds with the views of Lenin. This is true of Connolly, as it is of other individuals of tremendous stature such as Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Hermann Gorter, and John Maclean, and James Larkin, all of whom were internationally renown in their own time. I will argue that Connolly represents the same Left Communists tradition with which these other luminaries are associated.
A Proletarian Voice
In considering the impact of James Connolly’s thought and action upon the revolutionary socialist movement, it is important to first consider that Connolly’s was a genuinely proletarian voice within that movement, and one of a relatively small number of such voices. James Connolly was born into poverty to Irish immigrant parents in Edinburgh, Scotland in June of 1868. Unlike many better-known Marxist writers, Connolly had very little formal education, having left school at the age of ten to work in the print shop of a local newspaper. At fourteen, Connolly followed the path tread by many young Irish immigrants to escape poverty in those days; lying about his age and joined the British Army. It was his enlistment in the British Army that first took him to Ireland.
In Ireland, he met and married Lillie Reynolds, who worked as a domestic servant to a unionist family in Dublin. He deserted the army at age 21 and returned to Edinburgh, where he found work as a manure carter, shoveling animal and human waste off the streets of the city. A manure carter married to a domestic servant knows a thing or two about the experiences of the working class. He knows something about the exploitation of working class women and men under capitalism. When that person possesses the intelligence and insight of Connolly, he is able to express that experience in a manner that is understandable and meaningful to other working class women and men. Connolly’s writings often display a conversational style that has the ability to put Marxist analysis before working class men and women in a way that is easily understood, never condescending, never glossed over, and which attains simplicity of expression without sacrificing clarity of analysis. Connolly’s Socialism Made Easy is easily the best primer of socialist theory and practice ever written.
Women’s Liberation
Connolly demonstrated his advanced thinking relative to other leading figures in international socialism with his consistent attention to the special oppression of women workers. Calling women workers “the slave of the slave” because of their double oppression as members of the working class exploited by capitalism and as women within the patriarchal structure of capitalist society, he fought throughout his life for the rights of women. Equally important, Connolly respected women’s contribution to the revolutionary movement and encouraged them to take roles within its leadership. It is noteworthy that when the Irish Citizen Army, under Connolly’s command, rose in armed revolt on Easter Monday of 1916, there were women volunteers within its ranks and among its officers. Moreover, he had dispatched his daughter Nora to Belfast as the chief organizer for the rebellion in the north of Ireland.
Religion and Socialism
It is too often said by those who would damn Connolly with faint praise, that Connolly retained an Irish parochialism that left him unable to separate the influence of the Catholic Church from his writings. Such assertions are at odds with the reality of Connolly’s life and personal views, as well as at odds with the reality of the international socialist movement of his day. As is the case in so many aspects of theory, the reality has been misshaped by the influence of Bolshevism within Marxism. The reality is that, as Connolly wrote to a friend in Scotland, he had abandoned religious belief on a personal level decades before, but Connolly was not at all unaware of the obstacles to socialist propaganda within the Irish working class and the influence of religious belief in shaping workers’ world views. In recognition of this reality, Connolly sought to avoid confronting Irish workers with the need to choose between their religious faith and their political creed.
This position on religious belief, however, was not a unique to Ireland in response to the sway of the Catholicism there. It was, in fact, the accepted position of the Socialist International. Because the Bolshevik model has been elevated to standard by which all else is measured, the Bolshevik’s exceptional emphasis on atheistic propaganda has come to be seen as typical of advanced Marxists in the first two decades of the 20th century, but their perspective was the exception rather than the rule. In reality, revolutionary socialists had generally understood the correctness of the position taken by Marx when he stated that religion was the “opiate” of the people—that is, that it is the pain of exploitation under capitalism which causes the working class to seek solace in religious belief and that this is best addressed by attacking the disease of capitalist exploitation, rather than the symptom of religious faith. The Dutch communists Pannekoek and Gorter, in fact, attributed the Bolsheviks’ emphasis on attacking religion to the level of development in Russia at that time. They noted that the Bolsheviks were engaged in a struggle with a fundamentally feudal social order and it was this which caused them, like the bourgeois revolutionaries of the French Revolution, to confront religion as an immediate adversary. Likewise, the circumstances of underdevelopment tended to inject a bourgeois materialism into the Bolsheviks’ writings that tended to obscure the historical materialism inherent in Marxism. Writing on the subject of religion, Council Communist Anton Pannekoek said:
They say that the goal of our socialist movement is purely economic. In that respect they are right, and we shall not fail to repeat this again and again in refutation of the lies of the preachers. We do not wish to inoculate people with a new faith, or an atheism, but we rather wish to bring about an economic transformation of society. We desire to displace capitalist production by a socialist one. Any one may realize the practicability of such a collective production and its advantages over capitalist exploitation, for reasons which have nothing at all to do with religion. To this end we want to secure the political power for the working class, since it is indispensable as a means to this end. The necessity, or at least the desirability, of this transfer of the political power can be understood by any laborer from his political experience, without any further ceremony, regardless of whether he is in matters of faith a Protestant, a Catholic, a Jew, or a Freethinker without any religion. Our propaganda, then, is to be exclusively devoted to the work of elucidating the economic advantages of socialism, and everything is to be eschewed, which might run counter to the prejudice of religious minds.[1]
Pannekoek wrote the words above as part of an essay arguing that socialism did result in a decline in religious belief, but it nonetheless expresses the general line on religious belief adopted by all of the most advanced socialist parties of western Europe and it is a perspective that is in keeping with Connolly’s approach to the subject in Ireland or among the Irish or other Catholic immigrant communities of the U.S.. Moreover, Pannekoek’s further observations later in the essay seem to reflect the actual experience of James Connolly.
Here, then, lies the cause of the irreligion of the modern class-conscious socialist proletariat. It is not the product of any intentional anti-religious propaganda. Nor is it the demand of any program. It comes rather gradually as a consequence of the deeper social insight, which the working people acquire by instruction on the field of political economy. The proletarian is not divorced from his faith by any materialist doctrines, but by teaching which enables him to see clearly and rationally through the conditions of society, and to the extent that he grasps the fact that social forces are natural effects of known causes, the old faith in miracles dies out in him.
… In declaring that religion is a private matter, we do not mean to say that it is immaterial to us, what general conceptions our members hold. We prefer a thorough scientific understanding to an unscientific religious faith. But we are convinced, that the new conditions will of themselves alter the religious conceptions, and that religious or anti-religious propaganda is unable to accomplish or prevent this.[2]
Internationalism
Connolly’s internationalism was not simply a matter of rhetorical expression, but thoroughly manifested in the reality of his life. Despite his lack of formal education, Connolly taught himself French and German to enable him to regularly read the socialist press from Continental Europe and America, where a lively socialist press in German existed. While in America, Connolly came into contact with working people drawn from many immigrant communities, who at that time formed a large portion of the revolutionary movement in America and even learned Italian to facilitate his work in the U.S. It should never be presumed that Connolly saw himself as solely as an Irish activist; in fact, at the time that he was offered the job of organizing the ISRP in Dublin, he had been actively considering moving himself and his family to Chile where, had he followed this course, I have no doubt, he would have rivaled another Irish descendent, the national hero Bernardo O’Higgins, in stature, and become as common a reference among Latin American socialists as that another South American revolutionary whose ancestors could be traced to Ireland, Che (Lynch) Guevara.
It has been the subject of far too few writings, that in relation to the collapse of the Second International on the outbreak of the first World War, Connolly arrived at a position fundamentally the same as that of the Zimmerwald Left and that he not only did so earlier than the figures of the Socialist Left who met in Zimmerwald, Switzerland to advocate turning the imperialist war into a class war, but actually led an armed body working class revolutionaries into battle against their own government to achieve this objective. As early as August 15, 1914, Connolly wrote in the German socialist periodical Forward:
Civilisation is being destroyed before our eyes; the results of generations of propaganda and patient heroic plodding and self-sacrifice are being blown into annihilation from a hundred cannon mouths; thousands of comrades with whose souls we have lived in fraternal communion are about to be done to death; they whose one hope it was to be spared to cooperate in building the perfect society of the future are being driven to fratricidal slaughter in shambles where that hope will be buried under a sea of blood.
…Believing as I do that any action would be justified which would put a stop to this colossal crime now being perpetrated, I feel compelled to express the hope that ere long we may read of the paralysing of the internal transport service on the continent, even should the act of paralysing necessitate the erection of socialist barricades and acts of rioting by socialist soldiers and sailors, as happened in Russia in 1905. Even an unsuccessful attempt at social revolution by force of arms, following the paralysis of the economic life of militarism, would be less disastrous to the socialist cause than the act of socialists allowing themselves to be used in the slaughter of their brothers in the cause. A great continental uprising of the working class would stop the war; a universal protest at public meetings will not save a single life from being wantonly slaughtered.[3]
Connolly’s writings on this theme continued throughout the war, consistently advocating a rising by the working class against its own national bourgeoisie in order to bring an end to the slaughter of workers by workers of other nations on the battlefields of World War I. In fact, in early 1916, his writings on the subject became so pronounced as to worry the Irish Republican Brotherhood that Connolly might lead the Irish Citizen Army in insurrection, thereby stealing away their mantle as the advanced section of the Irish national liberation movement. This concern was so great that the IRB are believed to have abducted Connolly for the purpose of restraining him from independently initiating an uprising against British imperialism, which ultimately resulted in Connolly being brought on to the ruling council of the IRB and the IRB entering into joint action with the ICA in the Easter Uprising later that same year.
Insofar as it was within the Zimmerwald Left that the tendency that would later shatter the Second International was born, Connolly having independently arrived at the conclusion that would later define the Zimmerwald Left must be accorded proper recognition. Without a doubt, it places Connolly politically within the ranks of the most advanced forces within the Socialist International at the time and fully aligned with those who would later forge the Left Communist tendency of international socialism. In an essay wherein Connolly discussed his opposition to Britain in its imperialist conflict with Russia, he outlines his perspective on combating imperialism in general and attacks the social imperialism so often manifested within the British socialist movement of his day.
We are, we repeat, disturbed in our mind upon the subject because we ourselves do not at all sympathise with this pro-British policy, but, on the contrary, would welcome the humiliation of the British arms in any one of the conflicts in which it is at present engaged, or with which it has been lately menaced. This we freely avow, but the question then arises: Is this hostility to the British Empire due to the fact of our national and racial subjection by that power, and does it exist in spite of our Socialism, or is it consistent with the doctrines we hold as adherents of the Marxist propaganda, and believers in the Marxist economics.
Nominally all Socialists hold to the international solidarity of Labour, and the identity of the interests of the workers the world over, and during the Franco-German and Spanish-American wars the Socialists of those countries demonstrated that the belief was no mere abstract theory, but a living, concrete fact. But our English friend, Mr. Blatchford, deliberately throws the doctrine to the winds, and declares that “when England is at war he is English and regards all those who have taken up arms against England as enemies to be fought and beaten.” This is unqualifiedly chauvinist, and as a brutal endorsement of every act of brigandage and murder in which the capitalists of England may involve their country it throws a curious sidelight on the mental make-up of this man – who very nearly shed tears of pity over the wrongs and “Christ-like appearance” of the Anarchists expelled from the International Socialist Congress in London. Our esteemed comrade, H.M. Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation, also in an article contributed to the Berlin Vorwaerts and reprinted in Justice took the position that England ought not to have given way to Russia at Port Arthur, but ought to have fought her and asserted English supremacy in the far East. His reason for so contending being the greater freedom enjoyed under British than under Russian rule.
Mr. Blatchford’s chauvinist pronouncement can be ignored as simply a personal predilection, and therefore binding no one, but the opinions of our comrades in the Social Democratic Federation of England hardly stand upon the same footing, but require severer consideration. That we may not be accused of criticising the attitude of others without stating our own, we hereby place on record our position on all questions of international policy. Scientific revolutionary Socialism teaches us that Socialism can only be realised when Capitalism has reached its zenith of development; that consequently the advance of nations industrially undeveloped into the capitalistic stage of industry is a thing highly to be desired, since such advance will breed a revolutionary proletariat in such countries and force forward here the political freedom necessary for the speedy success of the Socialist movement; and finally, that as colonial expansion and the conquest of new markets are necessary for the prolongation of the life of capitalism, the prevention of colonial expansion and the loss of markets to countries capitalistically developed, such as England, precipitates economic crises there, and so gives an impulse to revolutionary thought and helps to shorten the period required to develop backward countries and thus prepare the economic conditions needed for our triumph. That is our position.
Arguing from such premises we hold that as England is the most capitalistically developed country in Europe, every fresh conquest of territory by her armies, every sphere of influence acquired in the interests of her commercialists, is a span added to the life of capitalist society; and that every market lost, every sphere of influence captured by the non-capitalist enemies of England, shortens the life of Capitalism by aiding the development of reactionary countries, and hurling back upon itself the socially conservative industrial population of England.
It may be urged that our Irish nationality plays a large part in forming this conception of international politics here set forth. We do not plead guilty, but even if it were so the objection would be puerile. As Socialists we base our political policy on the class struggle of the workers, because we know that the self-interest of the workers lies our way. That the self-interest may sometimes be base does not affect the correctness of our position. In like manner the mere fact that the inherited (and often unreasoning) anti-British sentiment of a chauvinist Irish patriot impels him to the same conclusion as we arrived at as the result of our economic studies does not cause us to shrink from proclaiming our position, but rather leads us to rejoice that our propaganda is thus made all the easier by this none too common identity of aim established as a consequence of what we esteem the strong and irreconcilable hostility between English Imperialism and Socialism.[4]
Defense of Marx’s view on Wages
Connolly was a Marxist, both learned in Marx and Engels writings and aware of the debates ranging within the international socialist movement. As such, he was shocked to find the otherwise revolutionary Socialist Labor Party in the U.S. clinging to a Lassallean understanding of wages. Connolly’s defense of the Marxist perspective on this issue was sound, effective, and most importantly, can be argued to have won the debate in the mind of any unbiased observer. Moreover, the willingness and ability of Connolly to enter into polemical battle with the so-called Red Pope, Daniel De Leon, on the issue demonstrates his stature and maturity as a Marxist writer.
The issue was neither esoteric nor minor. The Lassallean understanding of the nature of wages carried with it the conclusion that workers organized into unions struggling for higher wages was of little or no consequence for socialist revolutionaries. In contrast to Ferdinand Lassalle’s view that any increase in income gained from a raise in workers’ wages would be negated by increased prices, Marx argued that workers demands for increased wages could directly impinge on the profits of the capitalist class, as prices were subject to market forces and could not be adjusted at will. Thus the struggle of workers for more income brought them into direct contradiction with the ability of the capitalist class to control the extent of expropriation of surplus labor. The Lassallean perspective embraced by the American SLP had the affect of disengaging the party from active support for the militant action of unions to improve the standard of living for members of the working class, whereas the Marxist perspective on wages had the contrasting impact of prompting the socialist movement to engage in active support of union battles. This latter point is of tremendous importance for Connolly, who distinguished himself beyond any other leading Marxist for his actions as an industrial union organizer and leader.
In most parts of the international socialist movement, the leaders of the trade union sections represented the party’s right-wing and often exerted a conservative influence on the party’s program. It is therefore no surprise that few of the leading figures of international socialism have been associated with union organizing. In sharp contrast, Connolly, with James Larkin, was a major force in the industrial union movement in Ireland and through the IWW made an important contribution to industrial unionism in America as well. This contribution can no doubt be attributed to a great extent to Connolly’s own working class roots, but it serves to make him stand out as one of the foremost figures in the tendency that later became known as Council Communism, as will be discussed later.
Workers’ Democracy
Connolly was among the earliest socialist writers to grasp the reality inherent in historical materialism of Marxism--that the working class must develop unique forms of organization, struggle, and social administration. The lesson of Marxism (that classes within society have unique and mutually antagonistic interests and the understanding that the ascendancy of the capitalist class necessitated the creation of unique social institutions reflecting bourgeois interests) was seemingly missed by many leading Marxists. However, after witnessing the experience of the revolutionary struggle waged in Russia in 1905, a number of Marxist writers took note of the new organizational forms wrought by the working class.
The great Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg was among the earliest writers to recognize the importance of the new structures forged by the working class in the heat of the class war. Known in Russian as soviets, they became known in English as workers councils. Recognizing their importance sufficiently to advocate support for them as the leading focus of revolutionary struggle, even when their immaturity resulted in their erroneous rejection of the revolutionary parties of socialism, Luxemburg’s writings contain a clear anticipation that socialist parties will be forced to strive to keep up with the innovative leadership shown by these organic bodies of the working class in the midst of struggle.
This understanding of the importance of the working class forging its own structures of social organization led to the creation of an anti-parliamentarian tendency that was especially influential in the socialist movements of Germany and the Netherlands. Connolly, like Luxemburg, never embraced the anti-parliamentarian perspective within the socialist movement, though their relatively early deaths at the hands of the imperialists and reactionaries make it impossible to assess what direction their thinking might have taken, had they lived to see this tendency emerge fully mature. However, some of Connolly’s writings provide a suggestion that his thinking was moving in this direction. He wrote:
The democracy of Parliament is in short the democracy of Capitalism. Capitalism gives to the worker the right to choose his master, but insists that the fact of mastership shall remain unquestioned; Parliamentary Democracy gives to the worker the right to a voice in the selection of his rulers but insists that he shall bend as a subject to be ruled. The fundamental feature of both in their relation to the worker is that they imply his continued subjection to a ruling class once his choice of the personnel of the rulers is made. But the freedom of the revolutionist will change the choice of rulers which we have to-day into the choice of administrators of laws voted upon directly by the people; and will also substitute for the choice of masters (capitalists) the appointment of reliable public servants under direct public control. That will mean true democracy – the industrial democracy of the SocialistRepublic.[5]
In Connolly’s vision of industrial unionism lies the same fundamental perspective that was later to give rise to the emphasis on economic organization by the Council Communists of the KAP of the Netherlands and the KAPD of Germany that complimented their anti-parliamentary propaganda. Connolly expressed his perspective well in an essay, which again captures the theme of class struggle being brought to bear against the imperialist slaughter of the First World War.
I believe the war could have been prevented by the socialists; as it was not prevented and as the issues are knit, I want to see England beaten so thoroughly that the commerce of the seas will hence-forth be free to all nations – to the smallest equally with the greatest. But how could this war have been prevented, which is another way of saying how and why did the socialist movement fail to prevent it?
The full answer to that question can only be grasped by those who are familiar with the propaganda that from 1905 onwards has been known as ‘industrialist’ in the United States and, though not so accurately, has been called ‘syndicalist’ in Europe.
…In all the belligerent countries of western and central Europe the socialist vote was very large; in none of these belligerent countries was there an organised revolutionary industrial organisation directing the socialist vote nor a socialist political party directing a revolutionary industrial organisation. The socialist voters having cast their ballots were helpless, as voters, until the next election; as workers, they were indeed in control of the forces of production and distribution, and by exercising that control over the transport service could have made the war impossible. But the idea of thus coordinating their two spheres of activity had not gained sufficient lodgment to be effective in the emergency.
No socialist party in Europe could say that rather than go to war it would call out the entire transport service of the country and thus prevent mobilisation. No socialist party could say so, because no socialist party could have the slightest reasonable prospect of having such a call obeyed.
…To sum up then, the failure of European socialism to avert the war is primarily due to the divorce between the industrial and political movements of labour. The socialist voter, as such, is helpless between elections. He requires to organise power to enforce the mandate of the elections and the only power he can so organise is economic power – the power to stop the wheels of commerce, to control the heart that sends the life blood pulsating through the social organism.[6]
Nationalization vs. Expropriation of the Expropriators
One area of Connolly’s writings that deserve far greater attention today, because the error Connolly addressed in these writings continues to range broadly throughout the Left, is on the subject of the nationalization of property. To many contemporary socialists, nationalization of property is seen as inherently socialist. In fact, the nationalized industry of the former Soviet Union or of the People’s Republic of China is often cited as the ‘proof’ of these countries having attained socialism. Connolly disputed this perspective repeatedly in his writings calling into question those within the socialist movement who advocated municipalization or nationalizing of industries. Connolly expressed his perspective on this question in the following excerpt from his writings:
One of the most significant signs of our times is the readiness with which our struggling middle class turns to schemes of State or Municipal ownership and control, for relief from the economic pressure under which it is struggling. Thus we find in England demands for the nationalisation of the telephone system, for the extension of municipal enterprise in the use of electricity, for the extension of the parcel system in the Post Office, for the nationalisation of railways and canals. In Ireland we have our middle class reformers demanding state help for agriculture, state purchase of lands, arterial draining, state construction of docks, piers and harbours, state aid for the fishing industry, state control of the relations between agricultural tenant and landlord, and also nationalisation of railways and canals.
There is a certain section of Socialists, chiefly in England, who never tire of hailing all such demands for state activity as a sign of the growth of the Socialist spirit among the middle class, and therefore worthy of all the support the working-class democracy can give. In some degree such a view seems justifiable. The fact that large sections of the capitalist class join in demanding the intervention of the State in industry is a sure sign that they, at least, have lost the overweening belief in the all-sufficiency of private enterprise which characterised their class a generation ago; and that they have been forced to recognise the fact that there are a multitude of things in which the ‘brain’, ‘self-reliance’, and ‘personal responsibility’ of the capitalist are entirely unnecessary. To argue that, since in such enterprises the private property-holder is dispensed with, therefore he can be dispensed with in all other forms of industrial activity, is logical enough and we really fail to see in what manner the advocates of capitalist society can continue to clamour for such state ownership as that alluded to – ownership in which the private capitalist is seen to be superfluous, and yet continue to argue that in all other forms of industry the private capitalist is indispensable. For it must be remembered that every function of a useful character performed by the State or Municipality to-day was at one time performed by private individuals for profit, and in conformity with the then generally accepted belief that it could not be satisfactorily performed except by private individuals.
But all this notwithstanding, we would, without undue desire to carp or cavil, point out that to call such demands ‘Socialistic’ is in the highest degree misleading. Socialism properly implies above all things the co-operative control by the workers of the machinery of production; without this co-operative control the public ownership by the State is not Socialism—it is only State capitalism.
…Schemes of state and municipal ownership, if unaccompanied by this co-operative principle, are but schemes for the perfectioning of the mechanism of capitalist government-schemes to make the capitalist regime respectable and efficient for the purposes of the capitalist; in the second place they represent the class-conscious instinct of the business man who feels that capitalist should not prey upon capitalist, while all may unite to prey upon the workers.[7]
More recently, it has been the Council Communist tendency that has emerged as the leading critics of the fallacy of associating the nationalization of industry, or the creation of ‘public ownership’, with the socialist reconstruction of society. Flowing from this, this tendency has been the leading source of the critique of what is now called state capitalism. As Anton Pannekoek wrote:
Marx never spoke of socialization; he spoke of the expropriation of the expropriators. Of the two principal transformations brought about within production by socialism: the suppression of exploitation and the organisation of the economic system, the first is the principal and most important one for the proletariat. One could conceive of an organisation of production on a capitalist basis, it would then lead to state socialism, a more complete slavery and exploitation of the proletariat by the centralised force of the state. The suppression of exploitation with dispersed production was the ideal of the old cooperators and anarchists, but where the suppression of exploitation is achieved, as in communist Russia, one must immediately deal with the organisation of production.
.…If the proletariat improves its working conditions so much that companies no longer return a profit on capital, their capitalist value will fall to zero; the factories may be useful to society, but they will have lost their value for capitalists. Money then loses the ability to produce more money, more surplus-value, because the workers no longer allow themselves to be exploited. This is the expropriation which Marx envisaged. Capitalist property will be suppressed because capital will be without value, without profit. This economic expropriation through which property loses its value and is consequently destroyed, even though the right of free disposal remains, is the opposite of the legal expropriation often applied in the capitalist world, through which the right of free disposal is removed, while allowing the property to remain through compensation. It goes without saying that legal expropriations will also occur in passing over to socialism. The political power of the proletariat will take all measures which are useful for the suppression of exploitation. It will not be satisfied just to limit the former employers' right of free exploitation, through the regularisation of wages, working hours and prices, it will suppress it completely. The economic basis of these measures is laid down by what precedes them; it is not confiscation of all property as the frightened petit bourgeois thinks, but the suppression of any right to surplus-value, to an income not produced by labour. It is the legal expression of the political fact that the proletariat is master and that it will no longer allow itself to be exploited.[8]
Syndicalist ‘Deviation’
The ultimate triumph of the Leninist tendency within contemporary socialism has made it commonplace for writers on Connolly’s contribution to international socialism to speak of his “Syndicalist deviation.” Those familiar with the actual historical reality of the international socialist movement in the first decades of the 20th century, however, will know that “industrial unionism” the preferred phrase of Connolly which he equated with Syndicalism, represented the vanguard of socialist organizing efforts in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. In the United States this tendency was represented by no organization as prominently as by the Industrial Workers of the World. While the Wobblies became associated with anarchism within a little over a decade of their founding, the boundaries between those the socialist and anarchist movements were far from well defined and mutually exclusive at the time.
Connolly saw in industrial unionism the means of organizing the working class where their source of power lay, in the arena of production. Moreover, akin to the view expressed by other Marxists on the nature of the workers’ councils, Connolly recognized the industrial union as the potential means by which the working class could create the basis for the administration of a future socialist republic within the husk of capitalism.
Between, on the one hand, the new economic organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, which prepares and organizes the administrative framework of society in the future, and at the same time furnishes the only effective method of resistance against present-day encroachments of the master class, and on the other hand the old-style pure and simple trade unionism of the AF of L with its system of dividing the working class and its professed belief in the identity of interests between Capital and Labor, between these two economic organizations our choice is as plain and unmistakable as between Socialism and Capitalism; indeed, it is the same proposition presented in different terms. And as we believe that all working class Socialists must realize that their place is in the only real economic organization truly worthy of the name of union, the IWW, so we believe that the same body has it in its power to solve the problem of Socialist unity. On the day that the IWW launches its own political party it will put an end to all excuse for two Socialist parties and open the way for a real and effective unification of the revolutionary forces. To it will flock all the real proletarians, all the loyal-hearted working class whom distrust and suspicion have so long kept divided: it will be the real Political Party of the Workers – the weapon by which the working class will register the decrees which its economic army must and shall enforce.[9]
While advocating for continued political activism within the IWW, Connolly clearly held the economic organization of the working class to be of primary importance for the class struggle. He demonstrated this in Ireland with his effort organizing and his leadership of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, which remains today, under a revised name, by far the largest union in Ireland and during his stay in America through his work with the IWW. Castigating those who sought to put support of the American Federation of Labor on the same footing with support for the IWW, Connolly wrote:
The most dispersive and isolating force at work in the labour movement today is craft unionism, the most cohesive and unifying force, industrial unionism. In view of that fact all objections which my comrades make to industrial unionism on the grounds of the supposedly, or truly, anti-political bias of many members of the Industrial Workers of the World is quite beside the mark. That question at the present stage of the game is purely doctrinaire. The use or non-use of political action will not be settled by the doctrinaires who may make it their hobby today, but will be settled by the workers who use the Industrial Workers of the World in their workshop struggles. And if at any time the conditions of a struggle in shop, factory, railroad or mine necessitate the employment of political action those workers so organized will use it, all theories and theorists to the contrary notwithstanding. In their march to freedom the workers will use every weapon they find necessary. As the economic struggle is the preparatory school and training ground for Socialists it is our duty to help guide along right lines the effort of the workers to choose the correct kind of organization to fight their battles in that conflict. According as they choose aright or wrongly, so will the development of class consciousness in their minds be hastened or retarded by their everyday experience in class struggles.[10]
National Liberation Inseparable from the Class Struggle
Connolly’s contribution for which is most readily recognized is in his melding of the national liberation struggle with the class struggle, but while it is widely recognized, it is less than fully understood. His understanding of the nature of imperialism shaped Connolly’s perspective on Irish national liberation. Far from falling prey to the nationalist tradition of Ireland, Connolly repeatedly asserted that Irish workers had no interest in a nationally independent Ireland that remained capitalist.
Let us free Ireland!
The rackrenting landlord; is he not also an Irishman, and wherefore should we hate him? Nay, let us not speak harshly of our brother - yea, even when he raises our rent.
Let us free Ireland !
The profit-grinding capitalist, who robs us of three-fourths of the fruits of our labour, who sucks the very marrow of our bones when we were young, and then throws us out in the street, like a worn-out tool, when we are grown prematurely old in his service, is he not an Irishman, and mayhap a patriot, and wherefore should we think harshly of him?
Let us free Ireland!
"The land that bred and bore us." And the landlord who makes us pay for permission to live upon it.
Whoop it up for liberty!
"Let us free Ireland," says the patriot, who won't touch Socialism.
…Whoop it up for liberty!
And, says the agricultural workers, after we have freed Ireland, what then?
Oh, then you can go scraping around for the landlord's rent or the money-lenders' interest same as before.
Whoop it up for liberty!
After Ireland is free, says the patriot who won't touch Socialism, we will protect all classes, and if you won't pay your rent you will be evicted same as now. But the evicting party, under command of the sheriff, will wear green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the roadside will be stamped with the arms of the IrishRepublic.
Now, isn't that worth fighting for?[11]
In discussing national liberation, a primary consideration was placed on Connolly’s very definition of the nation, which is not a political abstraction concerning a given piece of geography, but the reality of the people who inhabit that geography. The Irish working class are those people, or at least the majority of those people, and Connolly made plain that one could not speak sensibly about the liberation of the nation, while the majority of its people remained enchained. Moreover his views on Irish national liberation arose out of his recognition that the Irish capitalist class existed in a comprador relationship to the more powerful imperialist nation’s capitalists. Such being the case, national sovereignty could never truly be established in a capitalist Ireland. In short, not only would Irish workers remain oppressed by exploitation in an independent capitalist Ireland, but independence would be cosmetic at best so long as Ireland remained capitalist. In advancing this perspective on the meaning of national liberation in the era of imperialism, Connolly brought to full flower a distinct tendency within the Irish republican tradition, that of republican socialism, which significantly departs from the earlier tradition. Connolly advanced this perspective repeatedly, one notable example being the following:
We are out for Ireland for the Irish. But who are the Irish? Not the rack-renting, slum-owning landlord; not the sweating, profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman – the hired liars of the enemy. Not these are the Irish upon whom the future depends. Not these, but the Irish working class, the only secure foundation upon which a free nation can be reared.
The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered. Ireland seeks freedom. Labour seeks that an Ireland free should be the sole mistress of her own destiny, supreme owner of all material things within and upon her soil. Labour seeks to make the free Irish nation the guardian of the interests of the people of Ireland, and to secure that end would vest in that free Irish nation all property rights as against the claims of the individual, with the end in view that the individual may be enriched by the nation, and not by the spoiling of his fellows.[12]
The adoption by the Communist International of the “stagiest” theory of socialist struggle in those nations exploited by imperialism has led to the idea being widely accepted that the working class should put off its struggle against capitalism until after achieving some shared objective with its own capitalist class. It is a perspective for which little support can be found in the writings of James Connolly. Moreover, it is a perspective predicated on the mistaken assumption that working class struggle is required to “wait its turn” in the waging of social revolution. This view is ahistorical and certainly anti-Marxist. This is not to say that the working class can hope to win the struggle for the mastery over the means of production and the political machinery necessary to administer it before capitalism has completed its historic tasks of industrializing society, centralizing production, proletarianizing the populace, and creating the circumstances whereby society can end the scarcity of the material wealth needed to survive and prosper. Socialism will not be established until scarcity can be made archaic, until the working class constitutes the majority of the populace, and until capital is sufficiently centralized to permit for it relatively easy expropriation, but the working class will fight for its interests against its class enemies over and over and over before it is victorious. Connolly consistently defended the independence of the working class in political struggle throughout his life, with the exception of the events that brought about the end of that life.
Connolly’s bringing the ICA into insurrection with the IRB/ Irish Volunteers in the Easter Rising is an action in stark contradiction to the position he took repeatedly concerning the role of the working class within the national liberation movement. We must assume, based on the perspective put forward over and over again up to the very eve of the Rising that Connolly had sought to use the bourgeois nationalist forces to the advantage of the working class, while maintaining the ICA’s independence, so as to then carry the struggle forward into open class warfare. We know that only a week before the Rising, Connolly said to the volunteers of the ICA, “The odds against us are a thousand to one. But if we should win, hold onto your rifles because the Volunteers may have a different goal. Remember, we are not only for political liberty, but for economic liberty as well."
Sadly, Connolly’s death before a firing squad as a result of his participation in the Rising left him unable to explain his views on the subject and permitted the bourgeois nationalists to co-opt Connolly’s legacy. The resulting confusion has plagued Irish republican socialism repeatedly, as the joint Rising by the ICA and the IRB/Irish Volunteers has been held up as a model for working class action in Ireland, despite Connolly’s writings advocating against this perspective time and time again.
NOTES
[1]Anton Pannekoek, Socialism and Religion from the International Socialist Review, April 1907.
[2] Ibid.
[3]James Connolly, Continental Revolution in Forward, 15 August 1914
[4]James Connolly, Imperialism and Socialism from the Workers’ Republic, 4 November 1899.
[5]James Connolly, Parliamentary Democracy from the Workers’ Republic, 22 September 1900, republished in James Connolly: Lost Writings, (ed. Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh), Pluto Press 1997.
[6]James Connolly, Revolutionary Unionism and War from the International Socialist Review, March 1915.
[7]James Connolly,The New Evangel-State Monopoly versus Socialism from the Workers’ Republic, 10 June 1899
[8]Anton Pannekoek, Socialization from in The Internationale, volume one, numbers 13-14, September 1919.
[9]James Connolly,A Political Party of the Workers from The Harp, January 1908.
[10]James Connolly, Industrialism and the Trade Unions from International Socialist Review, February 1910.
[11]James Connolly, Socialism Made Easy.
[12]James Connolly, The Irish Flag from the Workers’ Republic, 8 April 1916.
James Connolly is often spoken of as ‘Ireland’s greatest Marxists’ but this description fails to adequately express Connolly’s stature. James Connolly was a revolutionary working class activist, leader, and theorist on an international level and should be recognized as one of the world’s greatest Marxists. In part, the cooptation of Connolly by the forces of Irish nationalism after his death in 1916 has tended to render Connolly far more parochial than is appropriate and has contributed to Connolly’s contribution to international socialism not having been generally recognized. James Connolly was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was active in the socialist movement in Scotland and thereby was active in the British socialist movement. His first party in Ireland, the Irish Socialist Republican Party counted Eleanor and Edward Marx-Aveling among its supporters. The ISRP participated in the Paris Congress of the Socialist International in 1900, where they won the right to be seated as the representatives of a distinct nation. At that congress, they were one of only two nation’s representatives who voted consistently with the Left-wing of the International. Connolly actively followed the debates within the international in the socialist press of Britain, continental Europe, and North America. In 1902, he went on a five-month lecture tour of the United States sponsored by the Socialist Labour Party, after which he returned not to Ireland, but finding the IRSP moribund, he returned to Edinburgh. Back in Scotland he worked for the Scottish District of the Social Democratic federation. In 1903 he chaired the inaugural meeting of the Scottish Socialist Labour Party. Shortly thereafter, however, he returned to the United States for a five year period, during which time he helped to found the Industrial Workers of the World, worked first with the SLP and subsequently with the Socialist Party and his own Irish Socialist Federation. Accordingly, while his contribution to the Irish national liberation movement was significant, it in no way overshadowed his role as a socialist on the international stage.
Another reason for Connolly’s contribution to international socialism having been undervalued has been the profound influence of the Russian Revolution in transforming the international socialist movement. This influence has had the impact of obscuring the contribution of all those revolutionary figures whose interpretation of Marxism was at odds with the views of Lenin. This is true of Connolly, as it is of other individuals of tremendous stature such as Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Hermann Gorter, and John Maclean, and James Larkin, all of whom were internationally renown in their own time. I will argue that Connolly represents the same Left Communists tradition with which these other luminaries are associated.
A Proletarian Voice
In considering the impact of James Connolly’s thought and action upon the revolutionary socialist movement, it is important to first consider that Connolly’s was a genuinely proletarian voice within that movement, and one of a relatively small number of such voices. James Connolly was born into poverty to Irish immigrant parents in Edinburgh, Scotland in June of 1868. Unlike many better-known Marxist writers, Connolly had very little formal education, having left school at the age of ten to work in the print shop of a local newspaper. At fourteen, Connolly followed the path tread by many young Irish immigrants to escape poverty in those days; lying about his age and joined the British Army. It was his enlistment in the British Army that first took him to Ireland.
In Ireland, he met and married Lillie Reynolds, who worked as a domestic servant to a unionist family in Dublin. He deserted the army at age 21 and returned to Edinburgh, where he found work as a manure carter, shoveling animal and human waste off the streets of the city. A manure carter married to a domestic servant knows a thing or two about the experiences of the working class. He knows something about the exploitation of working class women and men under capitalism. When that person possesses the intelligence and insight of Connolly, he is able to express that experience in a manner that is understandable and meaningful to other working class women and men. Connolly’s writings often display a conversational style that has the ability to put Marxist analysis before working class men and women in a way that is easily understood, never condescending, never glossed over, and which attains simplicity of expression without sacrificing clarity of analysis. Connolly’s Socialism Made Easy is easily the best primer of socialist theory and practice ever written.
Women’s Liberation
Connolly demonstrated his advanced thinking relative to other leading figures in international socialism with his consistent attention to the special oppression of women workers. Calling women workers “the slave of the slave” because of their double oppression as members of the working class exploited by capitalism and as women within the patriarchal structure of capitalist society, he fought throughout his life for the rights of women. Equally important, Connolly respected women’s contribution to the revolutionary movement and encouraged them to take roles within its leadership. It is noteworthy that when the Irish Citizen Army, under Connolly’s command, rose in armed revolt on Easter Monday of 1916, there were women volunteers within its ranks and among its officers. Moreover, he had dispatched his daughter Nora to Belfast as the chief organizer for the rebellion in the north of Ireland.
Religion and Socialism
It is too often said by those who would damn Connolly with faint praise, that Connolly retained an Irish parochialism that left him unable to separate the influence of the Catholic Church from his writings. Such assertions are at odds with the reality of Connolly’s life and personal views, as well as at odds with the reality of the international socialist movement of his day. As is the case in so many aspects of theory, the reality has been misshaped by the influence of Bolshevism within Marxism. The reality is that, as Connolly wrote to a friend in Scotland, he had abandoned religious belief on a personal level decades before, but Connolly was not at all unaware of the obstacles to socialist propaganda within the Irish working class and the influence of religious belief in shaping workers’ world views. In recognition of this reality, Connolly sought to avoid confronting Irish workers with the need to choose between their religious faith and their political creed.
This position on religious belief, however, was not a unique to Ireland in response to the sway of the Catholicism there. It was, in fact, the accepted position of the Socialist International. Because the Bolshevik model has been elevated to standard by which all else is measured, the Bolshevik’s exceptional emphasis on atheistic propaganda has come to be seen as typical of advanced Marxists in the first two decades of the 20th century, but their perspective was the exception rather than the rule. In reality, revolutionary socialists had generally understood the correctness of the position taken by Marx when he stated that religion was the “opiate” of the people—that is, that it is the pain of exploitation under capitalism which causes the working class to seek solace in religious belief and that this is best addressed by attacking the disease of capitalist exploitation, rather than the symptom of religious faith. The Dutch communists Pannekoek and Gorter, in fact, attributed the Bolsheviks’ emphasis on attacking religion to the level of development in Russia at that time. They noted that the Bolsheviks were engaged in a struggle with a fundamentally feudal social order and it was this which caused them, like the bourgeois revolutionaries of the French Revolution, to confront religion as an immediate adversary. Likewise, the circumstances of underdevelopment tended to inject a bourgeois materialism into the Bolsheviks’ writings that tended to obscure the historical materialism inherent in Marxism. Writing on the subject of religion, Council Communist Anton Pannekoek said:
They say that the goal of our socialist movement is purely economic. In that respect they are right, and we shall not fail to repeat this again and again in refutation of the lies of the preachers. We do not wish to inoculate people with a new faith, or an atheism, but we rather wish to bring about an economic transformation of society. We desire to displace capitalist production by a socialist one. Any one may realize the practicability of such a collective production and its advantages over capitalist exploitation, for reasons which have nothing at all to do with religion. To this end we want to secure the political power for the working class, since it is indispensable as a means to this end. The necessity, or at least the desirability, of this transfer of the political power can be understood by any laborer from his political experience, without any further ceremony, regardless of whether he is in matters of faith a Protestant, a Catholic, a Jew, or a Freethinker without any religion. Our propaganda, then, is to be exclusively devoted to the work of elucidating the economic advantages of socialism, and everything is to be eschewed, which might run counter to the prejudice of religious minds.[1]
Pannekoek wrote the words above as part of an essay arguing that socialism did result in a decline in religious belief, but it nonetheless expresses the general line on religious belief adopted by all of the most advanced socialist parties of western Europe and it is a perspective that is in keeping with Connolly’s approach to the subject in Ireland or among the Irish or other Catholic immigrant communities of the U.S.. Moreover, Pannekoek’s further observations later in the essay seem to reflect the actual experience of James Connolly.
Here, then, lies the cause of the irreligion of the modern class-conscious socialist proletariat. It is not the product of any intentional anti-religious propaganda. Nor is it the demand of any program. It comes rather gradually as a consequence of the deeper social insight, which the working people acquire by instruction on the field of political economy. The proletarian is not divorced from his faith by any materialist doctrines, but by teaching which enables him to see clearly and rationally through the conditions of society, and to the extent that he grasps the fact that social forces are natural effects of known causes, the old faith in miracles dies out in him.
… In declaring that religion is a private matter, we do not mean to say that it is immaterial to us, what general conceptions our members hold. We prefer a thorough scientific understanding to an unscientific religious faith. But we are convinced, that the new conditions will of themselves alter the religious conceptions, and that religious or anti-religious propaganda is unable to accomplish or prevent this.[2]
Internationalism
Connolly’s internationalism was not simply a matter of rhetorical expression, but thoroughly manifested in the reality of his life. Despite his lack of formal education, Connolly taught himself French and German to enable him to regularly read the socialist press from Continental Europe and America, where a lively socialist press in German existed. While in America, Connolly came into contact with working people drawn from many immigrant communities, who at that time formed a large portion of the revolutionary movement in America and even learned Italian to facilitate his work in the U.S. It should never be presumed that Connolly saw himself as solely as an Irish activist; in fact, at the time that he was offered the job of organizing the ISRP in Dublin, he had been actively considering moving himself and his family to Chile where, had he followed this course, I have no doubt, he would have rivaled another Irish descendent, the national hero Bernardo O’Higgins, in stature, and become as common a reference among Latin American socialists as that another South American revolutionary whose ancestors could be traced to Ireland, Che (Lynch) Guevara.
It has been the subject of far too few writings, that in relation to the collapse of the Second International on the outbreak of the first World War, Connolly arrived at a position fundamentally the same as that of the Zimmerwald Left and that he not only did so earlier than the figures of the Socialist Left who met in Zimmerwald, Switzerland to advocate turning the imperialist war into a class war, but actually led an armed body working class revolutionaries into battle against their own government to achieve this objective. As early as August 15, 1914, Connolly wrote in the German socialist periodical Forward:
Civilisation is being destroyed before our eyes; the results of generations of propaganda and patient heroic plodding and self-sacrifice are being blown into annihilation from a hundred cannon mouths; thousands of comrades with whose souls we have lived in fraternal communion are about to be done to death; they whose one hope it was to be spared to cooperate in building the perfect society of the future are being driven to fratricidal slaughter in shambles where that hope will be buried under a sea of blood.
…Believing as I do that any action would be justified which would put a stop to this colossal crime now being perpetrated, I feel compelled to express the hope that ere long we may read of the paralysing of the internal transport service on the continent, even should the act of paralysing necessitate the erection of socialist barricades and acts of rioting by socialist soldiers and sailors, as happened in Russia in 1905. Even an unsuccessful attempt at social revolution by force of arms, following the paralysis of the economic life of militarism, would be less disastrous to the socialist cause than the act of socialists allowing themselves to be used in the slaughter of their brothers in the cause. A great continental uprising of the working class would stop the war; a universal protest at public meetings will not save a single life from being wantonly slaughtered.[3]
Connolly’s writings on this theme continued throughout the war, consistently advocating a rising by the working class against its own national bourgeoisie in order to bring an end to the slaughter of workers by workers of other nations on the battlefields of World War I. In fact, in early 1916, his writings on the subject became so pronounced as to worry the Irish Republican Brotherhood that Connolly might lead the Irish Citizen Army in insurrection, thereby stealing away their mantle as the advanced section of the Irish national liberation movement. This concern was so great that the IRB are believed to have abducted Connolly for the purpose of restraining him from independently initiating an uprising against British imperialism, which ultimately resulted in Connolly being brought on to the ruling council of the IRB and the IRB entering into joint action with the ICA in the Easter Uprising later that same year.
Insofar as it was within the Zimmerwald Left that the tendency that would later shatter the Second International was born, Connolly having independently arrived at the conclusion that would later define the Zimmerwald Left must be accorded proper recognition. Without a doubt, it places Connolly politically within the ranks of the most advanced forces within the Socialist International at the time and fully aligned with those who would later forge the Left Communist tendency of international socialism. In an essay wherein Connolly discussed his opposition to Britain in its imperialist conflict with Russia, he outlines his perspective on combating imperialism in general and attacks the social imperialism so often manifested within the British socialist movement of his day.
We are, we repeat, disturbed in our mind upon the subject because we ourselves do not at all sympathise with this pro-British policy, but, on the contrary, would welcome the humiliation of the British arms in any one of the conflicts in which it is at present engaged, or with which it has been lately menaced. This we freely avow, but the question then arises: Is this hostility to the British Empire due to the fact of our national and racial subjection by that power, and does it exist in spite of our Socialism, or is it consistent with the doctrines we hold as adherents of the Marxist propaganda, and believers in the Marxist economics.
Nominally all Socialists hold to the international solidarity of Labour, and the identity of the interests of the workers the world over, and during the Franco-German and Spanish-American wars the Socialists of those countries demonstrated that the belief was no mere abstract theory, but a living, concrete fact. But our English friend, Mr. Blatchford, deliberately throws the doctrine to the winds, and declares that “when England is at war he is English and regards all those who have taken up arms against England as enemies to be fought and beaten.” This is unqualifiedly chauvinist, and as a brutal endorsement of every act of brigandage and murder in which the capitalists of England may involve their country it throws a curious sidelight on the mental make-up of this man – who very nearly shed tears of pity over the wrongs and “Christ-like appearance” of the Anarchists expelled from the International Socialist Congress in London. Our esteemed comrade, H.M. Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation, also in an article contributed to the Berlin Vorwaerts and reprinted in Justice took the position that England ought not to have given way to Russia at Port Arthur, but ought to have fought her and asserted English supremacy in the far East. His reason for so contending being the greater freedom enjoyed under British than under Russian rule.
Mr. Blatchford’s chauvinist pronouncement can be ignored as simply a personal predilection, and therefore binding no one, but the opinions of our comrades in the Social Democratic Federation of England hardly stand upon the same footing, but require severer consideration. That we may not be accused of criticising the attitude of others without stating our own, we hereby place on record our position on all questions of international policy. Scientific revolutionary Socialism teaches us that Socialism can only be realised when Capitalism has reached its zenith of development; that consequently the advance of nations industrially undeveloped into the capitalistic stage of industry is a thing highly to be desired, since such advance will breed a revolutionary proletariat in such countries and force forward here the political freedom necessary for the speedy success of the Socialist movement; and finally, that as colonial expansion and the conquest of new markets are necessary for the prolongation of the life of capitalism, the prevention of colonial expansion and the loss of markets to countries capitalistically developed, such as England, precipitates economic crises there, and so gives an impulse to revolutionary thought and helps to shorten the period required to develop backward countries and thus prepare the economic conditions needed for our triumph. That is our position.
Arguing from such premises we hold that as England is the most capitalistically developed country in Europe, every fresh conquest of territory by her armies, every sphere of influence acquired in the interests of her commercialists, is a span added to the life of capitalist society; and that every market lost, every sphere of influence captured by the non-capitalist enemies of England, shortens the life of Capitalism by aiding the development of reactionary countries, and hurling back upon itself the socially conservative industrial population of England.
It may be urged that our Irish nationality plays a large part in forming this conception of international politics here set forth. We do not plead guilty, but even if it were so the objection would be puerile. As Socialists we base our political policy on the class struggle of the workers, because we know that the self-interest of the workers lies our way. That the self-interest may sometimes be base does not affect the correctness of our position. In like manner the mere fact that the inherited (and often unreasoning) anti-British sentiment of a chauvinist Irish patriot impels him to the same conclusion as we arrived at as the result of our economic studies does not cause us to shrink from proclaiming our position, but rather leads us to rejoice that our propaganda is thus made all the easier by this none too common identity of aim established as a consequence of what we esteem the strong and irreconcilable hostility between English Imperialism and Socialism.[4]
Defense of Marx’s view on Wages
Connolly was a Marxist, both learned in Marx and Engels writings and aware of the debates ranging within the international socialist movement. As such, he was shocked to find the otherwise revolutionary Socialist Labor Party in the U.S. clinging to a Lassallean understanding of wages. Connolly’s defense of the Marxist perspective on this issue was sound, effective, and most importantly, can be argued to have won the debate in the mind of any unbiased observer. Moreover, the willingness and ability of Connolly to enter into polemical battle with the so-called Red Pope, Daniel De Leon, on the issue demonstrates his stature and maturity as a Marxist writer.
The issue was neither esoteric nor minor. The Lassallean understanding of the nature of wages carried with it the conclusion that workers organized into unions struggling for higher wages was of little or no consequence for socialist revolutionaries. In contrast to Ferdinand Lassalle’s view that any increase in income gained from a raise in workers’ wages would be negated by increased prices, Marx argued that workers demands for increased wages could directly impinge on the profits of the capitalist class, as prices were subject to market forces and could not be adjusted at will. Thus the struggle of workers for more income brought them into direct contradiction with the ability of the capitalist class to control the extent of expropriation of surplus labor. The Lassallean perspective embraced by the American SLP had the affect of disengaging the party from active support for the militant action of unions to improve the standard of living for members of the working class, whereas the Marxist perspective on wages had the contrasting impact of prompting the socialist movement to engage in active support of union battles. This latter point is of tremendous importance for Connolly, who distinguished himself beyond any other leading Marxist for his actions as an industrial union organizer and leader.
In most parts of the international socialist movement, the leaders of the trade union sections represented the party’s right-wing and often exerted a conservative influence on the party’s program. It is therefore no surprise that few of the leading figures of international socialism have been associated with union organizing. In sharp contrast, Connolly, with James Larkin, was a major force in the industrial union movement in Ireland and through the IWW made an important contribution to industrial unionism in America as well. This contribution can no doubt be attributed to a great extent to Connolly’s own working class roots, but it serves to make him stand out as one of the foremost figures in the tendency that later became known as Council Communism, as will be discussed later.
Workers’ Democracy
Connolly was among the earliest socialist writers to grasp the reality inherent in historical materialism of Marxism--that the working class must develop unique forms of organization, struggle, and social administration. The lesson of Marxism (that classes within society have unique and mutually antagonistic interests and the understanding that the ascendancy of the capitalist class necessitated the creation of unique social institutions reflecting bourgeois interests) was seemingly missed by many leading Marxists. However, after witnessing the experience of the revolutionary struggle waged in Russia in 1905, a number of Marxist writers took note of the new organizational forms wrought by the working class.
The great Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg was among the earliest writers to recognize the importance of the new structures forged by the working class in the heat of the class war. Known in Russian as soviets, they became known in English as workers councils. Recognizing their importance sufficiently to advocate support for them as the leading focus of revolutionary struggle, even when their immaturity resulted in their erroneous rejection of the revolutionary parties of socialism, Luxemburg’s writings contain a clear anticipation that socialist parties will be forced to strive to keep up with the innovative leadership shown by these organic bodies of the working class in the midst of struggle.
This understanding of the importance of the working class forging its own structures of social organization led to the creation of an anti-parliamentarian tendency that was especially influential in the socialist movements of Germany and the Netherlands. Connolly, like Luxemburg, never embraced the anti-parliamentarian perspective within the socialist movement, though their relatively early deaths at the hands of the imperialists and reactionaries make it impossible to assess what direction their thinking might have taken, had they lived to see this tendency emerge fully mature. However, some of Connolly’s writings provide a suggestion that his thinking was moving in this direction. He wrote:
The democracy of Parliament is in short the democracy of Capitalism. Capitalism gives to the worker the right to choose his master, but insists that the fact of mastership shall remain unquestioned; Parliamentary Democracy gives to the worker the right to a voice in the selection of his rulers but insists that he shall bend as a subject to be ruled. The fundamental feature of both in their relation to the worker is that they imply his continued subjection to a ruling class once his choice of the personnel of the rulers is made. But the freedom of the revolutionist will change the choice of rulers which we have to-day into the choice of administrators of laws voted upon directly by the people; and will also substitute for the choice of masters (capitalists) the appointment of reliable public servants under direct public control. That will mean true democracy – the industrial democracy of the SocialistRepublic.[5]
In Connolly’s vision of industrial unionism lies the same fundamental perspective that was later to give rise to the emphasis on economic organization by the Council Communists of the KAP of the Netherlands and the KAPD of Germany that complimented their anti-parliamentary propaganda. Connolly expressed his perspective well in an essay, which again captures the theme of class struggle being brought to bear against the imperialist slaughter of the First World War.
I believe the war could have been prevented by the socialists; as it was not prevented and as the issues are knit, I want to see England beaten so thoroughly that the commerce of the seas will hence-forth be free to all nations – to the smallest equally with the greatest. But how could this war have been prevented, which is another way of saying how and why did the socialist movement fail to prevent it?
The full answer to that question can only be grasped by those who are familiar with the propaganda that from 1905 onwards has been known as ‘industrialist’ in the United States and, though not so accurately, has been called ‘syndicalist’ in Europe.
…In all the belligerent countries of western and central Europe the socialist vote was very large; in none of these belligerent countries was there an organised revolutionary industrial organisation directing the socialist vote nor a socialist political party directing a revolutionary industrial organisation. The socialist voters having cast their ballots were helpless, as voters, until the next election; as workers, they were indeed in control of the forces of production and distribution, and by exercising that control over the transport service could have made the war impossible. But the idea of thus coordinating their two spheres of activity had not gained sufficient lodgment to be effective in the emergency.
No socialist party in Europe could say that rather than go to war it would call out the entire transport service of the country and thus prevent mobilisation. No socialist party could say so, because no socialist party could have the slightest reasonable prospect of having such a call obeyed.
…To sum up then, the failure of European socialism to avert the war is primarily due to the divorce between the industrial and political movements of labour. The socialist voter, as such, is helpless between elections. He requires to organise power to enforce the mandate of the elections and the only power he can so organise is economic power – the power to stop the wheels of commerce, to control the heart that sends the life blood pulsating through the social organism.[6]
Nationalization vs. Expropriation of the Expropriators
One area of Connolly’s writings that deserve far greater attention today, because the error Connolly addressed in these writings continues to range broadly throughout the Left, is on the subject of the nationalization of property. To many contemporary socialists, nationalization of property is seen as inherently socialist. In fact, the nationalized industry of the former Soviet Union or of the People’s Republic of China is often cited as the ‘proof’ of these countries having attained socialism. Connolly disputed this perspective repeatedly in his writings calling into question those within the socialist movement who advocated municipalization or nationalizing of industries. Connolly expressed his perspective on this question in the following excerpt from his writings:
One of the most significant signs of our times is the readiness with which our struggling middle class turns to schemes of State or Municipal ownership and control, for relief from the economic pressure under which it is struggling. Thus we find in England demands for the nationalisation of the telephone system, for the extension of municipal enterprise in the use of electricity, for the extension of the parcel system in the Post Office, for the nationalisation of railways and canals. In Ireland we have our middle class reformers demanding state help for agriculture, state purchase of lands, arterial draining, state construction of docks, piers and harbours, state aid for the fishing industry, state control of the relations between agricultural tenant and landlord, and also nationalisation of railways and canals.
There is a certain section of Socialists, chiefly in England, who never tire of hailing all such demands for state activity as a sign of the growth of the Socialist spirit among the middle class, and therefore worthy of all the support the working-class democracy can give. In some degree such a view seems justifiable. The fact that large sections of the capitalist class join in demanding the intervention of the State in industry is a sure sign that they, at least, have lost the overweening belief in the all-sufficiency of private enterprise which characterised their class a generation ago; and that they have been forced to recognise the fact that there are a multitude of things in which the ‘brain’, ‘self-reliance’, and ‘personal responsibility’ of the capitalist are entirely unnecessary. To argue that, since in such enterprises the private property-holder is dispensed with, therefore he can be dispensed with in all other forms of industrial activity, is logical enough and we really fail to see in what manner the advocates of capitalist society can continue to clamour for such state ownership as that alluded to – ownership in which the private capitalist is seen to be superfluous, and yet continue to argue that in all other forms of industry the private capitalist is indispensable. For it must be remembered that every function of a useful character performed by the State or Municipality to-day was at one time performed by private individuals for profit, and in conformity with the then generally accepted belief that it could not be satisfactorily performed except by private individuals.
But all this notwithstanding, we would, without undue desire to carp or cavil, point out that to call such demands ‘Socialistic’ is in the highest degree misleading. Socialism properly implies above all things the co-operative control by the workers of the machinery of production; without this co-operative control the public ownership by the State is not Socialism—it is only State capitalism.
…Schemes of state and municipal ownership, if unaccompanied by this co-operative principle, are but schemes for the perfectioning of the mechanism of capitalist government-schemes to make the capitalist regime respectable and efficient for the purposes of the capitalist; in the second place they represent the class-conscious instinct of the business man who feels that capitalist should not prey upon capitalist, while all may unite to prey upon the workers.[7]
More recently, it has been the Council Communist tendency that has emerged as the leading critics of the fallacy of associating the nationalization of industry, or the creation of ‘public ownership’, with the socialist reconstruction of society. Flowing from this, this tendency has been the leading source of the critique of what is now called state capitalism. As Anton Pannekoek wrote:
Marx never spoke of socialization; he spoke of the expropriation of the expropriators. Of the two principal transformations brought about within production by socialism: the suppression of exploitation and the organisation of the economic system, the first is the principal and most important one for the proletariat. One could conceive of an organisation of production on a capitalist basis, it would then lead to state socialism, a more complete slavery and exploitation of the proletariat by the centralised force of the state. The suppression of exploitation with dispersed production was the ideal of the old cooperators and anarchists, but where the suppression of exploitation is achieved, as in communist Russia, one must immediately deal with the organisation of production.
.…If the proletariat improves its working conditions so much that companies no longer return a profit on capital, their capitalist value will fall to zero; the factories may be useful to society, but they will have lost their value for capitalists. Money then loses the ability to produce more money, more surplus-value, because the workers no longer allow themselves to be exploited. This is the expropriation which Marx envisaged. Capitalist property will be suppressed because capital will be without value, without profit. This economic expropriation through which property loses its value and is consequently destroyed, even though the right of free disposal remains, is the opposite of the legal expropriation often applied in the capitalist world, through which the right of free disposal is removed, while allowing the property to remain through compensation. It goes without saying that legal expropriations will also occur in passing over to socialism. The political power of the proletariat will take all measures which are useful for the suppression of exploitation. It will not be satisfied just to limit the former employers' right of free exploitation, through the regularisation of wages, working hours and prices, it will suppress it completely. The economic basis of these measures is laid down by what precedes them; it is not confiscation of all property as the frightened petit bourgeois thinks, but the suppression of any right to surplus-value, to an income not produced by labour. It is the legal expression of the political fact that the proletariat is master and that it will no longer allow itself to be exploited.[8]
Syndicalist ‘Deviation’
The ultimate triumph of the Leninist tendency within contemporary socialism has made it commonplace for writers on Connolly’s contribution to international socialism to speak of his “Syndicalist deviation.” Those familiar with the actual historical reality of the international socialist movement in the first decades of the 20th century, however, will know that “industrial unionism” the preferred phrase of Connolly which he equated with Syndicalism, represented the vanguard of socialist organizing efforts in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. In the United States this tendency was represented by no organization as prominently as by the Industrial Workers of the World. While the Wobblies became associated with anarchism within a little over a decade of their founding, the boundaries between those the socialist and anarchist movements were far from well defined and mutually exclusive at the time.
Connolly saw in industrial unionism the means of organizing the working class where their source of power lay, in the arena of production. Moreover, akin to the view expressed by other Marxists on the nature of the workers’ councils, Connolly recognized the industrial union as the potential means by which the working class could create the basis for the administration of a future socialist republic within the husk of capitalism.
Between, on the one hand, the new economic organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, which prepares and organizes the administrative framework of society in the future, and at the same time furnishes the only effective method of resistance against present-day encroachments of the master class, and on the other hand the old-style pure and simple trade unionism of the AF of L with its system of dividing the working class and its professed belief in the identity of interests between Capital and Labor, between these two economic organizations our choice is as plain and unmistakable as between Socialism and Capitalism; indeed, it is the same proposition presented in different terms. And as we believe that all working class Socialists must realize that their place is in the only real economic organization truly worthy of the name of union, the IWW, so we believe that the same body has it in its power to solve the problem of Socialist unity. On the day that the IWW launches its own political party it will put an end to all excuse for two Socialist parties and open the way for a real and effective unification of the revolutionary forces. To it will flock all the real proletarians, all the loyal-hearted working class whom distrust and suspicion have so long kept divided: it will be the real Political Party of the Workers – the weapon by which the working class will register the decrees which its economic army must and shall enforce.[9]
While advocating for continued political activism within the IWW, Connolly clearly held the economic organization of the working class to be of primary importance for the class struggle. He demonstrated this in Ireland with his effort organizing and his leadership of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, which remains today, under a revised name, by far the largest union in Ireland and during his stay in America through his work with the IWW. Castigating those who sought to put support of the American Federation of Labor on the same footing with support for the IWW, Connolly wrote:
The most dispersive and isolating force at work in the labour movement today is craft unionism, the most cohesive and unifying force, industrial unionism. In view of that fact all objections which my comrades make to industrial unionism on the grounds of the supposedly, or truly, anti-political bias of many members of the Industrial Workers of the World is quite beside the mark. That question at the present stage of the game is purely doctrinaire. The use or non-use of political action will not be settled by the doctrinaires who may make it their hobby today, but will be settled by the workers who use the Industrial Workers of the World in their workshop struggles. And if at any time the conditions of a struggle in shop, factory, railroad or mine necessitate the employment of political action those workers so organized will use it, all theories and theorists to the contrary notwithstanding. In their march to freedom the workers will use every weapon they find necessary. As the economic struggle is the preparatory school and training ground for Socialists it is our duty to help guide along right lines the effort of the workers to choose the correct kind of organization to fight their battles in that conflict. According as they choose aright or wrongly, so will the development of class consciousness in their minds be hastened or retarded by their everyday experience in class struggles.[10]
National Liberation Inseparable from the Class Struggle
Connolly’s contribution for which is most readily recognized is in his melding of the national liberation struggle with the class struggle, but while it is widely recognized, it is less than fully understood. His understanding of the nature of imperialism shaped Connolly’s perspective on Irish national liberation. Far from falling prey to the nationalist tradition of Ireland, Connolly repeatedly asserted that Irish workers had no interest in a nationally independent Ireland that remained capitalist.
Let us free Ireland!
The rackrenting landlord; is he not also an Irishman, and wherefore should we hate him? Nay, let us not speak harshly of our brother - yea, even when he raises our rent.
Let us free Ireland !
The profit-grinding capitalist, who robs us of three-fourths of the fruits of our labour, who sucks the very marrow of our bones when we were young, and then throws us out in the street, like a worn-out tool, when we are grown prematurely old in his service, is he not an Irishman, and mayhap a patriot, and wherefore should we think harshly of him?
Let us free Ireland!
"The land that bred and bore us." And the landlord who makes us pay for permission to live upon it.
Whoop it up for liberty!
"Let us free Ireland," says the patriot, who won't touch Socialism.
…Whoop it up for liberty!
And, says the agricultural workers, after we have freed Ireland, what then?
Oh, then you can go scraping around for the landlord's rent or the money-lenders' interest same as before.
Whoop it up for liberty!
After Ireland is free, says the patriot who won't touch Socialism, we will protect all classes, and if you won't pay your rent you will be evicted same as now. But the evicting party, under command of the sheriff, will wear green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the roadside will be stamped with the arms of the IrishRepublic.
Now, isn't that worth fighting for?[11]
In discussing national liberation, a primary consideration was placed on Connolly’s very definition of the nation, which is not a political abstraction concerning a given piece of geography, but the reality of the people who inhabit that geography. The Irish working class are those people, or at least the majority of those people, and Connolly made plain that one could not speak sensibly about the liberation of the nation, while the majority of its people remained enchained. Moreover his views on Irish national liberation arose out of his recognition that the Irish capitalist class existed in a comprador relationship to the more powerful imperialist nation’s capitalists. Such being the case, national sovereignty could never truly be established in a capitalist Ireland. In short, not only would Irish workers remain oppressed by exploitation in an independent capitalist Ireland, but independence would be cosmetic at best so long as Ireland remained capitalist. In advancing this perspective on the meaning of national liberation in the era of imperialism, Connolly brought to full flower a distinct tendency within the Irish republican tradition, that of republican socialism, which significantly departs from the earlier tradition. Connolly advanced this perspective repeatedly, one notable example being the following:
We are out for Ireland for the Irish. But who are the Irish? Not the rack-renting, slum-owning landlord; not the sweating, profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman – the hired liars of the enemy. Not these are the Irish upon whom the future depends. Not these, but the Irish working class, the only secure foundation upon which a free nation can be reared.
The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered. Ireland seeks freedom. Labour seeks that an Ireland free should be the sole mistress of her own destiny, supreme owner of all material things within and upon her soil. Labour seeks to make the free Irish nation the guardian of the interests of the people of Ireland, and to secure that end would vest in that free Irish nation all property rights as against the claims of the individual, with the end in view that the individual may be enriched by the nation, and not by the spoiling of his fellows.[12]
The adoption by the Communist International of the “stagiest” theory of socialist struggle in those nations exploited by imperialism has led to the idea being widely accepted that the working class should put off its struggle against capitalism until after achieving some shared objective with its own capitalist class. It is a perspective for which little support can be found in the writings of James Connolly. Moreover, it is a perspective predicated on the mistaken assumption that working class struggle is required to “wait its turn” in the waging of social revolution. This view is ahistorical and certainly anti-Marxist. This is not to say that the working class can hope to win the struggle for the mastery over the means of production and the political machinery necessary to administer it before capitalism has completed its historic tasks of industrializing society, centralizing production, proletarianizing the populace, and creating the circumstances whereby society can end the scarcity of the material wealth needed to survive and prosper. Socialism will not be established until scarcity can be made archaic, until the working class constitutes the majority of the populace, and until capital is sufficiently centralized to permit for it relatively easy expropriation, but the working class will fight for its interests against its class enemies over and over and over before it is victorious. Connolly consistently defended the independence of the working class in political struggle throughout his life, with the exception of the events that brought about the end of that life.
Connolly’s bringing the ICA into insurrection with the IRB/ Irish Volunteers in the Easter Rising is an action in stark contradiction to the position he took repeatedly concerning the role of the working class within the national liberation movement. We must assume, based on the perspective put forward over and over again up to the very eve of the Rising that Connolly had sought to use the bourgeois nationalist forces to the advantage of the working class, while maintaining the ICA’s independence, so as to then carry the struggle forward into open class warfare. We know that only a week before the Rising, Connolly said to the volunteers of the ICA, “The odds against us are a thousand to one. But if we should win, hold onto your rifles because the Volunteers may have a different goal. Remember, we are not only for political liberty, but for economic liberty as well."
Sadly, Connolly’s death before a firing squad as a result of his participation in the Rising left him unable to explain his views on the subject and permitted the bourgeois nationalists to co-opt Connolly’s legacy. The resulting confusion has plagued Irish republican socialism repeatedly, as the joint Rising by the ICA and the IRB/Irish Volunteers has been held up as a model for working class action in Ireland, despite Connolly’s writings advocating against this perspective time and time again.
NOTES
[1]Anton Pannekoek, Socialism and Religion from the International Socialist Review, April 1907.
[2] Ibid.
[3]James Connolly, Continental Revolution in Forward, 15 August 1914
[4]James Connolly, Imperialism and Socialism from the Workers’ Republic, 4 November 1899.
[5]James Connolly, Parliamentary Democracy from the Workers’ Republic, 22 September 1900, republished in James Connolly: Lost Writings, (ed. Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh), Pluto Press 1997.
[6]James Connolly, Revolutionary Unionism and War from the International Socialist Review, March 1915.
[7]James Connolly,The New Evangel-State Monopoly versus Socialism from the Workers’ Republic, 10 June 1899
[8]Anton Pannekoek, Socialization from in The Internationale, volume one, numbers 13-14, September 1919.
[9]James Connolly,A Political Party of the Workers from The Harp, January 1908.
[10]James Connolly, Industrialism and the Trade Unions from International Socialist Review, February 1910.
[11]James Connolly, Socialism Made Easy.
[12]James Connolly, The Irish Flag from the Workers’ Republic, 8 April 1916.