Chris Beausang, writer and socialist activist, revisits the politics of the signatories to the 1916 proclamation highlighting the sharp differences between Connolly’s revolutionary socialism and the nationalism of Pearse and others.
In Easter 1916 over one thousand members of the IrishVolunteers and Irish Citizen Army seized a number of buildings around Dublin city centre. Among the seven signatories of a short document announcing the formation of a Provisional Government of an independent Irish Republic – variously poets, scholars, journalists and clerks – it is James Connolly who stands out. Firstly, on the basis of his regarding the cause of Irish separatism as a means to the end of broader economic and social questions, and secondly for his being born into a working-class family; leaving school for a bakery and then a printer’s workshop, followed by the British army, drawn, as many of those of his class were, by the promise of a secure income. After deserting, he became involved in the Scottish labour movement, riding the wave of a renaissance of organising among low and unskilled manual labourers in the transport and manufacturing sectors, in pursuit of higher wages, better working conditions and the inculcation of revolutionary consciousness.
While organising unskilled workers often indicated a repudiation of caste differentiations within the labour force, a commitment to an offensive strategy, as against the defensive one of craft privileges, the variety of ideological and strategic orientation within new unionism was enormous, with a spectrum encompassing anything from reformist parliamentarians to anarcho-syndicalists.
Connolly’s correspondence, speeches and writings, appearing in labour newspapers as well as pamphlet-length books, indicate that, though he operated in its periphery, he was on the left of the Second International. He saw trade union activity within a revolutionary horizon, tending in the direction of organising the working class towards seizing power and overthrowing the tyrannies of capitalist production, bourgeois democracy and imperialism. At this time, the fortunes of the International were at their peak. Throughout Europe, mass worker parties had secured representation in parliaments, built the infrastructure for general or solidarity strikes and formed congresses to co-ordinate policy. We see a contempt for the centrist and rightist factions within socialist parties in his gravitation first to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labour Party and a reactive internationalism, in his move to the International Workers of the World, an organisation which had at its core a willingness to organise the working class across language and national boundaries.
When he first moved to Dublin, Connolly founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party. From the name as well as his most extensive theoretical-historical work Labour in Irish History(1910), it is obvious that Connolly aimed to leverage the class cleavages within the Irish Parliamentary Party’s electoral base. He placed its country squire leader John Redmond in a tradition of conciliatory and vacillating national leaders such as Daniel O’Connell and Henry Grattan, who are set against authentic revolutionaries such as Wolfe Tone, Jim Mitchel and James Fintan Lalor. Through a formalistic understanding of ancient legal documents and a generalised application of Friedrich Engels’ writings on ancient human civilisation, Connolly also produced an account of ancient Irish society which does not align with the body of scholarship we have today. This is, however, of a piece with his representation of the physical force tradition of Irish Republicanism as proto-socialist; it is a strategic choice to contest Irish history and British imperialism along class lines for present purposes.
Taking an overall perspective, Connolly’s life demonstrates a willingness and capacity to work with what was available, not just in the United States, but also in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, with Irish suffragettes such as Constance Markievicz as well as veterans of the Belfast textile industry Winifred Carney and Nellie Gordon. This record indicates the value both of the Scottish labour movement as a formative environment — more internationalist and radical than its English counterpart, as Liam McNulty demonstrates in his masterful study of Connolly’s life and work — as well as Marxism. Connolly’s facility with history and class analysis, his centrality within the Irish labour movement granted his politics a sophistication which is stark when weighed against those of the other signatories.
After Connolly, Padraig Pearse is the signatory in possession of the largest corpus of writings addressing social questions. His father was a sculptor with his own premises on Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street. Pearse’s most significant political writings correspond with his rising profile within the national movement, from the time of the Home Rule crisis onwards. A consistent motif established early on is a rejection of modernity and industrial society; in ‘The Murder Machine’ Pearse critiques the standardised education system it requires and facilitates. While for Connolly Tone and Mitchel point the way forward, for Pearse they are rather bulwarks or guarantors of a purer identity which pre-dates the British conquest. In this sense, the basic unit of Pearse’s political outlook is the nation. An independent Ireland would be a one-to-one expression of the nation and of the will of the Irish people, who would offer their mandate to representatives to govern in their name. Class enters into the picture in the course of an historical analogy, in which Pearse contends that Parnell would not have been justified in waging a struggle for land agitation were it not directed towards national separatism.
In this sense, Pearse’s strategic vector runs contrary to Connolly’s, not just in sundering the economic to the national but in seeking to sunder one to the other at all. There are no moments in which Pearse measures up to Connolly in anticipating theories of neo-colonialism in the mid to late twentieth century, identifying how imperialism and capitalism are imprecated, how any form of separatism is compromised without the overthrow of both, nor when Roger Casement, when considering the detrimental effects language loss has on a subject people’s capacity for resistance seems to anticipate Franz Fanon. Rather Pearse’s Irishness inhibits the broaching of social questions; Pearse declares himself at peace with his ‘fellow slaves’, whether capitalist or worker, rich or poor, fed or starving.
However, within the same paragraph Pearse declares himself at one with the propertied, he concedes that his sympathies lie with the impoverished, that it is a ‘sin’ that there is poverty, overcrowded tenements and hunger in a country with adequate resources. He also deplores the coercion tenants are subject to when organising for improvement. In this sense Pearse seems to vacillate; he holds Larkinism to be in many respects unwise, regarding its methods as ‘crude’ and ‘bloody’, but attributes these features to the suffering of its social base, calling Larkin ‘brave’ and ‘good’ in his attempts to solve these problems. Tracing their roots brings him back to modernity; atheism, urbanisation and ‘ruthless Capitalists’, none of which are indigenous to Ireland, and would therefore dissipate once English rule was ended. The paradoxes continue in what amounts to his most detailed account of what a future independent Irish state would look like; draining the bogs, stimulating native commerce, building hydro-electric dams, applying scientific improvements to agriculture and reducing expenditure on the judiciary and the police, a measure more indicative of how over-policed Ireland was than suggestive of a proto-abolitionist sentiment. These projections are all contained in a couple of paragraphs within the context of a longer piece. Its simultaneous rejection of modernism, its embrace of native industry and Catholic gloss (Pearse expresses a hope that a European war will stimulate a Catholic revival in France) it anticipates the economic policies of Eamon De Valera. Material in ‘The Sovereign People’ and ‘The Separatist Ideal’. It speaks directly to private property and democracy, how the rights of individuals should be balanced against those of the collective. It adopts the mercurial language of Bunreacht na hÉireann, deployed as often by property developers and their mouthpieces, as it is by those in favour of de-commodifying housing provision.
Tom Clarke, the oldest of the signatories by a decade, represented a connection the Rising had to a previous generation of Irish revolutionaries, having been sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a transatlantic oath-bound organisation founded in 1858. Factions and splinters from the core of this organisation had at various points carried out the assassination of British colonial officials, undertaken incendiary bombing campaigns across England and Scotland, as well as an abortive uprising. After being found in possession of dynamite, Clarke served fifteen years in solitary confinement in a London prison and on his release moved to Dublin where IRB members Seán MacDiarmada, Bulmer Hobson and Denis McCullough were at work in infiltrating Sinn Féin, a pressure group established by the journalist Arthur Griffith, devised in opposition to the insufficient Home Rule platform of the Irish Parliamentary Party.
In his biography of Connolly, Desmond Greaves claims that Clarke once said that he would become a socialist once Ireland is free but provides no reference, leaving his position on democratising the economy unverifiable. With the other signatories Clarke deplored the conditions in which many citizens of Dublin lived and was horrified by the violence the Dublin Metropolitan Police unleashed in the course of the lockout, writing a letter to Larkin’s magazine The Irish Worker detailing what he had seen and calling for an inquiry but on question of trade unions and Larkinism writ large they were far more ambivalent. The IRB abided by the Fenian tradition’s long history of clandestine or conspiratorial organisation and were suspicious of the more open agitation practiced by Connolly and the labour movement. Clarke organised collections for Irish workers deprived of their wages during the lockout, but seemed more motivated by the fact that their food would otherwise be purchased by the British Trade Union Congress. MacDiarmada dismissed Larkinism as an attack on Irish industry which would undermine Irish industry to the benefit of England and once ejected a self-declared internationalist from a Volunteer meeting going so far as to argue the English working class was a myth.
The Irish Review, a literary journal founded in 1911 which featured many articles written by intellectuals in the IRB leadership – Joseph Plunkett took ownership of it in 1913 – did not express much interest in socialism. MacDonagh was an Irish language activist, and advocated for women’s suffrage but like MacDiarmada was suspicious of their connections with English counterparts. Though Connolly was granted space in the Review to outline his position on the lockout and speak about what the Dublin employers were inflicting on the workers, he worked with UCD Economics Professor and former IPP MP for East Tyrone Thomas Kettle in the context of the Industrial Peace Committee which did not take a side with either capitalists or workers but rather pursued a truce to the end of a ‘ruinous campaign’; Kettle commending Larkin and Martin Murphy both as great leaders is indicative and an article in The Irish Review which described their efforts as ‘idle sophistry’ was correct.
It is from Éamon Ceannt, a clerk in Dublin City Council, that we see the most coherent and extended attempt to get to Connolly via nationalism. Writing a response to Griffiths’ condemnation of Larkin and the ITGWU, Ceannt asks if it is not the task of Irish nationalists to use class grievances against Britain, locating this policy explicitly within internationalist struggle. It is difficult to imagine any of these men accepting the Anglo-Irish Treaty which was to set the objective limitations of Irish independence politically, economically and culturally for a generation, but the same could be said of many of those who either accommodated themselves to it or remained neutral. Ceannt aside, it is not at all difficult to imagine them united in their opposition to a Labour Party under James Connolly organising a general strike in an Irish Republic.
Further Reading:
Collins, Lorcan & O’Donnell, Ruán. 16 Lives Series, O’Brien Press, 2014.
McNulty, Liam. James Connolly: Socialist, Nationalist & Internationalist. Merlin Press, 2022.
Townshend, Charles. Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion. Penguin Books, 2015.
