This article is one of a series on Ireland which we have been printing in 'International'. In Vol. 1, no. 1 we reproduced Connolly's most important articles on Partition. In Vol. 1, no. 3 we printed an article by D.R. O'Connor-Lysaght on Connolly. A few copies of these are still available from Red Books, 182 Pentonville Road, London, N.1. This present article deals with the social forces at work in the period leading up to the signing of the Easter Rising. It aims to provide a historical background to the present struggle in Ireland. Our intention is not to duplicate the aims of the various histories of Ireland such as Lysaght's 'The Republic of Ireland' or Liam de Paor's 'Divided Ulster', but to concentrate on those aspects which are most essential for understanding present problems. For example, it is impossible to understand the ideology behind the present split in the Republican movement unless you know the social forces which shaped the historical origins of the 'physical force' traditions of the I.R.A. Similarly, the terrible confusion of the Irish Labour movement over the national question becomes much easier to understand when you realise the syndicalist origins from which that movement sprang. - Eds.
'In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom'. (Declaration of the Republic of Ireland).
This might seem rather a remarkable declaration for a revolutionary socialist such as James Connolly to attach his name to. Appeals to God and nationhood have not generally rested easily on the Marxist conscience. But this declaration was not simple rhetoric nor merely an invocation of memories. The struggle of the Irish people against the British ruling class had had a real continuity in content and not simply in tradition. That continuity can be found in the origins of the clash between Britain and Ireland. It does not lie in the colour of flags, the name of the patron saint or even in the clash of two abstract national ideals. It lies in the struggle for land.
The invasion of Ireland by the ex-Norman English aristocracy in the twelfth century was not simply a clash of armies. It was a clash of social systems. The English feudal system was pitted against the Irish system of holding land in common. (1) Feudalism inevitably triumphed(2), but, in so doing, it did not abolish the land question, it simply altered its form. From that moment until at least the 1930s, the land question, in many guises, dominated Irish politics.(3) It was the continuation of this struggle over land, together with the particular form of foreign oppression, which resulted in the creation of an extremely revolutionary and nationalist peasantry. The revolutionary nature of this class was heightened by the fact that it was the peasants who suffered the more 'spectacular' excesses of British rule and its rather simple minded early policy of the seizure of land and booty(4).
As Britain began to find new methods of colonial exploitation and new countries to conquer, direct plundering of Ireland became less attractive. Ireland remained a colonial nation, but it was the indirect effects of British rule which now became the worst oppression. These effects could assume truly staggering proportions. For example, in 1740 no less than 400,000 people died as a result of famine, and even this did not compare with the effects of the Great Famine of the 1840s.(5)
Although the peasantry bore the main weight of British rule, it was incapable of leading the national struggle. The peasantry is too fragmented a class to have the social cohesion necessary to lead a revolution. Furthermore its main class aims, division of the land, etc., are scientifically speaking utopian. But because of its numerical preponderance, no other class could make a revolution without the support of the peasantry. For this reason, Irish history is largely the story of various sections of the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, or proletariat trying to link their class goals to the struggle of the peasantry.
Peasant movement in Ireland
The revolutionary nature of the Irish peasantry was heightened by the particularly barbarous system of holding land imposed on Ireland by British rule. Holding land on lease was of course one of the main features of the feudal system in both Ireland and Britain, but in Ireland there was none of the security of tenure which held under English common law. The few rights that the tenant enjoyed were abolished in a series of acts running from the final enforcement of the feudal system right up to the 1860 Landlord and Tenant Law Amendment Act. The only areas possessing any greater security of tenure were those in which the 'Ulster Custom' prevailed. This levied an extra rent, but gave some security of tenure. Jemmy Hope summarises the position that had been reached by 1840 as follows:
'The relation in which the tenant now stands to the landlord is the relation in which the uprooted travellor stands to the highwayman who holds a blunderbuss to his breast while he demands his purse'.
The law as it applied in Ireland did not recognise a person as holding land for a period of years, but allowed him to be evicted at any time. Similarly, any buildings erected by the tenants on the land belonged legally to the landlord and not to the tenant.
The peasant rebellions against these conditions began to become serious by about 1750, when the secret society of Whiteboys carried out agitation throughout the south of Ireland. Both Protestants and Catholic landlords united to crush them. The Protestant citizens of Cork offered £300 for the capture of the chief of the Whiteboys and £50 for his lieutenants. The Catholic citizens of the same city offered £200 and £40 for the same captures. There were angry scenes in the Irish House of Commons with Irish 'patriots' condemning the British for not killing enough Whiteboys. In the north the peasant societies were known as Oakboys or Steelboys. The first named of these staged a minor rising in County Monaghan in 1762. The Steelboys were predominantly dissenting Protestants, and appear to have been a more formidable organisation. Their strength is indicated by the fact that when six of their leaders were jailed in Belfast, they marched through the city in broad daylight and stormed the jail.
Initially, the main demands of such organisations were against secondary features of capitalism such as the tithe system. However, as the 18th century progressed, their aims grew progressively more radical. Although none of these early revolts posed a serious threat to British rule in Ireland, they are nevertheless important for several reasons. In particular, they display the typical features of peasant movements, with attacks on feudal institutions and conspiratorial forms of organisation.
The first of these features is easy to account for. If the peasantry is oppressed by feudalism it will obviously attack the institutions of that social system. The other feature - the organisational form of the movement - needs a little more explanation.
The main social characteristic of the peasantry is its fragmentation as a class. This is true not merely in the literal physical sense of its being widely dispersed geographically, but also in the more important sense that the mode of production of the peasantry is not a socialised one, but an individual one involving little or no division of labour. This mode of existence naturally tends to produce political movements based on individual actions. The classic peasant form of struggle is therefore terrorism (e.g. the Narodniks). If however a more widespread movement is generated, then its organisational form does not develop naturally out of the mode of existence of the peasantry. Such an organisation must be extremely hierarchical and rigid, and in fact most such organisations have tended towards a 'military' form. Historically the form of organisation corresponding to these requirements has been the secret society or, more recently, the type of Stalinist party whose organisational form is carried to its logical conclusion in the militarised Chinese Communist Party. It is the organisational rigidity which enables it to surmount, at least temporarily, the fragmentation of the peasantry. As we shall see, the Irish peasant based movements, for example the Irish Republican Brotherhood, fully display these characteristics. The type of militarised organisation produced by the conditions of existence of the peasantry is, however, fatal when applied to the working class movement. If organisation is seen in purely administrative terms, then it leads to an ignoring of the political role of the revolutionary organisation.
The nineteenth century - the peasantry alone
The peasantry of course played a role in the 1798 rising of the United Irishmen, but that movement was predominantly a movement of the bourgeoisie (with the participation of the urban artisans lending the rebellion a very thorough going nature). The United Irishmen was the last fling of the revolutionary bourgeoisie in Ireland. After 1798, the Irish bourgeoisie, in common with other European bourgeoisies, became more afraid of the power and aspirations of the working class than it was interested in overthrowing its native and foreign oppressors. It therefore ceased to be a revolutionary class.
What the revolt of the United Irishmen did achieve, and this because of its radical and deep going nature which affected all classes in Ireland, was to leave a permanent mark on the consciousness of all future revolutionary movements. From then on 'The Republic' became the goal of every radical Irish movement whatever its class origin. The concrete interpretation of the slogan of course varied from class to class as we shall see. Gilmore summarises this development as follows:
'It seems advisable then to take a closer look at that name (the Republic), and to try to appreciate what it meant to those who, through the generations, have thought it worth striving for. However vaguely defined, it had a very real meaning simply because the subjection of Ireland to Britain had a very real meaning to life in Ireland.
In its origin there was no doubt as to its meaning. 'The rights of man in Ireland; the inherent and indefeasible claims of every free nation to rest in this nation' - that statement of objectives, issued as a manifesto at a time when the minds of oppressed people in every country in Europe had been fired by the overthrow in France of the institution of monarchy, and of the organisation of society of which monarchy was the symbol and coping-stone, represented explicitly the aspirations of the people of Ireland oppressed by a similar organisation of society, with the added complication that that society was itself a subject one.
There was no doubt then about what it meant - neither in the minds of its friends nor of its enemies. The doctrine of 'The rights of man' was not just a phrase representing a liberal attitude of mind in nice people. It was understood and adopted as a basic political principle upon which the independence movement was founded, and it was applied by the organisation of the United Irish Societies to the circumstances of the time in an agitation directed towards breaking the tyranny of the landed aristocracy through a radical reform of the franchise and the abolition of discriminative laws against Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, and other 'non-conformist' religious denominations. It meant, in effect, a revolt by a subject people against the social structure that oppressed them, so that they could rebuild the life of their country in a way that only people with the self-respect of freemen can demand that only people in 'effectual ownership and possession' of their country can do. It brought together into one camp the different elements in Irish life whose far-back racial origins and religious and political traditions had up to then held them apart in hostility to each other. In terms of world politics, it meant falling into step with the progressive forces of Europe and the world. So it was seen by its friends and by its enemies'.(6)
This then is the reason why Irish socialist revolutionaries still fight under the banner which has been claimed as their own by everyone from the reactionary Fine Gael Party leftwards(7). Thus in the same way that the Bolsheviks claimed at times to be the successors of the Jacobins, Connolly and other Marxists could claim that the working class revolution in Ireland would be the historical inheritors of the struggle of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen.
The fears of the bourgeoisie in Ireland were however premature as regards the working class - not until the end of the 19th century did the Irish working class become sufficiently large and organised enough to be a decisive social force. What however did appear to threaten the stability of the bourgeoisie was the seething peasant discontent.
The rebellion of the United Irishmen had its particular organisational form and social content because of the involvement of the bourgeoisie and urban petty-bourgeoisie in the revolt. After 1800 the peasant and bourgeois movements diverged. At the end of the century the working class struggle began to merge with the peasant movement and gave it a new social content and organisational form. However, for most of the 19th century, the land, and therefore the national struggle passed into the hands of peasant-based currents and their intellectual reflections in the petty bourgeoisie. This peasant social base meant that the ideology of the movement was Jacobin and its organisational form was conspiracy. These movements fed on the discontent caused by the rising population in the poorest areas during the early part of the century, and then on the devestation produced by the famine of the 1840s. Another strong driving force for these movements was the six-fold increase in absentee rent payments between 1780 and 1860. Spurred on by these social pressures and freed from the restraining influence of the bourgeoisie (because it had abandoned the national struggle), the ideology of the peasant movement grew steadily more radical as the 19th century progressed.
The prototype of these movements was the Emmett Conspiracy of 1803. This appears to have been based on the peasantry and artisans who had supported the United Irishmen, as indicated by the fact that the most serious fighting in the insurrection occurred in the area of Dublin inhabited almost exclusively by artisans. It had been preceeded in 1802 by peasant uprisings in Limmerick, Waterford and Tipperary. The programme drawn up by Emmett was a typical Jacobin one, including the confiscation and nationalising of church property, the introduction of universal suffrage, and a ban on the sale of land and public securities. It is significant because as Connolly puts it:
'Emmett believed the 'national will' was superior to property rights and could abolish them at will; and also that he realised that the producing classes could not be expected to rally to the revolution unless given to understand that it meant their freedom from social as well as from political bondage'.(8)
In other words, right from the beginning, these Jacobin movements had a tendency to turn in a 'socialist' direction. This created the possibility for the working class struggle to link up with the peasant movement. The tragedy of Ireland is that no working class party ever developed which was capable of utilising the enormous possibilities thus created. The story of Irish history from 1803 onwards becomes the history of isolated proletarian and peasant movements without the political understanding and organisation necessary to unite them (except for brief moments before and during the first world war and in the early 1930s). The way George Gilmore summarises the failure of the 1934 Republican Congress sums up this entire period. He says that the Congress brought about:
'... a meeting between a section of the Trade Union movement and the militants of the countryside on terms that might have set the nation marching again under a leadership dominated by the political thought of working-class militancy. It was an uneasy meeting, and the junction of forces did not hold. The industrial section withdrew from a task for which it was not ready, and the opportunity presented by the upsurge of courageous spirit in those critical years was lost ... The reconquest of Ireland by its people awaits the day when these forces meet - and hold'.(9)
'Young Ireland'
The Jacobin traditions of the United Irishmen and Emmett's conspiracy were kept alive during the late 1820s and 1830s by the 'Ribbon Conspiracy'. This was a type of violent agricultural trade union. The next movement to assume insurrectionary proportions was the 'Young Ireland' rebellion of 1848. The conditions leading to this rebellion were the appalling misery caused by the 'Great Famine' and the wave of revolutionary upsurge sweeping Europe during 1848.
The famine itself was the worst disaster, calculated by the percentage of the population affected, to occur anywhere in the world during the 19th century. In 1847 and 1848 alone over 570,000 people died of hunger or the disease following the famine. This suffering was imposed on a long term oppression which produced over 3½ million evictions between 1838 and 1888. These social conditions created a tinderbox in Ireland. Unfortunately, the leaders of the Young Ireland movement inevitably displayed all the contradictions of the petty bourgeoisie. The nature of these leaders is summed up in Connolly's description of the antics of William Smith O'Brien during the rebellion:
'He wandered through the country telling the starving peasantry to get ready, but refusing to allow them to feed themselves at the expense of the landlords who had so long plundered, starved, and evicted them; he would not allow his followers to seize upon the carts of grain passing along the roads where the people were dying for want of food; at Mullinahone he refused to allow his followers to fell trees to build a barricade across the road until they had asked permission of the land lords who owned the trees; when the people of Killenaule had a body of dragoons entrapped between two barricades he released the dragoons from their dangerous situation upon their leader assuring him that he had no warrant for his, O'Brien's arrest; in another place he surprised a party of soldiers in the Town Hall with their arms taken apart for cleaning purposes, and instead of confiscating the arms told the soldiers that their arms were as safe there as they would be in Dublin Castle(10).
All this might seem tragically absurd, but, as Connolly points out, there was method in apparent madness:
'The simple fact is that the Irish workers in town and country were ready and willing to revolt, and that the English government of the time was saved from serious danger only by the fact that Smith O'Brien and those who patterned after him, dreaded to trust the nation to the passion of the so-called lower classes.(11)
and that:
'Everything had to be done in a 'respectable' manner; English army one side and, provided with guns, bands and banners; Irish army on the other side, also provided with guns, bands and banners ... no mere proletarian insurrection and no interference with the rights of property(12)
It is of course this last point that was crucial for the bourgeois leaders of the Young Ireland movement. A thorough going peasant (let alone proletarian) insurrection would have inevitably turned into a revolution against the feudal land system and against the private ownership of property. In order to prevent this, the Young Ireland leaders had to hold the movement in check. By doing so they ensured its failure.
Possibly the most significant thing to come out of the rebellions was the writings of James Fintan Lalor. Here for the first time the connection between the national struggle and the land and labour struggles was expressed in clear theoretical terms. This is done most remarkably in the following passage from the paper the 'Irish Felon'. Lalor says that he failed to convert the rebels to his views and states that:
'They wanted an alliance with the landowners. They chose to consider them as Irishmen, and imagined they could induce them to hoist the green flag. They wished to preserve an aristocracy. They desired, not a democratic, but merely a national revolution. Had the Confederation in the May or June of '47 thrown heart and mind and means into the movement I pointed out they would have made it successful, and settled at once and forever all questions between us and England. The opinions I then stated, and which I yet stand firm to, are these:
'1. That in order to save their own lives, the occupying tenants of the soil of Ireland ought, next autumn, to refuse all rent and arrears of rent then due, beyond and except the value of the overplus of harvest produce remaining in their hands after having deducted and reserved a due and full provision for their own subsistence during the next ensuing twelve months.
'2. That they ought to refuse and resist being made beggars, landless and homeless, under the English law of ejection.
'3. That they ought further, on principle, to refuse all rent to the present usurping proprietors, until the people, the true proprietors (or lords paramount, in legal parlance) have in national congress or convention, decided what rents they are to pay, and to whom they are to pay them.
'4. And that the people, on grounds of policy and economy, ought to decide (as a general rule admitting of reservations) that these rents shall be paid to themselves, the people, for public purposes, and for behoof and benefit of them, the entire general people'.
It has been said to me that such a war, on the principles I propose, would be looked on with detestation by Europe. I assert the contrary; I say such a war would propagate itself throughout Europe. Mark the words of this prophecy - the principle I propound goes to the foundations of Europe, and sooner or later will cause Europe to outrise. Mankind will yet be masters of the earth. The right of the people to make the laws - this is what produced the first great modern earthquake, whose latent shocks, even now, are heaving in the heart of the world. The right of the people to own the land - this will produce the next. Train your hands, and your sons hands, gentlemen of the earth, for you and they will yet have to use them'.(13)
These formulations of Lalor are important not merely because of their impact on the peasant uprising, the Fenian rising of 1867, but also because they contain the first germs of the idea that the national struggle had its basis and its solution in the struggle of the peasantry for land. This idea was developed fully by Connolly - with explosive effect. What Lalor of course did not understand was that the peasantry was too fragmented a class to solve the land and national questions by itself. For that it needed an alliance with a more compact, organised and historically progressive class - the proletariat. To understand this was Connolly's great contribution to Marxism. Nevertheless, the beginning of the ideas that Connolly was to develop are to be found in Lalor, and this marks him out as one of the most significant figures in Irish history.
The Fenians
The Fenian movement represented a further development of the Jacobin tradition in that for the first time an insurrectionary movement as a whole turned consciously against the leadership of the bourgeoisie. The United Irishmen, for all Tone's radicalism, had been a bourgeois-inspired and led movement. The artisan and peasant involvement, which had lent it its thorough-going character, represented only one part of the movement. The 1848 rising had been based on the peasantry, but its leaders, who in turn determined its ideology, had been men such as O'Brien, who owned vast estates. However, the Fenian movement was led, and its class ideology determined, by men such as John Devoy, son of a labourer, and Michael Davitt, son of an evicted small farmer. It is in this movement that the origins of the Jacobinism of the Pearse wing of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.) and the O'Donnell and Gilmore wing of the I.R.A. is to be found. It represents the political ideology of a peasantry and an artisan class which is still revolutionary because the land and national questions have not been solved, but which exists in an era when the bourgeoisie has ceased to be a revolutionary class.
Such an ideology has two main aspects. On the one hand, it is reactionary because it extols economic forms, small ownership, etc., which are economically impossible to maintain in a capitalist society. On the other hand, it is potentially explosive because its revolutionary nature in practice forces it to make alliances with other revolutionary classes and to break with reactionary ones. In so doing, its consciousness becomes affected by the class aims and political ideology of its revolutionary allies. In the present era, the only other revolutionary class is the working class, and this Jacobin ideology, and thereby the consciousness of the peasantry, begins to assume a socialist character.
This is, of course, not a mechanical process: if the working class is passive in the class struggle or does not attempt actively to link up with the peasantry through a revolutionary organisation, then this Jacobinism is far more likely to turn in the direction of bourgeois ideology than it is to develop in a socialist direction. Nevertheless, the potentiality is there for the working class leadership to exploit. The normal dialectic of this process is that the peasantry remains a revolutionary class, and a potential ally of the working class up until the moment when the peasantry achieves its main class aim - ownership of the land. After this is achieved, this same desire for the possession of land forces it to become the staunchest defender of private property. This means that it is now in alliance with the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. However, this process is not an automatic one, the economic base does not determine consciousness directly. In Ireland the tradition built up in the long struggle against Britain, the continuance of certain vestiges of British feudal land relations (the land annuities), plus the fact that the national question had not been fully solved, meant that the tradition of peasant Jacobinism continued long after most of the social conditions that had given rise to it had disappeared. The origins of this particularly radical form of Jacobinism are to be found, as we have already discussed, in the Fenian movement of the 1860s.
Organisationally the origins of the Fenian movement are to be found in the mass emigration following the Great Famine. In 1851 emigration was running at the rate of 220,000 a year, and it was still as high as 100,000 a year in 1854. Inevitably exported with the people were the revolutionary traditions of the Young Ireland movement. A revolutionary centre was rapidly established in New York. In 1856-57 this organisation began to co-operate closely with revolutionary elements in Ireland. Most notable of these was James Stephens, a veteran of the 1848 rising and a man who had some experience of the methods of the secret French revolutionary societies. On St. Patrick's day, 1858, Stephens launched the organisation that was to become the I.R.B.
The entrance oath of this organisation declared its aims to be 'to make Ireland an independent democratic republic'. The Organisation grew rapidly and soon had over 1,000 members in Dublin, and 2,000 in Leixlip. The fertile ground it was feeding on can be seen in the fact that when one of the leaders of the 1848 rising, Bellew MacManus, was buried in Dublin, over 25,000 people followed the coffin to its burial place. By November, 1863 Stephens had enough support to launch a paper, the 'Irish People'. The organisation had strong roots in the working class and had largely supplanted the old agrarian secret societies. Being a secret society, it is of course difficult to estimate how large the movement was, but some authorities estimate it as high as 80,000 members in Ireland alone(14). In 1865 the circumstances were as good as they were ever likely to be for a rising; the membership of the I.R.B. was at its height, its leadership had not yet been decimated by arrests and the British government was pre-occupied by the conflict with the United States that had developed out of the American Civil War. However, Stephens missed this opportunity, and in September, 1865 the British authorities struck. They suppressed the 'Irish People', and arrested the Fenian leaders. Stephens was rescued from prison, but the movement was now on the defensive. In addition, the American movement was split by controversy over an insane scheme to invade Canada in order to divert British energies. By the time the rising was planned in February, 1867, the organisation had gone into a serious decline. This February rising however proved abortive and was called off at the last moment. (The state the organisation had declined to by this time, and the extent to which it had been riddled by police spies is shown by the fact that one detachment, led by John O'Connor, only found that the rising had been cancelled when they captured a policeman and found he was carrying a copy of the order cancelling the attempt!).(15)
The actual rising itself took place on the night of March 4th, and was a complete fiasco, and in no place did the rising last for more than a few hours. As far as the immediate consequences were concerned, that was just about it. A certain notoriety was however gained by subsequent events in England. On September 11th a police sergeant was killed in an attempt to release two of the Fenian leaders. This led to the execution of three Fenians who became known as the 'Manchester Martyrs'. Subsequently, in December, 1867 further notoriety was gained by an attempt to release two Fenians from Clerkenwell Prison by demolishing part of the prison wall with gunpowder.
Politically the rising had a shattering effect. Apart from its radicalism in Ireland itself, its programme declared for the separation of church and state, and the restoration of the land to the peasants, the occurrence of the rising made clear to the more long sighted members of the English bourgeoisie that their policy of straightforward repression was sowing a whirlwind whose effects would not be confined to Ireland alone.(16) The open repression of the 1860 Land Act was replaced by a more subtle policy which commenced with Gladstone's disestablishment of the Irish Anglican church in 1869. This process was climaxed by the 1881 Land Act which largely abolished the old land holding system and instead introduced a form of double ownership between landlord and tenant. Under this system the tenant got the profit from land improvements. Nevertheless, the land problem was by no means completely solved. As late as 1896, 45% of Irish agricultural produce went as rent or tax (c.f. the British figure of 10%) and some aspects of the problem continued up until the abolition of the Land Annuity payments in the 1930s.(17)
In Ireland itself the I.R.B. continued as the inheritor of the Jacobinism of the Fenians. As the social basis of its agitation, the land question, began slowly to disappear, the movement began to lose any social content it might have had. What was left was the conspiratorial form of organisation and the fetish of 'physical force' and 'military action'. Thus was born the ideology that was to sustain the I.R.A. for most of its history.(18)
II
While the original motive for the English conquest had been greed for land, this naturally became less important as a motive as the English feudal system declined and Britain became transformed into the first capitalist state in the world. Ireland was now seen as a potential industrial competitor and the British bourgeoisie therefore used British domination of Ireland to destroy any rival trades or industries. A whole series of restrictive acts were passed. Thus, for example, in 1666 a ban was placed on the export of cattle from Ireland, and in 1699 an act was passed destroying the Irish wool trade. The only industry not directly hit was the linen trade as here Britain had no competitor industry. This was however largely confined to the north east.
By the middle of the 18th century, Britain's needs had changed again. Now the British bourgeoisie needed provisions for its expanding urban population. It now saw in Ireland a useful 'farm' to exploit, and it began to lift the legislation against the Irish agricultural trades. This allowed a certain increase in prosperity for sections of the Irish bourgeoisie. With increasing prosperity and social importance came increasing political assertiveness. The ideal opportunity to assert this desire for political power came when Britain's military might was fully engaged in the American revolutionary war. At that time, British agents in Dublin declared that the only force available for dealing with any trouble in the north was a 'troop or two of horse, or part of a company of invalids'. By the expedient of raising a considerable army of 'Volunteers', the Irish bourgeoisie succeeded in wringing a relatively independent legislature from Britain. This it promptly coupled with protective tariffs.
Fortunately for the bourgeoisie of north east Ireland, this period coincided with the beginning of the industrial revolution, and allowed it to utilise the new technology of the period. This was highlighted in 1790 with the introduction of the first steam engine into Ireland. The north eastern bourgeoisie grew rapidly and became more politically assertive still. It was now pulling at the bit of British rule.
This period of rising political expectations of the bourgeoisie coincided with an upsurge of agrarian discontent which was fed by the rapid increase in rents in the late part of the 18th century.(19) By the late 1790s, the bourgeois and peasant movements were beginning to merge. The organisational expression of this was Wolfe Tone's 'United Irishmen' which was mainly based on the artisans of Belfast, but had widespread support, particularly amongst the Protestant population of East Ulster. It was this widespread involvement of the urban petty-bourgeoisie which gave the movement its particularly radical political colouring. (As it had to the comparable movements led by Hebert and Babeuf in France).
After 1798, with the collapse of the bourgeoisie as a consistently revolutionary class, all that was produced was the lukewarm reformism summed up by Daniel O'Connell's reference to his:
'most dutiful and ever inviolate loyalty to our most gracious and ever beloved sovereign, Queen Victoria'.(20)
The Irish bourgeoisie in general, and O'Connell in particular, were acutely aware of the danger of a revolt stemming from the misery of the working class and the peasantry. This concern showed itself in continual church and press injunctions against 'the sin of conspiracy', and in continual and vituperative attacks on the embryonic organisations of the working class. The general tone of these attacks, and therefore the fear producing them, can be gauged by this comment of O'Connell's on the cloth workers:
'There is no tyranny equal to that which was exercised by the trade unionists in Dublin over their fellow labourers. One rule of the workmen prescribed a minimum rate of wages, so that the best workman received no more than the worst. Another part of their system was directed towards depriving the masters of all freedom in their power of selecting workmen ... the combination of tailors in that city had raised the price of clothes to such a pitch that it was worth a person's while to go to Glasgow and wait a couple of days for a suit'.
On laws to limit the maximum working day, he said:
'Let them not be guilty of the childish folly of regulating the labour of adults, and go about parading before the world their ridiculous humanity'.
Stricken by fear of unleashing the floodgates of 'Atheist communism', the bourgeoisie abandoned the revolutionary struggle, and by doing so abandoned any hope of solving the national question.
The southern triumph and dilemma
What little industrialisation there was in Ireland during the nineteenth century was almost entirely confined to the north-east of the country. Here the linen trade plus the Ulster Custom had created a pool of capital which could finance the more expensive technology of the industrial revolution. Once steam power and a degree of mechanisation existed in the north, the rest of the country could not compete in industrial terms. The strength of the north plus the crushing economic power and proximity of the greatest capitalist state in the world, Britain, meant that no industrial bourgeoisie developed in the south. Instead, a very singular development took place. We will deal with the development of the northern bourgeoisie in a later section. For now, we will deal briefly with the development of the southern bourgeoisie.
Famine-ruined Protestant estates could be, and were, bought up by the Catholic bourgeoisie. This plus increasing debts in the countryside led to the emergence of the money lender or 'Gombeenman'.
Unlike the northern bourgeoisie, the southern bourgeoisie's economic base was in service, distributive and small manufacturing industries, such as printing and leather. Unlike the manufacturing bourgeoisie in the north, which relied for its markets on the British and their Empire, the southern bourgeoisie had an initial interest in the erecting of tariffs against Britain. Men such as Murphy of Dublin - of whom more anon - were the layer of non manufacturing bourgeoisie who represented the highest development of their class. The key importance of the development of this class from the point of view of the national struggle however was that they were relatively independent of the landlords. They could therefore make a bid for the allegiance of the peasantry by promising land reform at the landlord's expense. This would enable them to get the mass social base they needed to shape Irish society in their own interests, and to wring concessions from the British bourgeoisie. This strategy, however, depended on the British bourgeoisie's playing ball and making concessions to the peasantry. As we have seen, by the 1870s, for its own reasons, the British bourgeoisie was prepared to do this.
Under these conditions, by the late 1860s the bourgeoisie was turning away from the anaemic reformism of O'Connell and attempting to win the allegiance of the peasantry. Its ability to gain this was, however, dependent on its success in gaining concessions from Britain which materially benefitted the peasant class. It had to rely on Britain in this way because revolution was ruled out by fear of unleashing 'the lower classes'. During the 1840s, 50s and 60s, the British bourgeoisie had felt in no mood to grant concessions. In consequence, the Irish bourgeoisie had nothing to offer the peasantry, and lacking a mass social base, the bourgeoisie fell into political impotence. The change in British policy after 1869 gave the Irish capitalist class its opportunity. By presenting itself to the peasantry as a force capable of winning concessions, the bourgeoisie could regain its mass political base. This in turn gave it the political weight which enabled it to gain concessions for itself from Britain. From political obscurity the Irish bourgeoisie emerges again in the 1870s as a significant social force.
The success of this policy was sealed in 1874 when the Irish Home Rule League won 59 seats in the British House of Commons. This victory enabled the Irish bourgeoisie to settle accounts fully with the landlords. This latter group was conclusively defeated in 1879 when the leadership of the struggle passed firmly into the hands of the urban bourgeoisie led by Parnell.
This 'leftward' shift of the bourgeoisie had two main effects on the peasant movement; firstly, it succeeded in temporarily 'defusing' the extreme social tensions and agitation of the countryside, and secondly it led to the political decay of that section of the Fenian movement which had supported the land war and Parnell.
Despite its apparent success in the 1870s and early 80s, the position of the Irish bourgeoisie was only maintained by the grace of Westminster. As soon as the supply of reforms to appease the peasantry dried up, then the bourgeoisie would no longer have its mass political base. The supply of reforms began to cease by the middle 1880s. The split and subsequent collapse of the Land League was the first warning to the bourgeoisie, but the writing was really on the wall with successive defeats for Gladstone's Home Rule Bills. With the bourgeoisie no longer able to appease the peasantry, the I.R.B. began to revive.
The I.R.B. again
The first real sign of this Jacobin revival was with the launching of the 'Gaelic Athletic Association' in 1884. This ostensibly was a society for the preservation and fostering of Irish games and athletics. In reality, however, it was seen by the I.R.B. as a means of stimulating a militant national spirit. As such, it met with a spectacular initial success, and provided a highly efficient recruiting ground for the I.R.B. This success was consolidated by the launching of the Gaelic League in 1893. In 1898 the ex-Fenian terrorist, Tom Clarke, arrived in America from 15 years in British prisons, and rapidly rejuvenated the American end of the I.R.B.'s organisation. In 1907 he returned to Ireland and began co-operating with Sean MacDermott who had already made great strides in revitalising the secret organisation of the I.R.B. in Ireland itself. In 1910 the militantly republican newspaper 'Irish Freedom' was published. The I.R.B. was now gaining ground rapidly.
Finding its mass political base undermined, the bourgeoisie was forced to move further in the direction of attempting to gain concessions for the peasants. In 1900 the parliamentary Nationalist Party adopted the land policy of the United Ireland League, which included division of big grazing estates and the establishment of more labourers' small holdings for the peasants. By now, in order to keep its mass political base, the bourgeoisie was being forced to promise the peasantry concessions which it could not produce. Thus, although the position of the bourgeois Nationalist Party appeared to be strong in the first decade of this century, in fact it was able to survive politically only because of a very hollow and knife-edged confidence trick. At some point it would become obvious that it could no longer gain the concessions the peasantry demanded. Then its political position could disappear in an instant. It was the First World War which revealed the true position of the bourgeoisie, and the 1916 rising which exploded the confidence trick.
The position of the bourgeoisie was made even less secure by the fact that by the 20th century, a new social force had arrived on the scene which could far outbid the bourgeoisie for the support of the peasantry. This force was the Irish working class.
Throughout the last years of the 19th century, the industrial struggles in the cities had been intensifying, and this upsurge found political expression in 1896 with the creation of James Connolly's Irish Socialist Republican Party. With the founding of this organisation the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat for the leadership of the national struggle, and thereby for the allegiance of the peasantry, was well and truly joined. The outcome of this struggle dominated Irish politics for over half a century.
Ulster
The complete exception to the type of bourgeois development just discussed was Ulster. The reasons for this must be sought in the peculiarities of historical development of north-east Ireland.
Religious bigotry had been used as an instrument of British rule in Ireland since the reformation. The main role of religious divisions then was to butress the system of land ownership which was the foundation of British domination. But this meant that as the land question became less important for any section of the population, so religious sectarianism had less of a role to play for it and tended to decline. In terms of late 18th century Ireland, this meant that the industrialised areas, which were almost exclusively the region around Belfast, tended to be the least sectarian. Ironically, the later hot-bed of religious bigotry saw in the 1790s Protestants of all denominations making generous contributions to Catholic religious foundations.
The situation whereby Ulster was the most industrialised part of Ireland had always existed to some extent. It was created by Ulster's monopoly of the linen industry. Ulster's predominance was however greatly accelerated by the advent of steam power. Only the Ulster capitalists, with their wealth derived from the linen industry and the Ulster Custom, could afford to introduce this revolutionary new source of power. Once introduced, steam gave the Ulster industrialists a competitive advantage which enabled them to drive the rest of Ireland's industry into the ground. The result was that outside Ulster the only bourgeoisie that could exist was the gombeen bourgeoisie we have already discussed.
The rapid development of industry was naturally accompanied by the growth of a true industrial bourgeoisie. It was unique in the whole of Ireland in that its social position was not based on land ownership or secondary exploitation of the land situation, and therefore this class had far less interest in maintaining religious sectarianism than the ruling class in other parts of Ireland. In consequence, by 1800 Belfast was the least sectarian part of Ireland. This, plus the rapidly growing strength and assertiveness of the bourgeoisie, led to Belfast becoming the centre of Irish radicalism. As we have already discussed, this affected mainly the artisans, but it also spread to the small proletariat that existed at that time. In consequence, Belfast became not only the radical centre of Ireland, but also its trade union stronghold. This development culminated in a series of riots and strikes in the years 1815 to 1819.
A certain degree of working class radicalism is tolerable to a confident bourgeoisie. However, the height of the French revolution had supplied a series of traumatic shocks to the European bourgeoisie, and with the continued growth of the working class and its organisations, the bourgeoisie in all European countries, as we have seen, became more scared of its own working class than it was of native or foreign oppressors. The bourgeoisie therefore ceased to be a genuinely revolutionary class. It was now no longer interested in overcoming religious differences in order to forge a collective struggle against Britain. It now saw religion as a means of dividing the potentially threatening working class movement.
In these circumstances, the spirit which had produced the United Irishmen died rapidly. Just as Jacobinism, which had once expressed the most progressive interests of the French bourgeoisie, became anathema after 1795, so did 'The Republic' and the ideas of Tone become a nightmare instead of an aspiration for the northern bourgeoisie after 1798. The most ready weapon with which to fight 'The Republic' was bigotry. The old form was now to be filled with a new content. Its new master was not to be British interest, but Ulster capitalism. The instruments which the Ulster ruling class siezed upon were the 'Evangelical' anti-liberal wing of the General Synod of the Presbyterian Church of Ulster, and, most importantly, the Orange Order.
By 1829, the Evangelicals were in complete control of the Synod and were supporting the Protestant bourgeoisie's new tactic of discriminating against Catholics in the allocation of jobs. This policy fed on and reinforced the social tension in Belfast created by its enormously rapid growth in the early 19th century. In 1835 the bourgeoisie's policy was crowned with success when violent sectarian rioting swept Belfast. The bourgeoisie then rapidly moved to institutionalise the bigotry by setting up organisations such as the openly Protestant Belfast Town Police Force. These 19th century B Specials carried out a systematic reign of terror against the Catholics from their founding in 1845 until 1865.
The main institution of Ulster Protestant rule was the Orange Order. This had been originally an Anglican body, but in 1834, significantly one year before the first riots, it was opened to all protestants. This organisation grew steadily throughout the 19th century, and played a leading role in, for example, arming the Protestant population against the 'Young Irelanders'. By 1900 it was the bulwark of the Ulster bourgeoisie, playing such diverse roles as terrifying Catholic priests and arranging scabs during the 1907 Belfast strikes. It was on the blood-stained foundation of the Orange Order that the Northern Irish state was to be founded.
It is of key importance for a correct policy in northern Ireland today to realise that the Ulster state is an organised expression and stronghold of bigotry. It is of key importance for a strategy in Ireland today to realise that the bigotry of the northern Irish state is not something incidental to its existence, but is built into the foundations of that state. To believe, for example that it is possible to create in northern Ireland:
'a democratic community ... in which free and full political debate can occur, a community in which some people no longer benefit from discrimination against their neighbours, in which the great mass of Protestants can learn that Nationalists, Republicans and Socialists are not all votaries of the Great Beast of Babylon, and in which some of them can gradually be won to accepting the ideal of national unity'.(22)
is to forget the most basic thing about the northern state, and is to lead the movement into utopian fantasies instead of organising to fight the battle as it really exists.
But if the need to use religious bigotry to split the working class was imposed on the Ulster bourgeoisie by its status as the only industrial bourgeoisie in Ireland, then so was the policy of support for the British connection. Lysaght succinctly summarises these forces when he says that:
'It was to Britain that the north-eastern industries looked. Scots banks supplied credit, Scots mines supplied coal. British industry supplied recruits for the entrepreneur's ranks (climaxing with Harland, the ship-builder). The British Empire gave Ulster markets. The Union Jack protected them'.(23)
As a result the Ulster bourgeoisie feared above all British tariffs and the possibility of being taxed by an independent Irish state in order to help build industry in the rest of Ireland.
In Britain itself the bourgeoisie as a whole was uninterested in Ireland. It found in India and the new African territories of the Empire a far readier source of profit than in Ireland. However, the Ulster bourgeoisie could rely upon the support of powerful sectional interests. In particular, the growth of the 'Imperial' ideology which necessarily accompanied the expansion of the Empire, gave the Ulster bourgeoisie a way of influencing far larger sections of the British ruling class than were directly opposed to the growth of independent Irish capitalism. This influence was naturally greatest in those sections of society which had most to gain from the maintenance of the 'Imperial' ideology; this meant primarily the Tory Party and the army.
Although the Ulster section of the Irish bourgeoisie could win over part of the British ruling class, it could not win the support of the rest of the Irish capitalists. This had none of the links with Britain that their Ulster compatriots had, and, in fact, stood to gain from any growth of an indiginous Irish capitalism. With the bourgeoisie in Ireland split and it being far from certain that the British ruling class would support Ulster in any civil war, some of the Orange capitalists at the beginning of the century began to fear the isolation their political positions were leading them into. This particularly applied to the strongest sections of the bourgeoisie who, because of their economic strength, had least need of sectarianism in order to keep a totally docile labour force. The sectarian rioting declined for a period. However the final cementing of the Unionist bloc came as a result of Larkin's pioneering trade union organising in Belfast.
During 1907 Larkin led major strikes of dockers and carters in Belfast, and during the course of that eventful year even the police went on strike. Larkin succeeded in overcoming temporarily the religious sectarianism of the working class. Seven Grand Masters of Orange Lodges resigned in order to assist Larkin. On the anniversary of the siege of Derry he led a parade in honour both of the Protestant defenders of Derry and of the Pope who had supported them. To the bourgeoisie it appeared that class consciousness was about to replace religious consciousness. Larkin's efforts at unionisation collapsed due to spinelessness of the leaders of the existing trade unions, but it had lasted long enough in order to terrify the bourgeoisie. Political isolation and possible civil war might not be a very appealing prospect, but at least it was better than the prospect of a united working class existing in the part of Britain with the longest revolutionary tradition and the worst social conditions. For the Ulster bourgeoisie from 1908 onwards, the die was cast. It would maintain its position inside the Union even if it had to fight Britain to do so.
The first step in this new policy was to stir up new sectarian rioting and to organise the Orange scabs of 1907 into the Ulster Volunteer Force. Before long the bourgeoisie was in a position to take its revenge on Larkin, and it used the occurence of sectarian rioting in 1912 to smash the organisation of the I.T.G.W.U. in Belfast. Having thus dealt with the threat from the 'lower orders', the Orange capitalists could display their British patriotism by entering into negotiations with the German government for the supply of arms. From September 12th onwards, it strengthened its base amongst the Protestant working class by hectic agitation which succeeded in getting over 200,000 people to sign the anti-Home Rule Covenant. With the Ulster bourgeoisie and their pawns armed, civil war appeared inevitable in 1914. In fact, it was only stopped then by the outbreak of a rather larger contest the First World War. This contest enabled the British government to show its determination to crush the U.V.F. by allowing it to form an independent unit inside the British Army. Apart from this, the war did nothing to solve the tensions in Ireland. On the contrary, Easter 1916 brought them up to breaking point. By then, two armed camps existed in Ireland.
III
'In developments of such magnitude twenty years are no more than a day, although later there may come days in which twenty years are embodied'. (Marx to Engels, April 9th, 1863).
We have already seen that it was the radicalisation of the urban artisan which characterised the revolt of the United Irishmen. Most of the great upheavals of 19th century Ireland were also preceeded by agitation in urban areas.
Even at the beginning of the 1790s, Connolly notes that there was a series of strikes and armed clashes between workmen and the authorities,(24) Similarly, before the Fenian rebellion, in the early 1860s, there was an upsurge of labour agitation(25). This particular urban upsurge found an ideological expression in the works of William Thompson. However, for the most part the agitation was confined to artisans proper and did not spread to the working class. In fact it would have been virtually impossible for a true working class movement to have existed at this period because, for most of the century, the proletariat was a small class confined to the linen industry of the north-east.
The rural depopulation following the Great Famine and the development of the 'gombeen' bourgeoisie was accompanied by an increase in the size and social weight of the working class. The first real act of political consciousness on the part of the proletariat came in 1863 with the setting up of the Dublin United Trades Association. Branches of the First International existed in Ireland during the 1860s but despite Marx and Engels's preoccupation with Ireland in this period, these had little impact.(26)
By the 1890s most towns of any size in Ireland had Trade Union Councils. However, two great problems were unsolved; firstly, the Trade Unions established up to that time included only the skilled crafts, while the great mass of unskilled workers were non-unionised, and secondly, there was as yet no clear political expression of this growth of working class size and organisation. In the conditions of appalling misery reigning in the Irish proletariat in the early 20th century it was almost inevitable that the solution of these problems would take a semi-revolutionary form.(27) However, the proletariat was still a minority of the population. It could not solve its problems without the support of the peasantry, and for that it needed to grasp the nettle of the land and therefore of the national questions. It was not oppressed directly by Britain in the way that the peasants were. To link its struggles to those of the peasantry therefore required a clear political understanding of the dynamics of the Irish situation. The failure to understand the theoretical questions involved produced the particular 'solution' of the national question which is the key to understanding Irish politics.
Larkinism
The struggle to organise a trade union movement is of course one pregnant with possibilities for developing the political consciousness of the working class. This can be clearly seen in, for example, the period of the rise of the German Social Democratic party. But trade union organisation does not automatically lead to a real heightening of political consciousness. To take just one case, the Popular Front policies of the American C.P. during the late 1930s, with its support for Democratic Party candidates, meant that the possibility of creating a separate Labour Party during the rise of the C.I.O. was wasted.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the reformism of the parties of the Second International, in particular its manifestation in their abstention from the economic struggle, was becoming apparent.(28) This trait was particularly well developed in the Social Democratic Federation, the British 'Marxist' organisation in which Connolly and Larkin gained their early political experience. Although this contained many excellent trade union militants who had played a key role during the great strikes of the period 1889-91 and who would do so again during the period 1915-19, as an organisation it was paralyzed by the policies of its dictatorial leader Hyndman (ex-city businessman, hated enemy of Frederick Engels and jingoist extraordinary).
Hyndman was a rabid defender of the Empire, and for Britain to lose any part of its domain was for him unthinkable. He was therefore violently opposed to Irish Republicanism, and, in consequence, the most the S.D.F. was prepared to concede on the question of Ireland was an acknowledgement of the right to Home Rule.
On the subject of trade union organisation, Hyndman's views were governed by his 'contempt for uneducated and undisciplined democracy', and his belief that 'a slave class cannot be freed by the slaves themselves. The leadership, the initiative, the teaching, the organisation, must come from those comrades in a different position, and who are trained to use their faculties in early life'. His 'considered' opinion was offered up in the view that: 'I never knew a strike which gained anything'. Against Hyndman's politics, which represented in a magnified form all the faults of the Second International, Connolly and Larkin rebelled.
The form this rebellion took was greatly influenced by ideas developing inside the American working class movement. We have already seen how the close links between the American and Irish working classes, which had been created by the mass waves of emigration from Ireland during the 19th century had been important in the Fenian rebellion. It was therefore to America, more than any other country, that both Republicans and Socialists looked for solidarity, finance and ideas. In the case of Connolly, this influence was heightened by his direct involvement in the American labour movement in the years 1903-1910.
Larkin was impressed primarily by the ideas of 'industrial unionism', put forward by the industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) which had been founded in 1905. The ideas of this organisation had an obvious interest to Larkin as they had been formed under the same pressures that faced him in Ireland - the need to organise unskilled labour, plus the obvious and growing political bankruptcy of the political parties of the Second International. The nature of the work force to be organised obviously made 'craft' unionism impossible. This had led the Industrial Workers of the World to formulate the idea of one all embracing union. The political reformism of the social democratic parties led it to place almost all emphasis on 'direct action', and in particular on the strike weapon. These ideas seemed to fit exactly the situation Larkin had to face where he had to organise an immensely diverse labour force and knew he would get little or no help from any 'political' organisation. Connolly had initially been more impressed by the ideas of De Leon, but eventually he too became a convert to the I.W.W., and became one of its organisers.
The combination of the ideas of the I.W.W., plus the seething discontent of the Dublin slums was not merely to turn that city from a non-union town into one of the strongholds of trade unionism in Europe, but was almost to succeed in bringing about a re-alignment of the social forces in Ireland, and to settle the national question once and for all.
Larkin's first agitation was in Belfast as an official of the National Dock Labourer's Union. Here he led strikes of firemen, dockers and seamen. A successful strike by carters in support of the dockers gave him his first taste of the power of the sympathy strike - a tactic he was later to develop to a fine art. In the ensuing industrial struggles he momentarily broke through the religious sectarianism of Belfast to unite Catholics and Protestants in a massive coal strike. This was successfully concluded in late July, and for once the parades of Protestant and Catholic workers against their employers matched the Orange bigot parades of July 12th. In the ensuing avalanch of industrial struggles, the Belfast police semi-mutinied for higher wages, and the army was called in to keep 'law and order'. This force was then deliberately used to whip up religious sectarianism by its constant parades and patrols in the nationalist Falls Road area. This inevitably culminated in rioting with the army shooting dead a young man and a girl. The N.U.D.L. then ratted on Larkin, and settled the dock strike over his head. This experience, plus the ideas of the I.W.W. convinced him of the necessity of a new type of union in Ireland. On 4th January, 1909, he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. It was to help organise this union that Connolly returned from the U.S. He provided the link that was to create the Easter 1916 uprising.
Labour war and national struggle
Larkin's success in Belfast had greatly scared the northern bourgeoisie, but that was not the key to the situation in Ireland. The vital task facing revolutionaries was to split the peasantry from its bourgeois leadership.
The period 1900-14 was an excellent time for an attempt to forge an alliance between the working class and the peasantry. In 1905 Sinn Fein had been founded by Arthur Griffith, and in 1907 had made its first appearance on the electoral scene - a sure indication that the social base of the bourgeois 'Home Rulers' was no longer secure. In this and the following year, peasant agitation began to grow, and with it the political expression of extreme 'physical force' nationalism, the reviving I.R.B. This began a policy of systematically taking over Sinn Fein, and in 1911 it acquired a new and more extreme leadership. The armed wing of the nationalist movement, the Irish Volunteers, was also undergoing a rapid growth. It was also locked in a fierce struggle between pro-Redmonites and more Jacobin elements. This led eventually, in September 1914, to a split with the I.R.B. wing taking about 12,000 out of the Redmonite dominated Volunteers. Thus, it was clear throughout this period that the split was sufficient between the bourgeois and Jacobin wings for the working class to make a bid to detach a considerable section of the peasantry's support away from the bourgeoisie. For this, three things were necessary: firstly, the working class had to heighten the tensions inside the nationalist bloc by being obviously involved with the bourgeoisie in a struggle. This would force the Jacobins to choose between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Secondly, the leadership of the working class had to see the necessity for linking the struggle of the working class to the land and national struggles of the peasantry. Thirdly, there had to exist an organisation capable of taking political advantage of the opportunities created. The Dublin 'Labour War' perfectly fulfilled the first requirement. Connolly, but not Larkin, understood the need for the second. But neither Connolly nor Larkin were able to understand the need for the third.
The tactical weapon which Larkin saw as the key to solving the problem of unionisation was the sympathy strike. This would prevent weak groups of workers being picked off one by one by the employer. The first application of this tactic by the ITGWU was in 1911 when it acted in solidarity with a general seamens' strike. Later the same year, it threatened to come out in sympathy with the railwaymen of the Great Southern and Western Railway. In Wexford a bitter recognition dispute in the iron industry led to the death of one striker and the deporting to Waterford of the union organiser. In Sligo a similar strike resulted in the death of another striker and a policeman. In a series of strikes throughout 1912 rises of between 3 shillings and 12 shillings weekly were gained - i.e. up to 50% of the average wage of Dublin of the period. By 1913 it had become obvious that either the ITGWU must be smashed by the employers or it would unleash a wave of working class militancy that would threaten the foundation of capitalism in Ireland. As always in such cases the bourgeoisie resorted to the mailed fist and the jackboot. The result was the 1913 General Strike.
The aftermath of the labour war
There is not space here to go into a detailed history of the Dublin General Strike(29). It is simply sufficient to note those features which made it an almost ideal opportunity to split the Jacobins from their bourgeois 'allies'.
In the first place, the bourgeois nationalists were in the forefront of the employers' organisation. This meant that it could be shown in practice that when it came to the crunch they were prepared to use all the force of the British state against 'fellow' Irishmen. Secondly, the employers showed complete solidarity across religious lines. Although the instigator of the employers' lock-out, William M. Murphy, was a Catholic, he was rapidly supported by Protestants and Quakers. This religious solidarity of the employers could be used to attempt to overcome the religious divisions within the working class by showing that in struggle class differences counted for far more than religious ones. Thirdly, the power of the religious organisations during the strike was weakened by the attitude of the Archbishop of Dublin. His feelings were summed-up in the following communication to the Lord Mayor of Dublin. It was sent on the ending of the strike and congratulated the Lord Mayor on:
'the notable victory gained yesterday over a combination of influences which in addition to the havoc they caused in the industrial world of labour have done no little harm in blunting if not deadening the moral and religious sense of not a few among the working population of our city'.
Apart from general attacks of this nature, the main activity of the church during the period of the strike was to prevent the children of strikers being sent to England, where they might have got adequate food.(30) Archbishop Walsh opposed this on the twin grounds that sending the children to Protestant England might impair their Catholicism, and secondly that seeing comfortable English middle class homes would make them discontented with their miserable slums in Ireland.
Despite the obvious advantages of divine help, Murphy tended to place rather more immediate faith in the police. The ferocity of this force during the strike reached heights which even Ireland had never seen before. Their activities included the torturing to death in a police cell of Michael Byrne, secretary of the Kingstown branch of the ITGWU. Continual batton charges were made on pickets. Larkin's meetings outside Liberty Hall and in O'Connell Street were systematically broken up by the police. The assault was even carried into the homes of the strikers, with police raids and rampages in areas such as 'Corporation Buildings' where many of the strikers lived. Typical of the heroic acts carried out by the police was ruining the eyesight of a baby by smashing up its room and battering a man unconscious in front of six children. In addition, the police aided the actions of scabs. These included the shooting dead of a young girl as she was collecting her strikers' food pay. Larkin himself was of course arrested on a charge of seditious libel and conspiracy.
The lesson of these events was clearly drawn by Larkin. He wrote in the 'Irish Worker' that:
'The most significant fact connected with the industrial struggle in this country has been the direct connection and agreement proved to be existing between the capitalists of the Murphy and Jacob type, the professional politician, the press and the clergy. Each of these sections most brutally and unashamedly stated that they are opposed to any improvement in the conditions of the common people ...'
The lesson of these events, and the way that they showed that when the chips were down the Irish bourgeoisie referred British troops to Irish workers, was not lost on the Jacobin wing of the national movement. The tremendous impetus gained by the working class upsurge threatened to tear apart the already strained peasant-bourgeois nationalist bloc. The strike itself split nationalist Ireland and revealed class forces in their true light. The bourgeois elements were implacably hostile to Larkin with the parliamentarian Murphy actually leading the lock out. The more 'radical' bourgeoisie were equally hostile. Arthur Griffith in particular, who had spared no efforts to condemn the strikers. On the other hand, the leaders and theorists of the peasant Jacobin wing, such as Padraic Pearse and George Russell, were staunch supporters of the strike. When in October Larkin attended a Sinn Fein meeting on Parnell, he was snubbed by Griffith, but greeted as a hero by Tom Clarke and Sean MacDiarmada.
The split in the traditional nationalist bloc created the possibility of an entirely new social alliance. If only the working class movement could seize on the revolutionary aspects of the peasants' traditional Jacobinism, then it could take the leadership of the national struggle out of the hands of Redmond, Griffith and their like. If this junction of forces had been created then the national struggle would have to be fought through to its conclusion, for the working class, unlike the bourgeoisie, had nothing to gain and everything to lose from a compromise with Britain, while, in any case, as soon as it faltered in its pursuance of the struggle for independence, it would be deserted by the peasantry and find itself without the mass support without which it could not fight the bourgeoisie in Ireland.
This alliance was never created. It was at this point that the fatal weakness of Larkin's and Connolly's syndicalist theories proved disastrous. The flaw in the theory of industrial unionism was that in order to be effective in the economic struggle, a union must include all workers regardless of their level of political understanding. The politics of such an organisation are determined by what the majority of its members are prepared to accept. As all levels of politics are represented in the organisation, it is impossible for such an organisation to take far reaching political initiatives, the importance of which are only understood by a few at the time when it is necessary to take them. For this type of initiative, of which an attempt to forge an alliance with the radical peasantry against the bourgeoisie was definitely one, a political organisation was necessary. But this was ruled out precisely by the philosophy of the industrial union. Men like Connolly were therefore reduced to personal action without having the backing of an organisation capable of taking advantage of the opportunities which had been created.
Worse still, because of the dogma of the industrial union, Connolly could not even persuade some of his closest political allies to see the link between the upsurge of nationalism and the struggle for socialism. Even Larkin, despite his genuine Republicanism, was opposed to trying to link the union based Irish Citizens' Army with the peasant based Irish Volunteers. This failure was tragic at a time when, as we have seen, the Volunteers were undergoing an internal struggle between the bourgeois Redmonite wing and a peasant based I.R.B. wing led by Pearse. A link between the Citizens' Army and the Volunteers would have immeasurably strengthened and radicalised the Pearse wing. Instead of the mass revolutionary party which might have emerged out of the labour struggles leading up to 1913, all that emerged was an alliance between Connolly, leading the rump of the Citizens' Army, and Pearse. Seldom can the bankruptcy of Syndicalism have been shown more clearly.
1916
The failure to create, in the most fruitful circumstances conceivable, a working class revolutionary organisation linked to the national struggle was the fundamental reason that doomed Connolly's work, for all its theoretical insight, to failure. In the critical period leading up to the Easter rising, the only force he could persuade of the need to link the struggle of the working class to the national struggle was the 1,000 or so volunteers of the Irish Citizens' Army, of which Connolly was the head. This failure was all the more tragic in that the outbreak of war in 1914 revealed clearly the weakness of the Irish bourgeoisie's position.
The outbreak of the First World War posed the capitalists of Ireland with an insoluble problem. Its entire strategy was based on cooperation with British Imperialism. As long as Britain would make even relatively minor concessions, the hold of the Irish bourgeoisie over its mass peasant base could be largely maintained. However, although that base could be duped, it could never be persuaded to actively cooperate with Britain. On the contrary, one of the key elements in the bourgeoisie's policy was to retain the image of actually fighting British Imperialism. But in August 1914, British Imperialism demanded that the price of any further concessions was cooperation by the Irish bourgeoisie in Britain's imperialist struggle against Germany. To make matters worse, the British ruling class also decided that, in order to secure the docility of Ireland, the concession of Home Rule would not be granted until after the end of the war(31). The choice before the Irish bourgeoisie and its main representative, Redmond, was clear-cut: if it sided with Britain, it would destroy its mass social base; if, on the other hand, it decided not to cooperate, it would be forced to launch a struggle against Britain in circumstances where the working class and peasantry were already showing unmistakable signs of immoderation. Such a struggle would have unleashed forces which would have rapidly got out of the control of the bourgeoisie. Faced with this situation Redmond showed clearly the nature of the bourgeoisie in the 20th century. He and the Irish bourgeoisie decided to side with Imperialism.
Almost at once, the bourgeois nationalist position began to crumble. In September the command of the Irish Volunteers expelled the Redmonites and demanded immediate Home Rule. Redmond captured the majority of the rank and file of the volunteers, but significantly the anti-Redmonites included many former Home Rule supporters. The left-wing of this section was responsive to Connolly's overtures. The right wing began to seek German aid as an alternative to a potentially explosive alliance with the working class.
By the beginning of 1916, the alliance of class forces was being created which should have come into being in 1913. The Irish Volunteers were split between their bourgeois wing, seeking foreign aid, and their revolutionary Jacobin wing which was now seeing the necessity for an alliance with Irish Labour. On the other hand, Connolly had succeeded in making it clear to at least some sections of the working class that the only way forward for the working class was to link its struggle to the nationalist aspirations of the peasantry. The tragedy was that by 1916 it was too late. What in the period around 1913 could, if only Connolly had had a better concept of the role of a political organisation, have been a massive movement, was by 1916 reduced to something approaching a rump. Only 220 members of the Citizens' Army and 1,000 of the Dublin brigade of the Volunteers took part in the Easter rising in Dublin. Outside Dublin the intended risings came to virtually nothing. Even this tiny force succeeded in transforming the situation in Ireland, but the political elements it represented were too weak to prevent the leadership of the newly revitalised national struggle from falling back into the hands of the old bourgeois leaders. The greatest tragedy for the Irish working class in 1916 was not simply the death of Connolly, but the fact that he had never created a political organisation which understood and was capable of continuing his policies.
This failure was to dominate Irish politics for 50 years. It was not simply that without linking the working class struggle to the national struggle, the working classes struggle for socialism could not be achieved. It was more fundamental than that. Without the leadership of the working class taking up the national struggle, the position of socialists within the working class movement could not even be maintained, let alone extended. The national struggle dominated Irish politics and the working class was no more immune to its influence than any other section of society. If the socialist leadership of the working class did not take a firm position on the question, then it would inevitably be replaced by a petty-bourgeois, but nationalist party. By a failure to grasp this point, the early labour leaders all unwittingly layed the conditions for the later domination of the working class by Fianna Fail and bourgeois nationalism. Only two generations later, and under the impetus of new developments, is the ideological supremacy of the bourgeoisie being challenged. The tragedy is that it was largely the mistakes made before 1916 that ever allowed that domination to pass into the hands of bourgeois nationalism.
Footnotes
1. See for example the early chapters of Connolly's 'Labour in Irish History'. Connolly's views on this essential question remained basically the same throughout his political life. As early as 1897, he wrote in 'Erin's Hope', 'Whichever be the true interpretation of Irish history, one fact at least stands out clear and undeniable, viz., that the conflict between the rival systems of land ownership was the pivot around which centered all the struggles and rebellions of which that history had been so prolific'. (New Books Edition, p.8.). Connolly has been attacked for glorifying the pre-feudal period (J.A. Hoffman, 'The Irish Question: Connolly the I.C.O. and the Irish Bourgeoisie', p. 1-6), and for his policy as regards the land question (D.R. O'Connor-Lysaght, 'The Unorthodoxy of James Connolly', International, Vol 1, no. 3), but his basic analysis has not been seriously attacked.
2. This would, of course, have occurred even without interference by England. By 1150 the Irish chiefs and clergy were already seeking the introduction of the feudal system. What the English intervention meant however was that the thirst of the peasants for land, an endemic feature of feudalism, would become inextricably linked with the struggle against the foreign oppresser (see D.R. O'Connor-Lysaght, 'The Republic of Ireland', p. 10).
3. The struggle over land has been mediated through many forms. For example, by 1703 the major manifestation of the question was the fact that Catholics owned only 14% of the land while making up the overwhelming majority of the population. In the twentieth century, it was seen in the struggle over the land annuity payments, and the inability of small farming to be viable, coupled with the inability of Irish industry to absorb the displaced labour. This resulted in a situation whereby as late as 1936-46 farmers were emigrating at the rate of 4,000 a year. (Lysaght Ibid, p.116). This is, of course, not to say at all that the form which the land problem took remained constant. What however did occur was that the way in which the problem was created meant that each attempt to solve it led into a further mire, e.g. the 19th century land acts and the annuity question.
4. For example, here is how Connolly described the effect of Cromwell's policy in Ireland. He states that the English governors proclaimed: '... that 'all the ancient estates and farms of the people of Ireland were to belong to the adventurers and the army of England, and that the Parliament had assigned Connacht for the habitation of the Irish nation, whither they must transplant their wives and daughters and children before the first of May following (1654) under penalty of death if found on this side of the Shannon after that day'. In addition to this transplanting to Connacht, gangs of soldiery were dispatched throughout Ireland to kidnap young boys and girls of tender years to be sold into slavery in the West Indies. Sir William Petty, ancestor of the Lansdowne family and a great and unscrupulous land-thief, declared that in some Irish accounts, the number so sold into slavery was estimated at one hundred thousand. This ancestor of Lord Lansdowne, the founder of the noble Lansdowne family, Sir William Petty, landed in Ireland in 1652 with a total capital of all his fortune of £500. But, he came over in the wake of Cromwell's army, and got himself appointed 'Physician of the Army of Ireland'. In 1662 he was made one of a Court of Commissioners of Irish Estates and also Surveyor-General for Ireland. As the native Irish were then being hunted to death, or transported in slave-gangs to Barbados, the latter fact gave this worthy ancestor of a worthy lord excellent opportunities to 'invest' his £500 to good purpose. (Connolly's 'The Re-Conquest of Ireland' p.2.).
5. Some idea of the dimensions of this British-caused disaster can be gauged from the following description by Engels. 'Except for Dublin the whole of Ireland - especially the towns - reminds one of France or northern Italy since there is a pleasing profusion of policemen, priests, lawyers, officials and country squires and a total absence of any industry whatever. It would be difficult to understand how all these parasites live if the distress of the peasants did not supply an answer to the problem. 'Strong measures' are to be seen in every corner of the country. Here one can see that the so-called liberty of English citizens is based upon the oppression of the colonies. I have never seen so many policemen in any country. The bleary look of the bibulous Prussian policeman is developed to its highest perfection among the Irish constables who carry carbines, bayonets and handcuffs. Ruined edifices are characteristic of the Irish countryside. The oldest date from the fifth and sixth centuries, the most recent from the nineteenth century. And every intervening period is represented. The oldest ruins are those of churches. After 1100 the ruins are of castles and churches. After 1800 the ruins are those of peasants' cottages. All western Ireland - especially in the neighbourhood of Galway - is covered with ruined cottages. Most of them have only been deserted since 1846. I never thought that famine could have such tangible reality. Whole villages are devastated. And among the deserted villages lie the fine parks of the lesser landlords - mostly lawyers - who are almost the only people still living there. This state of affairs is due to famine, emigration and clearances. Even the fields have no cattle. The land is deserted and nobody wants it. Ireland has been utterly ruined by the English wars of conquest from 1100 to 1850 - for it is a fact that the campaigns and the state of siege have lasted as long as that. There can be no question that most of the ruins were due to destruction in time of war. The result is that for all their fanatical nationalism the Irish feel that they are no longer at home in their own country. Ireland for the English! That is now being realized. The Irish know that they cannot compete with the English who are better equipped in every way. Emigration will continue until the almost exclusively Celtic character of the people has gone to the dogs. How often have the Irish started out to achieve something and every time they have been crushed, politically and industrially. Continual oppression has artificially turned the Irish into an utterly impoverished people and now, as everyone knows, they fulfil the function of supplying England, America and Australia with prostitutes, casual labourers, pimps, thieves, swindlers, beggars and other rabble'. (Engels to Marx, May 23rd, 1856).
6. G. Gilmore; 'The Republican Congress' p.2
7. In 1945 the Fine Gael party, which had accepted partition of Ireland in 1922 and which during the early 1930's had been overtly fascist party, thought it could regain its nationalist image by proclaiming a totally spurious 26 county 'Republic'.
8. Connolly; 'Labour in Irish History' p.67
9. Gilmore Ibid p.64
10. Connolly op.cit p.109
11. Ibid p.114
12. Ibid p.108
13. Ibid p.121
14. K.B. Nowlan; 'The Fenian rising of 1867' in 'The Fenian Movement' ed T.W. Moody.
15. Another symptom of the general disorganisation of the movement was the fact that the ship bringing arms from the USA, the 'Erin's Hope', did not arrive until 2 months after the rising had collapsed.
16. Quite apart from the political example of the rising for the English working class, the Fenians were also organisationally represented in Britain. Fenian cells existed in most towns with a large Irish population and the many Irish units and group of soldiers in the British army were honeycombed with Fenian groups.
17. See Lysaght op.cit p.29f for details of the Land changes in the last latter part of the 19th century.
18. Quite apart from this particular social development it is a general feature of social movements based on the petty bourgeoisie (including the Peasantry), that unless they have a politically working class leadership they tend to find a substitute for any coherent theory in military fetishism. An excellent example of this is El Fatah.
19. Between 1760 and 1815 the value of rents quadrupled.
20. For a theoretical discussion of the changing nature and role of the 19th century bourgeoisie see Engel's 'Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany' and 'The Role of Force in History'. For a discussion of this process in Ireland see Connolly op cit - particularly the Foreword and chapters 6-16.
21. Connolly op.cit p101
22. A Coughlan; 'The Northern Crisis, Which way forward?'. This book, which represents the theory of the C.P. concerning the situation in Ireland is one of the most remarkable documents ever appeared. It contains such gems as that it would be unrealistic to demand workers control from the Unionist Party. At a time when there are virtually daily gun-battles in Belfast the C.P. is still plugging on about the Peaceful Road and rather than organising the population to fight it is terrified of alienating the 'progressive priests and 'democratic' business men, in the name of 'uniting' the maximum number of people. What is truly amazing is that Coughlan can still put forward arguments which were refuted years ago. For example this is how Rosa Luxemburg dealt with Bernstein when he put forward exactly the same argument as was put forward by Coughlan and some members of Sinn Fein (i.e. that the struggle for Socialism must be kept seperate from the struggle (bourgeois) democracy). 'He advises the proletariat to disavow its socialist aim, so that the mortally frightened Liberals might come out of the mousehole of reaction. Making the suppression of the socialist labour movement an essential condition for the preservation of bourgeois democracy, he proves in a striking manner that this democracy is in complete contradiction with the inner tendency of development of the present society. He proves at the same time that the socialist movement is itself a direct product of this tendency. But he proves at the same time, still another thing. By making the renouncement of the socialist aim an essential condition of the resurrection of bourgeois democracy, he shows how inexact is the claim that bourgeois democracy is an indispensable condition of the socialist movement and the victory of socialism. His reasoning exhausts itself in a vicious circle. His conclusion swallows his premises. The solution is quite simple. In view of the fact that bourgeois liberalism has given up its ghost from fear of the growing labour-movement and its final aim, we conclude that the socialist labour-movement is today the only support for that which is not the goal of the socialist movement - democracy. We must conclude that democracy can have no other support. We must conclude that the socialist movement is not bound to bourgeois democracy, but that, on the contrary, the fate of democracy is bound with the socialist movement. We must conclude from this that democracy does not acquire greater chances of life in the measure that the working class renounces the struggle for its emancipation, but that, on the contrary, democracy acquires greater chances of survival as the socialist movement becomes sufficiently strong to struggle against the reactionary consequence of world politics and the bourgeois desertion of democracy. He who would strengthen democracy should want to strengthen and not weaken the socialist movement. He who renounces the struggle for socialism renounces both the labour movement and democracy.' Seventy years after that was written there is still nothing to add.
24. Ibid p.129
25. Ibid p.132
26. Marx's pre-occupation with Ireland was marked during the 1860's. See for example his letters of 30th Nov.1867, 29th Nov.1869 and 10th Dec. 1869 and also the section on Ireland is the 1st volume of Capital. (Published 1867).
27. The condition of the Irish working class in particular. Dublin during this period is virtually indescribable. In Dublin only 5,000 tenements lived 26,000 families. Of these tenements over 1,500 were condemned as unfit for human habitation even by the standards of the period. Of the families themselves, and the members of these families, made up almost one third of Dublin's population of 300,000 twenty thousand lived in one room and only one thousand of them had more than two rooms. Baths were unknown and water and primitive toilets existed only in the yards of the tenements. As a result to quote the report of the Departmental Committee of Inquiry into the housing of the Dublin working classes of 1914, 'Human excreta is to be found scattered about the yards - and in some cases even in the passages of the house itself.' The condition of the inhabitants of the tenements was however at least preferable to that of the not insignificant section of the population which was completely homeless and was forced to sleep in hallways and sheds. The effect of these social conditions was shown in the appalling death rate for Dublin. In the decade 1901-10 the average death rate for the whole of Ireland was 17.3 persons per thousand of the population. In such social conditions infant mortality in particular was bound to be incredibly high, in Dublin in 1901 one child in every 7 died in infancy. The death rate in Dublin was second only to Calcutta in the entire world. For the adult population things were little better. Over 12% of the population was unemployed, and even for those in work the average wage was only approx. 18 shillings a week (equivalent to approx.£6 now). Women slaved for as little as 5 shillings a week. Of this meagre income, rent and food accounted for over three quarters, leaving little fuel, clothes etc. Of the labour force itself over a half was classified as general labourers and here unemployment stood at approx. 20%. (For a fuller desciption see Emmett Larkin; 'James Larkin' ch.3)
28. See for example Knipskays 'Memories of Lenin' p.21
29. For a brief account see Red Mole 16th Feb 1971
30. Which is not to say of course that it would have been correct to support this. On the contrary it was more designed to lower the morale of the strikers. What is interesting however, is the reason the Archbishop gave for opposing it.
31. After 1910 the British Liberal government had to rely on the Irish nationalist for support in the House of Commons. The Redmondites used this advantage in order to wring Home Rule out of the Liberal government. The Act putting into force would have become law in 1914 but it was impended on the outbreak of war.