Connolly: A Marxist Analysis

As a part of our continuing project to build a collection of documents relating to 1916 here is a further one from the Irish Workers Group from 1990. The Left Archive is very grateful to those involved in that group for compiling and forwarding this keynote work. As the person who sent it notes:

In 1990 the Irish Workers Group published a book on James Connolly. It collected a series of articles that had appeared in IWG journals in the ’80s. No-one acknowledged their existence even when later preaching about some of its ideas.

Here is the original.

IWG’s intention was to bring out an analysis for anyone putting together a revolutionary socialist current in Ireland.

While defending the 1916 Rising, it critiques the ‘socialist republican’ history and doctrine that has afflicted the best traditions in Ireland of opposition to imperialism and capitalism.

It is also appropriate to quote from the Introduction to the work.

It argues that:

Every serious attempt since 1916 to develop a socialist programme which addresses also the National Question has looked to Connolly’s legacy. His ‘socialist republicanism’, because it is ambiguous on key questions of class and nation, remains an obstacle to developing independent working class politics

And suggests that:

The purpose of this book… is to examine the roots, influences and level ped ideas of Connolly’s thought from an unashamedly Marxist standpoint. Not the “Marxism” of Greaves or of Stalinists generally, but that of the classical tradition upheld and developed by Trotsky from the mid 1920’s, when Stalin’s grip began to tighten on the neck of the October revolution and all its historic aspirations. Now that Stalinism is being ground between the upper wheel of imperialism and the nether wheel of working class revolution, as predicted by Trotsky, it is all the more relevant for Marxists to re-examine Connolly’s legacy in a clearer light.

And concludes:

After the rising, Trotsky perceptively observed that the young Irish working class, emerging against a backdrop of a burgeoning nationalism and “the egoistic, narrow-minded imperial arrogance of British trade unionism”, tended to swing between syndicalism and nationalism in search of a programme. Connolly’s central ideological struggle consisted of the attempt to render such impulses into a coherent political consciousness. The wonder is that he achieved as much as he did, given the sources and influences that shaped his ideas. We see his demise in the 1916 insurrection not as the product of a simple abandonment of his socialist career, but rather as its inescapable conclusion. Not some sudden conversion to Pearse’s nationalism but his own theoretical paradigm since as early as 1897, provides the key to the rights and wrongs of Connolly’s ultimate political sacrifice, and indeed to so much of the political legacy we have inherited from him.

A provocative and timely addition to the Archive.

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