James Connolly, one of Ireland’s best known Marxists and revolutionaries, has left us a wealth of writings to help us navigate the struggles of today. Fiona Ferguson discusses perhaps his most important – Labour in Irish History – and argues you should read it, today.
“Irish history is a lamp to the feet of the Irish worker in the stormy paths of today.” So wrote James Connolly, over 100 years ago, in his classic Labour in Irish History. It was true then and it remains true today, and that’s what makes it such an important work a century later.
Connolly wanted to put the experiences of the working masses at the heart of Irish history, understanding that history told from this perspective would be full of lessons relevant for the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles of his day.
Reading it in 2025, those same lessons undoubtedly still apply. That’s why every radically minded person should pick up a copy of Labour in Irish History.
1. Rejecting the History of the Oppressor
There are four important themes in Labour in Irish History that Connolly sets out.
The first is to repudiate the account of very many historians, writers, journalists of the time in Irish history he is considering. In the very first chapter, he sets out “to repair the deliberate neglect of the social question by our historians” and even in the very last chapter, he summarises that “if silence gives consent, then all our history writing scribes have consented to, and hence approved of, this suppression of the facts of history in order to assist in perpetuating the blindness and the subjection of labour.”
Through careful consideration of key periods of Irish history, and the struggles of the masses, he proves that history is largely told in the interests of the ‘master class’ rather than the ‘mass of mankind’:
“Were history what it ought to be, an accurate literary reflex of the times with which it professes to deal, the pages of history would be almost entirely engrossed with a recital of the wrongs and struggles of the labouring people, constituting, as they have ever done, the vast mass of mankind.”
He recognises how the ‘elimination of questions of class interests’ was a constant feature of the narrative of politicians, press and historians of the possessing class alike:
“Hence the incessant strive to inflame the working-class mind to feverheat upon questions outside the range of their own class interests. War, religion, race, language, political reform, patriotism all serve in the hands of the possessing class as counter-irritants, whose function it is to avert the catastrophe of social revolution…”
Connolly doesn’t think these issues unimportant, as is proven by the vast range of his political interventions on each of them. The key line is that when they’re taken up by our ruling class they are put to work as “counter-irritants”.
He undertook Labour in Irish History, in his own words, “to prepare the way in order that other and abler pens than our own may demonstrate to the reading public the manner in which economic conditions have controlled and dominated our Irish history.”
Where establishment mouthpieces seek to hide class interests from our story, Connolly wants to put them back at its heart.
2. Protestant and Catholic tenants suffer a common oppression
The second key theme in Labour in Irish History is that despite what establishment historians of the day have written, the real division in Irish society at the time wasn’t between Catholic and Protestant – though obviously wars were waged and blood was shed on this island in the name of religion, and real material advantages were provided through law to some and not others.
He uses the example of the Williamite Wars, which saw the defeat of the Catholic James the II by Protestant William of Orange.
In reality, the Williamite war was primarily a war for mastery over the Irish people. Though the side Connolly possibly had more sympathy for, the Jacobite side, was fought for bravely and en masse, those who led it were Catholic noblemen. These noblemen ‘earned’ their property either by confiscation from peasant tribes (the masses), by supporting the English oppressors, or by being granted it in return for some concession to Britain. Those masses who died for them, therefore, had no business fighting for an endeavour which sought to protect these property interests against those of William the 3rd. Their victory would only have kept another set of landowners from thieving what was once theirs.
We know this to be the case because, as Connolly sets out, when the war was over William confiscated a million and a half acres, and distributed them among the aristocratic plunderers who followed him, rather than the masses.
Once the wars were over, Connolly writes of how the masses were left in a position of servility: “the unfortunate tenantry of Ireland, whether Catholic or Protestant, were enlightened upon how little difference the war had made to their position as a subject class.”
Indeed a large focus throughout the book is in clarifying the patriotic efforts of the Catholic gentry or the so-called patriots of the day, which Connolly sums up as follows: “all the political struggles of the period were built upon the material interests of one set of usurpers who wished to retain, and another set who wished to obtain, the mastery of those lands.”
This is also exposed in the period whereby Irish political patriots sought to repeal Dublin Parliament’s subordination to the Parliament in London. Rather than the nationalist claim that their efforts were to arouse the support of the masses and better their interests, it was really a concerted effort to keep hold of the land and power which would be threatened by newer thieves from Britain.
And as Connolly points out, the earlier famine in 1740 was solely attributable to economic causes; the poor of all religions and politics were equally sufferers; the rich of all religions and politics were equally exempt.
Connolly highlights how, in the mid-18th century, the wealthy Protestant and Catholic landowners united against the Whiteboys, a group made up of those evicted from cattle farms because it wasn’t profitable enough. The Whiteboys got organised to retaliate by wrecking farms, hocking cattle, and burning shepherds’ homes. Catholic and Protestant proprietors came together to preserve their privileges, even at a time when we have been led to believe that the anti-Catholic Penal Laws formed an insuperable barrier against such a union. The Government offered the sum of £100 for the capture of the first five Whiteboy Chiefs. The Protestant inhabitants of the city of Cork offered in addition £300 for the Chief, and £50 for each of his first five accomplices arrested. Immediately the wealthy Catholics of the same city added to the above sums a promise of £200 for the chief and £40 for each of his first five subordinates.
3. The Irish question is a social question
And so when it comes to the fight for a Socialist Ireland, Connolly is at pains to identify the Irish question as a social question. For him, the whole age-long fight of the Irish people against their oppressors resolves itself, in the last analysis, into a fight for the mastery of the means of life, the sources of production, in Ireland. Who would own and control the land? The people or the invaders? And if the invaders, which set of them – the most recent swarm of land-thieves, or the sons of the thieves of a former generation?
He argues in Labour in Irish History that Irish independence alone would bring little real freedom and progress for the majority of the Irish people unless it included a fundamental change to the social system. The Irish capitalist class – who “have a thousand economic strings in the shape of investments binding them to English capitalism” – were always prepared to abandon and betray the struggle for liberation if its fundamental economic and social interests were threatened. (Today, we might point out the links to US capitalism!)
When it came to the Irish National movement, the propertied class sought:
“the denial of all relation between the social rights of the Irish toilers and the political rights of the Irish nation. It was hoped and intended by this means to create what is termed ‘a real National movement’ – i.e. a movement in which each class would recognise the rights of other classes and, laying aside their contentions, would unite in a national struggle against the common enemy – England.”
As Connolly concludes, the only class deceived by this approach is the working class. It eliminates any and all interrogations of how the possessing class came by their title deed. Therefore, he sets out that radical nationalists of the time and their policy of a ‘union of classes’, working together to deliver freedom from British imperialism, would ultimately lead to disaster.
4. Irish Nationalist sell-out
For Connolly, when looking at Irish history from labour’s point of view, you quickly come to realise that it’s largely a history of nationalist sell-out.
For example, Connolly looks at the reign of the parliament of Henry Grattan in the 18th century. In response to the threat of a French invasion in 1778, 80,000 armed Irish Volunteers were used by the Irish parliament to win free trade from the British parliament. However Grattan quickly disassociated himself from the volunteers when they demanded universal suffrage in elections to the parliament.
He writes: “It will be observed by the attentive student that the ‘patriots’ who occupied the public stage in Ireland during the period we have been dealing with never once raised their voices in protest against such social injustice. Like their imitators to-day, they regarded the misery of the Irish people as a convenient handle for political agitation; and, like their imitators to-day, they were ever ready to outvie even the Government in their denunciation of all those who, more earnest than themselves, sought to find a radical cure for such misery.”
There are many more similar examples provided by Connolly in Labour in Irish History, discussing figures such as Daniel O’Connell and William Smith O’Brien among others. His work brings to light a pattern that still exists today: nationalist leaders who purport to have the same interests as the masses of Irish working class people, who can stand with our movements when it suits but ultimately will sell us out when our demands target their power, and use the mechanisms of the state to help them do it.
It is this history, and Connolly’s unequivocal Marxism, which leads him to conclude that “only the Irish working class remains as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland”.
For him, only a socialist movement of a united working class, across religious divides, could end the exploitation and oppression of the capitalist class in Ireland and ultimately resolve the national question. In his time that capitalist class was largely British – today it is Irish, British, American, global.
In these stormy times, as the idea of a united Ireland is becoming more popular, and as the genocide in Palestine is bringing renewed attention to colonialism, capitalism, and how these systems interact, Connolly’s work is indeed a lamp for our marching feet. Don’t delay, read it today.
Read more on Connolly in Rebel’s James Connolly Archive here.
