Bolsheviks and Ireland
Leo Trotski on the Easter Rising 1916: Leon Trotsky's Lessons of the Events in Dublin Transcribed from New International, No 1, Brian Pearce translator. Originally appeared in Nashe Slovo for 4 July 1916. Sir Roger Casement, formerly a prominent official in the British colonial service, but by conviction a revolutionary Irish nationalist who actedas intermediary between Germany and the rising in Ireland, has been sentenced to death. ... "I prefer to be standing in the dock to being in the prosecutor'splace," he cried before the sentence was passed on him, with its statement,in accordance with the time-honored pious formula, that Casement was tobe "hanged by the neck until dead," after which God was invited to have mercy on his soul. Will the sentence be carried out? This question must be giving Asquith and Lloyd George some anxious hours. To execute Casement would mean making more difficult the situation of the opportunist, purely parliamentary Irish Nationalist Party led by Redmond, which is ready tosign in the blood of the Dublin rebels a new compromise with the government of the United Kingdom. Reprieving Casement, however, after so many executions have already taken place, would mean openly "showing indulgence to a highly placed traitor." On this string, with real hooligan blood-lust, British social-imperialists of the Hyndman type are strumming their demagogic tunes. But however Casement's personal fate may be settled, the sentence passed on him marks the close of this dramatic episode of the rising in Ireland. So far as the purely military operations of the rebels were concerned, the government, as we know, proved to be easily the master of the situation. A nation wide movement such as the nationalist dreamers had hoped for completely failed to occur. The Irish countryside did not rise. The Irish bourgeoisie, together with the upper, more influential stratum of the Irish intelligentsia, held aloof. Those who fought and died were urban workers, along with some revolutionary enthusiasts from the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. The historical basis for a national revolution has disappeared even in backward Ireland. Insofar as the Irish movements in the last century were popular in character, they always drew their strength from the social antagonism between the rightless and starving pauper-farmers and their all-powerful British landlords. But whereas for the latter Ireland was merely an object of exploitation by agrarian plundering, for British imperialism it was a necessary guarantee of domination on the seas. In a pamphlet written on the eve of the war, Casement, speculating on arousing Germany's interest, showed that an independent Ireland would mean "freedom of the seas" and a mortal blow to Britain's sea-power. This is true, inasmuch as an "independent" Ireland could exist only as an advance post of some imperialist state hostile to British command of the seaways. It was Gladstone who first set the military and imperial interests of Britain quite clearly higher than the interests of the Anglo-Irish landlords, and inaugurated a broad scheme of agrarian legislation whereby the landlords' estates were transformed, through the instrumentality of the state, to the farmers of Ireland -- with, of course, generous compensation to the landlords. Anyhow, after the land reforms of 1881-1903 the farmers were transformed into conservative petty proprietors, whose attention the green flag of nationalism could no longer distract from their small holdings. The surplus of Ireland's educated population flowed away in their masses to the cities of Britain, as lawyers, journalists, shop assistants, and so on, and in this they were, in the main, lost to the "national cause." The independent Irish bourgeoisie of trade and industry, to the extent that such a class was formed in the last few decades, at once took up a fighting stance toward the young Irish proletariat, and thereby removed itself from the national-revolutionary camp into that of imperial possibilism and Irish "conciliation." The young working class of Ireland, formed as it was in an atmosphere saturated with heroic memories of national rebellion, and coming into conflict with the egotistically narrow and imperially arrogant trade unionism of Britain, has naturally wavered between nationalism and syndicalism, and is always ready to link these two conceptions together in its revolutionary consciousness. It has attracted to itself some young intellectuals and certain nationalist enthusiasts, who, in their turn have brought about the ascendancy of the green flag over the red in the labor movement. Thus, the "national revolution," in Ireland too has amounted in practice to a workers' revolt and Casement's markedly isolated position in the movement merely gives sharper emphasis to this fact. In a wretched, shameful article Plekhanov wrote recently of the "harmfulness" of the Irish rising to the cause of freedom and rejoiced that the Irish people had "to their honor," understood this and had not supported the revolutionary madmen. Only given complete patriotic softening of all the joints can one imagine that the Irish peasants declined to take part in the revolution out of regard for the international situation and thereby saved the "honor" of Ireland. Actually, they were guided merely by the blind egoism typical of farmers and their utter indifference to everything that happens beyond the bounds of their bits of land. For this reason and this alone they made possible the swift victory of the London government over the heroic defenders of the Dublin barricades. The experiment of an Irish national rebellion, in which Casement represented, with undoubted personal courage, the outworn hopes and methods of the past, is over and done with. But the historical role of the Irish proletariat is only beginning. Already it has brought its class anger against militarism and imperialism into this rising, under an out-of-date flag. This anger will not now subside. On the contrary, it will find echoes all over Britain. Scottish soldiers smashed down the barricades of Dublin. But in Scotland itself the miners have rallied round the red flag raised by MacLean and his comrades. The hangman's work done by Lloyd George will be sternly avenged by those very workers whom the Hendersons are now trying to chain to the bloody war chariot of imperialism.

Leon Trotsky Clemency! Written: 11 May 1916 First Published: Nashe Slovo, 11 May 1916 Source: Trotsky’s Writings on Britain New Park Publications Ltd, London 1974 The Irish rising has been crushed. Those whom it was thought necessary to shoot first have been shot. The rest wait for their personal fate to be decided after that of the rising itself. The triumph of British rule is so complete that Prime Minister Asquith considered it possible to declare from his parliamentary platform the government’s intention to show ‘reasonable clemency’ towards the imprisoned Irish revolutionaries. In so doing Asquith referred to the good fruits of the clemency shown by General Botha to those who took part in the South African rising. Asquith refrained from mentioning General Botha himself. Twelve years before the present war he stood at the head of the Boers who shed their blood in a struggle against British imperialism; but at the beginning of the war he put down a rising of his own fellow-countrymen. Thus Asquith remains wholly within the traditions of British imperialism when he crowns the work of ‘law and order’ specialists in Dublin and other places with the proclamation of the principles of ‘expedient’ humanity—humanity, that is, within the limits of what is ... expedient. So far, then, everything is clear, and there can be no doubt in the minds of our readers about Asquith’s statement, which goes beyond what it is permissible to express in the French Republic in 1916. But the matter does not end there. We have an uprising crushed—buildings razed, human corpses, men and women in chains. We have triumphant authority making a gesture of ‘philanthropy’. But in this picture which history has set in the frame of the world war, on this ‘stage within a stage’, one other figure is missing: the French social-patriot, the standard bearer of ‘liberating’ war and the principles of national ‘freedom’, commenting on the official ‘humanity’ of the Dublin government. To fill this gap, and add the finishing touch to our picture of the official governmental, patriotic aspect of our epoch, M. Renaudel published an article on Clemency in the pages of his paper Humanité, which until now has not carried a single word about the Irish rising. Now of course he, Renaudel, knows that there were facts in the past which clouded relations between Ireland and Britain. He allows that these facts could not but leave bitterness to this day in the most irreconcilable Irish hearts. But the irish chose a most fatal hour for their action. He Renaudel, had not doubted for a moment that the British government would do everything necessary to remain master of the situation, and he was not mistaken. But therefore, ‘Britain, who is fighting with her allies for the rights of nations, can and must show magnanimity.’ And that is why being simultaneously a friend of Britain and of Ireland, of Britain which crushed down and of Ireland which was crushed, he, Renaudel, could only welcome Asquith’s magnanimous gesture. One might think this was quite enough. One might think it physically impossible for social-patriotic cynicism to go any further than masquerading like this as the advocate of clemency to a set of frenzied butchers. But no, Renaudel has also to introduce a national French factor in order to explain and rationalise his sage statesman-like pleading on behalf of the vanquished and justify it to official France. ‘Of course,’ he writes, ‘in a land which weeps over Corneille’s verses and the noble farewell to Cinna by Auguste—in such a land it causes no surprise if we counsel that clemency be shown.’ Thus the spiritual heirs and political descendants of Thiers and General Gallifet are reassured. For didn’t they, who wept on reading Racine, show clemency to the fighters of the paris Commune? Here is the real crowning of the spiritual reconciliations between Gallifet’s descendants and the offspring of the movement in whose history the Commune is indelibly inscribed

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Ireland
The huge archive with articles by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with articles and letters on Ireland: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/ireland/index.htm P.S.: Engels spoke Irish fluently...

Correspondence between Nora Connolly O'Brien and Trotsky
Nora Connolly O’Brien & Leon Trotsky Correspondence (1936) These letters, dated 28 April and 6 June 1936, were first published in Workers Republic, journal of the League for a Workers Republic, Dublin, no.122, 1989. The spelling in Trotsky’s letter has been corrected where necessary. 36 Belgrave Square Rathmines Dublin Ireland 28 April 1936 Dear Comrade, A comrade here has promised to get this letter to you. First to introduce myself. I am the daughter of James Connolly, a worker in the Socialist movement all his life, and as you know, Commandant General in the Rising of Easter Week in 1916. He was executed. I learn that you are extremely interested in Ireland, and the development of the revolutionary movements here. If you desire it, I would gladly supply you with whatever items of information you require. There is not at present any Labour paper, but there will be by the end of May. I will send you copies if you wish them. There is one paper issued by the National Revolutionaries, the Irish Republican Army, and one issued by the CP. These also I will send if you wish. I hold an official position in the Irish Citizen Army, I am a member of the Irish Labour Party, and am in close touch with the officials of the Irish Republican Army. The Labour Party recently adopted a new programme and constitution, the first step towards achieving the leading role in the revolutionary movement in Ireland. The new programme is not yet a correct revolutionary one, but it is such an enormous advance on the previous one, that we are not indulging in any carping or cavilling criticism. Through it they can supply an alternative to Fianna Fáil (the majority Republican party in the Irish parliament, An Dáil) as by adopting James Connolly’s doctrine of the twin ideals of national and social independence they have ended the divorce between the national and Labour movements. This programme will be ready shortly. I could also send you a copy. This is not much of a letter, really it is only to establish contact. Nora Connolly O’Brien - - - - - - Norway 6 June 1936 Dear Comrade, I was very touched by your kind letter. A great deal of circumstances prevented me from writing to you immediately. I always have been greatly interested in Ireland, but unfortunately my interest remained only platonic. I never had the opportunity to study in detail Irish history and politics. Since my early days I have got, through Marx and Engels, the greatest sympathy and esteem for the heroic struggle of the Irish for their independence. The tragic fate of your courageous father met me in Paris during the war. I bear him faithfully in remembrance. I made up my mind to read your book about your father in the very next time. The revolutionary tradition of the national struggle is a precious good. Would it be possible to imbue the Irish proletariat with it for its Socialist class struggle, the working class of your country could, in spite of the numerical weakness of your population, play an important historical role and give a mighty impulse to the British working class now paralysed by the senile bureaucracy. I take the liberty to send you in the same time my little book, In Defence of Terrorism. Leon Trotsky

Good work, a chara.

James T. Farrell: Letter to Leon Trotsky on Ireland
James T. Farrell Letter to Leon Trotsky on Ireland (1938) 11 December 1938 New York City Leon Trotsky Coyoacan Mexico DF My Dear Leon Trotsky: We were both very pleased to receive your note. Hortense, jokingly, says that it must all be a Stalinist plot. While she is not disinterested in politics, she is, in no sense, a political person. However, she is no bitter foe. And in her own profession, the theatre, she must pay a price for her attitudes and the stand that she has taken. Stalinist influence is permeating the American theatre, and Hortense is automatically excluded from even being considered for roles in plays by certain managements because of this fact. Concerning “the mysteries of my style” <1>, you may be amused to know that one Communist Party functionary described it, once in The Daily Worker, as “Trotskyite.” And one of the most current criticisms of my writing in Stalinist sources is that “the rationale of Trotskyism” has given a basis for his “despair,” and through that means he is degenerating. This summer I was in Ireland, and I saw Jim Larkin. All men have weaknesses, but all men are not the victims of their weaknesses. Jim Larkin is a victim of his own weaknesses, and his own temperament. Now, he is embittered and envenomed. He feels that the Irish working class has sold him out. He was not returned in the last elections for the Dáil, and he ran in a working class district. He defended the trials, but thought that Bukharin could not be interested. But Larkin’s formal attitudes do not have much meaning. He is untheoretical and unstable intellectually. He is always a direct actionist, and his direct actionism takes whatever turn that his impulses lead him toward, In the midst, for instance, of a severe fight, he might be walking down the street and see a sparrow trapped in some electric wires where it might die. He will become incensed, and will telephone important members of the government and demand that they have men sent down to release the sparrow immediately, and then this will loom more important than the fight in which he is engaged. He is very garrulous, human and humane, witty, vindictive, vituperative, and he is Irish. At times, he is almost like an embittered version of the stage Irishman. In Ireland, there has never been much theory, and in consequence, never been many men with a rounded view of the reasons why Ireland was struggling. Before the war, the Irish labor movement was very militant and well toward the forefront of the European labor movement. It was defeated in the great Dublin transport strike of 1913, and out of this crushing defeat, the Irish Citizen Army was formed. Larkin left for America, and Larkin says that one of the last things that he said to Connolly was not to go into the National movement, not to join the Irish Volunteers, which was the armed force of the nationalist movement. Connolly did go into the Easter Rebellion, and there is the disputed question as to whether or not he made a mistake. Sean O’Casey, the Irish playwright, in a pamphlet he wrote on the Irish Citizen Army, declares baldly that James Connolly died not for Irish socialism but for Irish nationalism. Others maintain that Connolly could not have remained out of the rising. At all events, the Irish Citizen Army was decimated, and crushed by the Easter Rebellion. There were no leaders left to carry on the social side of Connolly’s doctrines. The entire movement was swept along in a frenzied rise of Irish patriotism and Irish nationalism. Sinn Féin was in complete control of the movement. The leaders of Sinn Féin had only the most vague notions of what they wanted – an Irish Ireland speaking Gaelic, developing its own Irish culture, free of the British crown, and some were not even fighting them for freedom from the crown. In 1921, when the treaty was negotiated in England, there was this same unclarity. Following the treaty, there was the split in the Irish ranks. The record of that split is most saddening to read. It was not a split on real issues. There were two or three documents with different wordings, and they all meant much the same thing. Instead of discussing social programs, they discussed Ireland, and they insulted one another. Out of this split the bitter civil war developed, and the comrades in arms of yesterday assassinated one another. The treatment which the Free State government meted out to its former comrades matches almost that which Stalin has meted out. The bravest fighters of the Irish Republican Army were taken out and placed up against a wall and butchered without any formality. And now, after all the trouble, the Irish people have changed masters, and a new Irish bourgeoisie is developing and coagulating, and the politicians of Sinn Féin are aligned with them and the Church, with reaction rampant, poverty to match even that of Mexico, progressive ideas almost completely shut out, a wall of silence keeping out the best Irish tradition – that of Fintan Lalor, Davitt, and Connolly, and poor Ireland is in a hell of a state. Larkin returned in the early twenties. After defeat, the Irish labor movement needed someone to lead it who could remould a defeated class. Larkin was a great and courageous agitator, but not a leader of a defeated army, and he could not work with any one. Gradually, he lost influence, and now he is old and embittered. Of course, Catholicism plays a strong role in Ireland, and Larkin is a Catholic and talks of the virtues of the Christian home. And suddenly out of his garrulous talk, a flash of his old fire comes through. Perhaps you are riding through the Dublin slums with him, and suddenly, seeing the poor in their filth, standing in front of the filthy buildings in which they are forced to live like animals, and a strong denunciation comes, and there is something of the Jim Larkin who defied the British Army, and at whose words the poor of Dublin came out into the streets in thousands, and flung themselves against the might of Britain and that of the Irish bourgeoisie. Human beings are social products, and Larkin is a product of the Irish movement. The principal instrument of the Irish revolutionaries was always terrorism and direct action, and when Larkin was unable to function with these methods on the wave of a rising and militant movement, he was lost, and the labor bureaucrats outmaneuvered and outsmarted him. When he returned to Ireland from an American jail, he got his following together, and marched on the quarters of the union he had formerly led. He took the building, but later lost it in the law courts, and he is no longer the leader of the transport workers. He has union following, and among his strongest support is that of the butchers and hospital workers. He showed me something in Ireland that few people in Dublin know about. In the Parnell days, a terrorist organization, composed almost exclusively of Dublin workingmen was formed and named the Invincibles. The Invincibles committed the famous Phoenix Park murders in front of the vice-regal lodge, and were denounced by the Church, by Parnell, and by almost the entire Irish nation. There are no monuments in Ireland to the Invincibles. They died in isolation, some of them defiant to the end in their utter isolation. At the spot across from the vice-regal lodge in Phoenix Park, where the murders were committed, there is a patch of earth alongside of the park walk. No matter how often grass is planted over this spot the grass is torn up by the roots, and this spot of earth is left, and always, there is a cross marked into the dirt in commemoration of the Invincibles. Every week, someone – principally, I believe, one of Larkin’s boys – goes there and marks that cross. This has been going on for a long time. In Larkin, there is something of that characteristic of defiant defeat that runs through so much of Irish history, and with it, never any real investigation of causes. But even up to today, he remains the only figure of commanding proportions in the Irish labor movement. The rest is pretty nearly all bureaucracy, tied to the tail of nationalism, enfolded in the cassock robes of the priestcraft, seeing the problems of Irish labor as an Irish question. Ireland is having something of an industrial boom. Certain sections of the Irish working class, the most advanced trade unions – which have been in existence some time – these are better paid than corresponding trade unions in England. But the country is partitioned between an industrial north and an agricultural south. In the south, de Valera is engaged in a program of industrialization. The Irish market is small, and that means that monopolies must be parcelled out to various groups or persons. When these monopolies get going, there will be resultant crises, because they will be able to supply the Irish market with a few months work and production. Also, the new factories are being spread over the country – a program of decentralization – and in many instances, factories are being set up in agricultural areas where there is no trade union strength. It is necessary to further industrialization in Ireland to have, as a consequence, sweat shop conditions. There is a small labor aristocracy and even this lives badly. And below it, poverty that reduces thousands upon thousands to live like animals in the most dire, miserable, and inhuman poverty. I saw some of this poverty. One family of eleven living in one room. The family has lived in this same room for twenty-four years. The building is crumbling, walls falling, ceiling caving in, roof decaying. The oldest in the family is nineteen, the youngest is an undernourished infant of eight months. Six sleep in one bed, three in another, two on the floor. The infant was born last Christmas eve in the bed where six sleep. The role of the Church is important. The Church tells the Irish that they are going to live for ever and be happier in heaven, and this engenders patience. There is a mystic fascination with death in Ireland. In all the homes of the poor, the walls are lined with holy pictures, those of the Sacred Heart predominating. The poor live in utter patience. They have lived in this patience ever since the heyday of Jim Larkin. In those days, at his word, they thronged the streets and threatened the power of England, and of the Irish and Anglo-Irish bourgeoisie. But no more. However, with the industrialization program, there is likely to be some enlargement of the Irish working class, and the economic factors of proletarianization, plus the resulting effects of factory work and familiarity with machines is likely to cause some changes in the consciousness of Irishmen. Familiarity with machines is likely to rub off some of the superstition, and the economic conditions will pose their problems to the Irish workers. There is possibly going to be a change in Ireland because of these factors, and some of the eternal sleep and mud-crusted ignorance is likely to go. But being an agricultural country, a poor country, a country ridden by superstition, it now sleeps, and there is a lot of talk about Ireland, and little is done about Ireland, and a characteristic attitude is sure and what is the bother. Ireland is no longer merely a victim of England, but of world economy now. Irish nationalism correspondingly has altered from being a progressive movement to a reactionary movement. Fascism could easily triumph in Ireland were fascism vitally necessary to the new rulers of Holy Ireland. The Irish Republican Army is split into factions, some demanding emphasis on a social program, others on a national program. Stalinists are in the former group, but Stalinism is very weak in Ireland, practically inconsequential. It amounts to a few pensionaries. Ireland does not need Stalinism. It has Rome. Rome handles these problems with the necessary efficiency. Rome confuses the struggles, poses the false questions, sidetracks protests as Stalinism now does in advanced countries. As a kind of compensation, Ireland a defeated nation has developed a fine modern literature, just as Germany, defeated and still un-unified at an earlier period, developed German philosophy. But the moral terrorism in the name of the Church and the Nation, and the parochial character of the life and of intellect in Ireland might choke the literature now. So backward is Ireland that even the American motion pictures have a progressive influence in the sense that they make the youth restless, that they produce freer and less strained relationships between the sexes, and that they give a sense of a social life of more advanced countries that is not permitted because of the state of economy in Ireland. Ireland impresses me as being somewhat parallel to Mexico, except that in Mexico there are progressive strains in the country, and in Ireland these are weak and morally terrorized. In part, this is undoubtedly because of Ireland’s lack of mineral resources and wealth, the backwardness and sleep of its labor movement, and the role of the Church. In Ireland, the Church was not the feudal landholder. Behind the scenes, the Church always fought against the Irish people, and spoke for law and order. But at one time, the Church itself was oppressed. The Church and the people became entangled in the consciousness of the Irish, and the religion question befogged the social and economic one. In Mexico, Spain, France, and Russia, the Church was more openly a part of a feudal or pseudo-feudal system. The peasants became anti-clerical because they wanted land. This did not happen in Ireland. In consequence, anti-clericalism did not take the same form. Anti-clericalism amounts to jokes at the priesthood, dislike of the archbishops, and so forth. In earlier days, it was stronger, particularly among the Fenians. But it never took the real form it took in France, Spain, etc. And so the Church has great power in Ireland today. In the most real, vivid, and immediate sense it gives opium to the people. Poor Ireland! She is one of the costs demanded by history in the growth of what we familiarly call our civilization. There is an old poem with the lines – They went forth to battle And they always fell. And today, after having fallen so many times, Ireland is a poor island on the outpost of European civilization, with all its heroic struggles leaving it, after partial victory, poverty-stricken, backward, wallowing in superstition and ignorance. My favorite Irish anecdote is the following. The last castle in Ireland to fall to Cromwell’s army was Castleross on the lakes of Killarney. At that time, the castle was held by the O’Donoghue. For several months, the British could not take the castle. The Irish infantry was more lightly clad than the British, and would always lead the better armored and more heavily clad British down into the bogs where their armed superiority became a handicap, and then the Irish would cut them to pieces. There was an old Gaelic prophecy that Castleross would never fall to a foreign foe until it was attacked by water. There was a proviso in this prophecy. For the lakes of Killarney empty into Dingle Bay, where the water is so shallow that foreign men of war from the sea cannot enter it. The British general heard of this prophecy. He went to Dingle Bay and built flat-bottomed boats and floated them up the lakes of Killarney. He fired one cannon shot at Castleross. And the O’Donoghue, thinking that the prophecy had been fulfilled, surrendered without firing a shot in return. I took the liberty of writing in such detail about Ireland because I thought you might be interested in modern Ireland. They call it the “new Ireland” these days. Hortense joins me in sending our warmest greetings to you and Natalia. Yours, Farrell P.S.: This summer I saw Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer a number of times, and they were very well. Madame Rosmer talked very often of you and Mrs Trotsky.

Jenny Marx-Longuet 1870: Articles on the Irish Question
Jenny Marx-Longuet 1870 Articles on the Irish Question http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/family/jenny/1870-ire.htm First Published: in French in the newspaper La Marseillaise March 1, 9, 19, 21 and 29, and April 12, 17 and 24, 1870. These articles were written by Marx’s daughter Jenny for the French Republican newspaper Marseillaise and dealt with the questions raised in Marx’s article “The English Government and the Fenian Prisoners.” The third article was written together with Marx. All except the second article were signed J. Williams.

International Notes: Ireland
Paddy Trench International Notes: Ireland Fourth International, December 1942 From Fourth International, Vol.3 No.12, December 1942, pp.382-383. The following is from a letter from Dublin , dated August 21, 1942: Labour has had a big success in the local government elections. These are elections for the various city and country councils which see to local affairs. In Dublin, where labour has always been weak, the success was especially marked. Of the 35 seats of the last Dublin Corporation elected in 1936, 13 seats were held by Fine Gael (Cosgrave’s party), 12 seats by Fianna Fáil (the government party), 7 by Independents and only 2 by Labour with 1 Independent Labour (Larkin, who to now official Labour). The seats now stand as follows: Labour 13, Fine Gael 11, Fianna Fáil 9, Independent 1, Progressive 1. Popular discontent with the government was bound to lead to a swing away from Fianna Fáil, but it is very encouraging to find that this did no good to Fine Gael. The voting was by proportional representation. The first choices were even more strongly Labour. One of the best Labour men up was Barney Conway, of Larkin’s Union; he helped organize the big strike of 1913, fought in 1916 in the Irish Citizens’ Army under Jim Connolly. And he is a good militant ever since, but with no backing of political theory; he lives in a slum tenement, he is not a typical trade union bureaucrat. He headed the poll in his area, and is therefore one of the city aldermen. Dublin is not isolated. Throughout all the country districts, there was a swing towards Labour. The practical effect of this is negatived by the decision of the government to operate the county management bill, by which a government nominee is given full powers of administration in each district, leaving the elected councillors the right only to collect rates. It remains to be seen what the reaction will be, with Labour in a fighting mood. A general election is due early next year. All the newspapers now urge or forecast a bloc of the two main parties against Labour to avoid an election. The Labour Party fought the campaign on a very small war chest and with a tiny party apparatus, especially in Dublin. In Dublin the whole weight of the campaign fell on the left wing. So far so good. Just where is it leading to? Internal party history during the last few years has been a series of defeats for the very vague left wing. The right wing eliminated from the constitution Connolly’s Workers’ Republic as the party aim, and substituted a vague phrase about a democratic republic. On top of that the party has accepted credit reform – the hobby of the national secretary, Luke Duffy. The Labour Party Program Roughly the Labour Party’s financial theory is as follows. At present every Irish pound note printed is backed by sterling securities. We are to break the link with sterling and have our own currency backed by the potential resources of the country. Extra currency is to be printed sufficient to pay trade union wages to the unemployed who will then be set to work on public work schemes of permanent value. For instance forestation. Their wages will be spent mainly on agricultural goods, leading to prosperity for the farmers. The forests, etc., created by this additional labour force will in a few years time be sufficient backing for the Irish Pound in other countries. In practice the tendency of this theory is to provide a substitute for militant labour action and reduces the party to calling for a Dáil majority to carry out this financial change. It is clear that the struggle for a Labour Government must go hand in hand with the development of a coherently organised and conscious left wing. Ireland and the War On the question of neutrality, the country is absolutely unanimous. Partly this to due to anti-imperialist sentiment. Partly to realisation and fear of the horrors of war. But the feeling that nothing else matters much so long as we can keep out of the war has led to political apathy. Economic suffering has been accepted as the price of neutrality. And while there is resentment against the few who, by buying up commodities that are short, make money out of the crisis, no party, not even Labour, has suggested a coherent solution for the economic crisis. To a large extent the war crisis is, of course, insoluble. The belligerents reserve for their own use the steel, coal, petrol and other war materials which Ireland must import. Consequently, the industries close down, and even agriculture is hampered. Many of the industries were artificially created by a high tariff, policy, especially under Fianna Fáil. These hot-house plants, of course, die off first, and men are thrown out of employment and cannot be absorbed by the land. But others such as the cement industry were economically justified. Cement, however. has ceased production owing lack of coal, and sale of cement except for government purposes is illegal. The town gas supply depends on imported coal, and has been very drastically cut down. Electricity is supplied by the Shannon hydro-electric plant, but is normally supplemented by coal-powered stations, so this too is rationed. There is no coal allowed for steam threshers which have to operate on wood, which is also short. There is a petrol allowance for tractors and essential services only. During the winter months there is a small allowance of kerosene for lighting, just enough to make farming life possible. Efforts are made to dig up the turf bogs to provide a substitute for coal, but, though an army of men is working at this, It is impossible to get enough. There is a drastic fuel famine. On the other hand, the government is paying a subsidy of two million pounds to the milling millionaire ring to compensate them for the smaller amounts of wheat available and keep their profits up to normal. The cost of living figures are what you might expect. For food only, with base July 1914=100, the indices are (for the second quarter of each year) 1939–157; 1940–180; 1941–197; 1942–208. I think there has been sharp rise since the last figures available. The cost of living index for all items has risen more steeply than for food. The food Index figure does not, however, show the situation accurately, in is effect upon low wage earners. There are no cheap substitute fats such an margarine. Drippings are very hard to get and often reserved for favored customers, or by the black market pirates. There is no lard. So the only fat for cooking is butter, which is short and expensive. There to no bacon, or practically none, and no oatmeal. Potato prices have not risen significantly, but with this exception the price rises are especially on food items which are important in the workers’ diet. By an emergency order wage increases are made illegal. I was very interested to read the article that Fourth International published on price rises in the USA, showing how it makes possible armament production. You can see from these figures that we have the same kind of inflationary tendency here, but for a different reason. By and large capitalism here has no independent existence, it is on too small a scale, it is closely linked with, and often dependent upon, English financial imperialism. Our inflation is not the result of free decisions on policy made by the Éire government, but is the consequence of inflation in the industrial countries. But note that unemployment is not on the increase in Éire! Employment in England is the safety valve and remittances sent home keep the wives going. There is a lot of sentiment against emigration, draining the country of its best blood, etc. But the hard fact is that on the present crisis and under the present economic system the country couldn’t carry on without it. It is another case showing how indirectly the economy of small countries is secondary to that of the big imperialists. The Agrarian Situation The most unexpected thing is, however, in relation to agriculture. We are having difficulty in producing enough food, and we are a farming country! Long before the war Irish farming had degenerated into cattle fattening for the English market, on permanent pastures which are never ploughed. Now we have a compulsory tillage order. Holdings over 10 acres must be 12.5 per cent ploughed. Wheat growing here was formerly ruined by American competition; now, of course, we cannot get much foreign wheat. So a guaranteed price is offered to the farmers; It is illegal to feed wheat products to animals, and the whole wheat is now milled into flour, so that the bran and pollard formerly available for pig and poultry feeding is now used as human food, making a wholesome, but not very popular brown loaf. In spite of this, we were just saved from a wheat famine last year by the timely arrival of some foreign wheat! This year a good harvest is expected. But, of course, the effect of having no bran or pollard is that most of the pigs and poultry have vanished or are liable to go. The bacon factories, many of them, have had to close down or are producing very little. Another effect of the tillage necessary in the emergency is that by reducing the grazing area it is tending to reduce the cattle and dairy farming. Meanwhile the English government is telling English farmers buy up the Irish milch cows! But how is it that when England increases her tillage, she can also increase her livestock, while In Ireland, it works the other way round? The answer is heavy industry linked to farming. British Agriculture In England the pre-war tractor force of 52,000 has been increased to 120,000 and each machine is more intensively used. The arable land has been increased from 12 to 18 million acres and is more intensively farmed. Crops such an wheat, potatoes and oats have been increased from 33 per cent to 100 per cent. At the same time grassland is ploughed up and reseeded to make better pastures and silage is becoming universal (it is still a rarity here). Milk production has increased by five million gallons since 1941 in England. The total increase in production is approximately 112 per cent since the first year of war, and already supplies the population with food for 210 days out of the 365. The production figures are still increasing and I believe will increase until England is producing all her own food. The tillage limit has now nearly been reached in England. But not the limit for reseeded pasture and beef production. And the limit for intensity (that is high capital investment per acre) has not yet been explored. In Great Britain and Northern Ireland 47.5 million people are living on 94 thousand square miles. In Éire three millions live on 26 thousand square miles. England’s agricultural achievement is astounding and very alarming for small farming countries. Hitherto there has not been a tendency to heavy capital investments in land on a world scale. Certainly, the technique of scientific agriculture has only been worked out recently. So it to now possible to industrialise land. I see from Comrade Charles’ articles in Fourth International that this is now happening on the largest scale in the USA. But I don’t think he draws the full conclusions. USA farming now makes English mechanisation look very small. The conclusion to be drawn from Comrade Charles’ articles in that monopoly capitalism will now develop on the land, and not only in America. In the course of a comparatively short time it will ruin the economy of traditional farming countries. P.T.

Theses on Ireland
Fourth International Theses on Ireland 1944 From Fourth International, Vol.5 No.4, April 1944, pp.123-126. Vested Interests and the Border Britain, far from deriving super-profits out of her occupation of the six North-Eastern counties of Ireland, suffers a considerable financial loss; for, while it is true that there are British businesmen with Interests In Ulster, it is also certain that these interests would be completely compensated, and a residue retained, if the British exchequer were to withdraw its subsidies towards the upkeep of the swollen Orange bureaucracy and the maintenance of social services in Ulster at the British level. Even in wartime Ulster is a depressed area. Despite the 40,000 skilled workers driven to find work in British war Industries there are still 25,000 officially unemployed out of a total population of a million and a quarter. Peacetime unemployment is considerably higher than in any other part of the United Kingdom. Several million pounds sterling are mulcted annually from the English taxpayer for the upkeep of the Orange puppet statelet. The fact is, however, that British overhead expenses in Ulster fall into precisely the same category as do grants to the armed forces, or the police – even when these expenses take the form not of direct outlays on behalf of the colossal Ulster police force, and other sections of the state, but of maintenance of social services and the provision of orders to Ulster Industry during the “normal” depression periods. Britain maintains its garrison in Ulster, not primarily as a means of coercing the Irish people, but to counteract the possibility of a rival imperialism establishing a military bridgehead in the British isles. The occupation engenders sentiments of revolt, however, and necessitates the preservation of “order”, i.e., the coercion of the nationalist population... The Orange bosses and bureaucrats, for their part, need to have their fingers directly dipped in England’s economic pie. That is why they are given representation in the Westminster Parliament. At a time when great monopolies largely derive their super-profits by a barely-concealed plundering of the Exchequer, and when worthwhile orders come only to those directly in the swim it, is a life and death question for Ulster capitalists to maintain a direct connection with the British state. That is why all De Valera’s promises of virtual autonomy for the North within a united Ireland, if only Stormont would agree to sever its direct connection with Britain, have gone unheeded. Without State representation at Westminster their industries would die, for out of sight is out of mind. If Britain sacrificed them in a deal with De Valera they would look for a new imperialist paymaster. Orange “loyalty” has its world market price. Éire and the Border As her neutrality in the war underscores. Éire is de facto a sovereign Irish Republic, notwithstanding the slim pretence of British Dominion status kept up by Westminster. British Liberalism bought out the absentee landlord class (with the Irish peasants’ own money to be sure!) to stave off a revolutionary seizure of the land. The Easter Week rising and the Anglo-Irish war brought an end to the foreign occupation of the South. Under the De Valera regime fiscal autonomy has enabled a host of petty manufacturing industries to struggle into being. Saddled with exorbitant interest rates on capital borrowed from British investors, and dependent on British monopolies for all primary materials, costs have been excessively high; and the dwindling, impoverished population cannot provide a market sufficient to absorb at a profitable level the output of labour-saving machinery in use elsewhere. Already the pathetic “industrialization” period, begun only a few years ago, is at a close. A chronic unfavourable balance of trade, rapidly dwindling foreign assets, a falling birthrate, mass unemployment and wholesale immigration to England revealed that the incurable maladies of world capitalist economy were eating at the vitals of the new sovereign statelet of Éire. The Second World War has only accentuated this disintegration. Today there are a hundred thousand unemployed within the 26 counties of Éire; while scores of thousands of others have been forced by unemployment into British war industries or the British armed forces. The export of men, sending home part of the proceeds of their earnings, has come to rival the agricultural export industry in importance. Irish bourgeois nationalism had already exhausted its mission as a vehicle for the development of the productive forces before any real development took place. International socialism alone can ensure a fresh upswing in production for Ireland; and it is precisely for this reason that the one uncompleted task of the bourgeois revolution, national unification, can only be solved by the proletarian revolution. The inclusion of the six Ulster counties within the framework of the national state would only hasten the decline of the already stagnant heavy industries in the North without furthering the development of Southern industry to any appreciable degree. National unification under the capitalist system, by plunging the hostile Protestant proletariat of the northern industries into permanent unemployment, would either lead straight to the victory of the social revolution or to fascism. There could be no middle way ... At times in the recent past the nationalist fervour of the common people of Ireland must have seemed dim, or dead, not only to the casual observer but to the workers themselves. But it only lay dormant, ready to blaze into life again. For the famous patriotism of the Irish people is something more than a traditional hangover, or a state of mind induced by bourgeois propaganda. It is an emotion of revolt, engendered by centuries of national degradation, kept alive by the knowledge that yesterday’s powerful imperialist oppressor still occupies part of the national territory and may yet lay a claim to the South of Ireland. When Tod Williams was hanged by the Stormont regime last year, flags were flown at half mast throughout Éire, the shops of the main Dublin thoroughfares closed as a mark of respect and protest rallies, organised by the Reprieve Committee, were held throughout the country. The threat of conscription in Ulster in 1941 created a crisis in Éire overnight and a wave of anti-British sentiment swept over the Southern workers. The workers’ patriotism is their pride in their age-old fight against imperialism. This is an ennobling sentiment, notwithstanding the poisonous bourgeois chauvinism mixed into it by the capitalist politicians and their reformist and Stalinist hangers-on who at all times seek to manipulate the freedom-loving aspirations of the workers for their own reactionary ends. The rich ranchers and rentiers are pro-British. The small farmers and the basic section of the bourgeoisie which is interested in production and trade for the domestic market look to England with strong forebodings. Britain is still a bourgeois democracy and it is not so easy just yet to get down to seizing the Éire ports; for, besides the huge numbers of Irish in British industries and the army, the English workers in uniform would not go willingly into an aggression against the “almost English” people of Éire. Catholic Church’s Mass Basis If Ireland has hitherto proved to be the most impregnable of all the Vatican’s citadels, this is not due to accident. During centuries of national degradation the social classes were mixed into a common Catholic cement by the British, who persecuted the native Irish ostensibly on account of their Catholicism ... Sentiment against the foreign imperialists was always uppermost and the masses encased themselves in the rituals and doctrines of the mother Church as in a suit of armour in lieu of more material means of defence. Catholic fanaticism the more easily became synonymous with the spirit of outraged nationality because, unlike in the other countries, the Irish priesthood never directly functioned as an exploiter. For 700 years Ireland was a colony. Against this, for barely two decades an uncertain independence has lasted for the South; and, during this time, the fledgling Éire statelet has been sedulously inculcating a psychology of national exclusiveness among the masses by fostering all those ideological distinctions and cultural pursuits which set the Irish apart from the neighbouring English nationality. It is well to remember in this connection that in its long-drawn-out trade war with Britain the Fianna Fáil Government received the backing not only of the bourgeois and peasant interests involved, but also of the majority of the workers. So long as imperialism remains intact in the North and a serious threat to the South, and until the workers find a revolutionary socialist leadership, we will have to reckon with the power and prestige of the priesthood ... On the surface the Catholic church looks unassailable. Yet its coming eclipse can be discerned precisely where the appearance of strength seems greatest. A picture of Christ on the Cross pinned to a Falls Road window is a demonstration against the imperialist status quo, but the Church cannot lead the change. The republican workers will throw away their icons as soon as the ideals of socialist internationalism begin to take shape among them. To expose the treacherous role of the allegedly neutral Christian ideology is an essential part of the struggle to develop a revolutionary consciousness among the workers ... The cowardly Éire Labour Party, on the other hand, has consistently pursued a shameful policy of appeasement towards the Catholic Church, even going so far as to claim that its programme is in conformity with the Pope’s Charter of Labour. The Church will be a colossal weight on the side of counter-revolution. It is one of the main propaganda tasks of our movement to explain this to the workers. Every insolent interference with the affairs of the labour movement must be combated. In particular the role of the Vatican in the present European situation must be mercilessly exposed. It would be treason to socialism to keep silent on grounds of expediency. In every important strike the bourgeois press is forced to drop its spurious neutrality. So likewise, in the hundred-and-one minor sorties leading up to the decisive revolutionary struggle, hunger marches, strikes, during every spate of which the bourgeoisie and its henchmen will take panic and cry ‘wolf’, the role of the clergy will become more and more obvious... It is reformism, holding out no hope of escape from the drab routine of poverty, that turns the backward masses over to conservatism and clericalism and in a crisis makes them storm troopers of the reaction. Notwithstanding its tirades against the Stalinist bureaucracy, to which it attributes the original sin of the Bolshevik Revolution, it is precisely thanks to the opportunist politics of Stalin that the Papacy is still a world power despite its notorious role in Spain and elsewhere. However, the era of Stalinism and reformism is drawing to a close. The great class struggles impending throughout the world will find an echo in the remotest corners of rural Ireland. Certainly reactionary clericalism will still retain a formidable following but the majority will be won for the revolution. The Nationalist Workers At present the living standards of even the Southern workers depend in the last resort upon the British Empire. It is the Colonial Empire which bolsters up profits, salaries and wages in England, thus permitting the absorption at a relatively high price level of Éire’s agricultural export, on which the remainder of the economic structure rests. Freedom of access to the British market and state independence especially in regard to fiscal policy are the twin needs of the Éire bourgeoisie and, so long as they cannot surmount capitalism, also of the workers. The Northern nationalist workers, on the other handy are as economically dependent upon direct incorporation into the United Kingdom as are the Protestant workers. In the days of sufficient peasant tillage the Catholic masses had an economic stake in fighting for an Ireland freed from the British grip on the land. Today, however, when all trades and occupations draw their life blood from the heavy industries which only survive by virtue of Ulster’s political unity with Britain, a bourgeois united Ireland could only bring pauperisation to its most ardent partisans – the Northern nationalist workers. The Tory regime at Stormont is the oldest in Europe – preceding Mussolini’s assumption of power it has outlasted the Roman Duce. The main props of its rule are: (a) its mass following amongst the Protestants based on Britain’s financial bribes and the spectre of republicanism; (b) constituency gerrymandering; (c) the Civil Authority (Special Powers) Acts which give almost unlimited power to the colossal army of the police. Ireland was partitioned by the British in such a way as to assure the Tory Unionist Party of a fool-proof majority over its nationalist opponents. Stormont in its turn gerrymandered the six county, electoral seats so effectively that the nationalist voters can only obtain a mere fraction of the representation to which their numbers entitle them. In consequence abstention from the vote has become a tradition in many Republican areas, so much so that a Unionist can get into Stormont by mustering the merest handful of Protestant votes. Only a few of the far-reaching powers vested in the Civil Authority can be listed here: 1. By police proclamation publications may be banned, meetings and demonstrations forbidden and a state of curfew imposed. 2. The police hold the right to enter and search premises without a warrant and to confiscate or destroy property. 3. Arrest and interment may be ordered on suspicion. 4. Habeas corpus is suspended and internees and their relatives may be prevented from seeing or communicating with one another. 5. One of the most sinister clauses relates to the right of the Civil Authority to withhold the right of inquest. A jailed or interned Republican is automatically disqualified from obtaining his family allowances under the Unemployment Insurance Acts on the grounds that he is not available for work. A former political prisoner or Republican suspect finds it extremely difficult to keep employment owing to the police practice of warning employers against them. An isolated incident may kindle with unexpected suddenness into a crisis during the course of which hundreds of suspects are rounded up and scores of families deprived of a breadwinner, are menaced by the spectres of hunger and debt. This explains why the barometer of parliamentary contests registers such startling overnight changes. At the last Labour Party Conference it was resolved that the Party should take the initiative in inaugurating a Northern Ireland Council for Civil Liberties. This is a welcome development from the days of Midgley. The Trotskyist movement has conducted a long campaign for the setting up of such a council to combat the injustices meted out under the Special Powers Acts. Militants in the labour Party, and the workers generally, must see to it that this decision is really implemented by the building of a genuine Civil Liberties Council supported by and representative of every section of the labour movement. Militants in the Éire labour movement must demand similar measures. By bringing into the clear light of day the full, unimpeachable facts on every case of arbitrary search, arrest and intimidation; by demanding full facilities for inquiry into every case of alleged police intimidation and brutality; by spreading information regarding the unsanitary overcrowded conditions under which political prisoners live; by opposing the farce of the police-influenced Internees’ Appeals Tribunal; and, in short, by making a public display of samples of the British “democracy” being meted out to hundreds of Ulster citizens, a Civil Liberties Council has a revolutionary role to perform. It can hasten the downfall of the regime. It can set on fire the conscience of the whole community, shaming and shocking even the Protestant petty bourgeoisie into protest. The fight for civil liberties is an integral and immensely important aspect of the class struggle. It is instructive, therefore, to perceive from this angle how low the Stalinist renegades have sunk in their clownish eagerness to act as sycophants to Tory Unionism. Stalinist policy, as is well known, is to give undivided attention to “democracy’s” battle against Hitler. However, the tyranny endured by the Ulster minority is too near at hand and affects too large a number of workers to be passed over in silence. At their recent Congress, therefore, the Stalinists passed a resolution “demanding” an end to (religious) sectarian discrimination in the hiring of labour and “insisting” on various other laudable changes in the direction of greater justice for the Catholic workers. However, this was a resolution for the record only. Civil liberties cannot be wrested from the vested interests without the maximum effort of a united proletariat, but complete and unconditional independence from the Orange capitalist state is the prerequisite for proletarian unity. The Stalinists, however, are the most steadfast and unswerving. supporters of the Orange Tory Cabinet. Actually, the Stalinist party is completely opposed to the extension of civil liberties. Its recipe for ending discrimination against the Catholic workers clearly amounts to this: “Put the Protestant workers in the same boat: abolish civil liberties for them also!” This can clearly be seen from the March 13th, 1943 issue of their paper Unity. In the front page editorial, while whole-heartedly professing agreement on the need for special powers, they permitted themselves to indulge in a light criticism of the sectarian character of the Civil Authority (Special Powers) Acts, and – without forthrightly demanding the abolition of these acts – suggested that the British Emergency Powers Act would be a “fairer” weapon in the hands of the government. This is equivalent to a demand to abolish hanging in favour of electrocution. The Communist Party of Ireland Protestant-Republican working class unity can be forged only on the anvil of the class war. National independence will be won either as a by-product of the Irish and British revolutionary struggles or not at- all. Finally, only the victory of socialism on a world scale will end national oppression forever. The Trotskyist movement alone fights under the banner of international socialism and therefore, alone of all parties and tendencies represents the true national interests of the Irish people. It alone is implacable in its hostility alike to imperialism and to all forms of capitalist rule; and alone is the enemy of every manifestation of bourgeois ideology within the ranks of the working class. On the other hand, the Communist Party of Ireland – Irish, as it is Communist in name only – confuses, disorients and increases the disunity of the working class. The Stalinist Party is never permitted to absolve itself from a sense of responsibility towards the capitalist system. This follows from its role as a satellite of the Kremlin bureaucracy. The Kremlin bureaucracy is fully aware that the social stability of the capitalist countries is a prerequisite for its own plunderous role over the Soviet working masses. World revolution constitutes an even greater threat to its vested interests than world imperialism; for while it is possible to hope that the antagonisms dividing the great powers will always drive one of the camps of imperialist predators into seeking an understanding with the Kremlin no hope whatever can be entertained of the revolutionaries making their peace with bureaucratic tyranny. A revolution in any one of the advanced countries would act as an inspiration and a signal to the Soviet masses to break asunder the chains of Stalinism. Thus, under the totalitarian Stalinist regime, the Soviet Union is as deeply involved as any of the capitalist countries in the jugglery of power politics. It follows, therefore, that either the Stalin regime will be in the camp of British imperialism or working in collaboration with its (Britain’s) imperialist enemies; and that the Communist Party of Ireland will be committed either to supporting the British ruling class or to demagogically opposing them. However, opposition to British imperialism does not mean for the Stalinist Party support for an independent proletarian struggle for national and social freedom. It simply means that an alliance with the Orange dictatorship on the essentials of the Tory programme, is replaced by an attempted alliance with the bourgeois nationalist organisations their programme. One form of “national united front” takes the place of another. That is all. The social set-up in Northern Ireland undoubtedly offers the Stalinists admirable scope for the creation on paper of national fronts to suit all purposes. In reality of course either form of the so-called national front is of an equally fictitious nature. This is not to imply that the fiction is without its effects; but these are wholly on the side of sectarian disunity. What happens is this: each fresh turnabout of the Stalinists not only leaves the caste bigotry of the workers unchanged, but actually leads to a strengthening of the bonds of ideology uniting them to the bourgeois politicians belonging to their own particular side of the community. For instance, during the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact the Communist Party’s flirtation with the nationalist organisations had the double consequence of sustaining the worst illusions of the Republican proletariat and, at the same time, hopelessly alienating the Protestant workers. Among the Protestants the Stalinist Party has registered formidable gains over the past two years, Membership has probably increased seven or eight-fold. These new recruits consist mainly of worker and petty-bourgeois elements completely new to politics; drawn towards the “left” out of admiration for the Red Army but, most of them, unemancipated from the old jingoistic mentality. On the other hand the strike breaking role of the Stalinist Party has alienated most of the experienced industrial militants among the Protestants. In Éire, following upon Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, afraid to proclaim openly the new policy foisted upon it by the Kremlin – the ending of Éire neutrality – quietly dissolved itself into the Labour Party. Hitherto, despite its imposing record of treachery, Stalinism has always brazenly tried to justify itself in the eyes of the workers. In this single episode is contained the whole preceding twenty years of Stalinist degeneration; its political bankruptcy and its moral spinelessness. The greatness of Bolshevism consisted not merely in its capacity to withstand the material blows of reaction but even more to swim against the current of popular feeling. Stalinism gives a few short grunts and then sinks to the bottom. Nationalism and Socialism The fundamental tasks of nationalism awaiting the solution of the approaching revolution are: (1) the healing of the sectarian breach; (2) the winning of national independence from British imperialism; and (3) the ending of partition. These form an inseparable trinity. None are realisable as isolated aims in themselves, or possible of attainment except by means of the socialist revolution. Conversely, the socialist movement can turn its back on the problems of nationalism only at the price of prostration before capitalism; for a proletariat divided within itself cannot seize power. National tasks and social tasks are thus inextricably woven together. The national question IS a social question and, moreover, one of the largest magnitude. Hitherto, the prevailing tendency has been to regard the intrusion of Orange and Nationalist banners into the arena of the class struggle as a complication of an exclusively detrimental nature to the labour movement; as a plague of ideologies, in fact. Most certainly this judgment holds true under all circumstances so far as Orangeism is concerned. On the other hand, the unsolved national question – which is not at all a religious sectarian issue from the standpoint of the nationalist workers – is not necessarily a brake upon the class struggle but, under favourable circumstances, can act as a dynamo upon it, causing violent accelerations of tempo. Finally, the best Irish nationalists will always be Trotskyists; for Trotskyism’s conceptions of international solidarity and socialist co-operation alone correspond to the national needs of the Irish people. An isolated proletarian dictatorship, even assuming it were not militarily overthrown, could not in the long run prevent a resurgence of sectarian disunity; for ideology cannot take the place of bread indefinitely. With the prolongation of hunger and poverty the wheels of the revolution would begin to revolve backwards. It is only within a system of world socialist economy that the unity of the Irish people will become indestructible for all time. Labor and the Imperial State Within limits the class struggle in Northern Ireland has its own internal rhythm of development, which may lag behind or race ahead of the British. However, in the last analysis, the balance of political power existing between the workers and capitalists of Britain exercises a decisive influence in determining the nature of the regime. A fascist dictatorship in England would inevitably produce its Ulster equivalent ... Similarly, a triumphant socialist revolution in Britain would be followed in quick succession – if not automatically – by the assumption of state power by the Irish proletariat. A reformist Labor Government at Stormont would be unable to maintain itself for long in the face of an entrenched Tory regirne at Westminster; for if, despite its minority position in Parliament, the Tory Party in past years proved sufficiently powerful in the work of sabotage, and resourceful enough in the invention of calumnies, to bring about the untimely downfall of two MacDonald Labor regimes; and if at a later stage, operating through the machinery of the Federation of British Industries, they conspired to close the New Zealand Government’s channels of trade – notwithstanding New Zealand’s relative independence of Britain as compared to Ulster, it may be accepted without discussion that the British Tory Government would move into action against a Stormont Labor regime with ruthlessness, effrontery and ruinous effect. The choice confronting the unfortunate Labor ministers would be reduced to one of running a risk of provoking a state overturn by the workers should they postpone the introduction of radical social changes or, alternatively, of being crushed in the vise of an economic boycott imposed by the Imperial State should they prove themselves lax in the defense of property rights and the maintenance of order. Caught in the midst of a withering cross-fire from three directions – from the workers, the Republicans and the Imperialists – the Labor regime would inevitably succumb to mortal wounds. However, during its brief tenure of office the commands of the imperial dispenser of gold and food would be hearkened to like the voice of God. The labor reformists could not implement to the full the dictates of their imperialist overlords without, in doing so, eternally disgracing themselves in the eyes of the nationalist population and the working class in general. They would equivocate and temporize, squirming round in a vicious circle of half measures. Confronted with the imperative necessity of taking sides on an issue, certainly the labor lackeys would always choose the bourgeois state. But they would take sides weakly. Therefore, imperialism would not be tempted gratefully to forbear from wrecking their regime; for it would feel the pressing need of restoring a strong, authoritarian government in Ulster. British “good-will” is not a free commodity on the market. Its price to Ulster is the maintenance of sufficient internal calm to ensure a peaceful occupation ...

The Struggle for Ireland
William Morgan The Struggle for Ireland The New International, April 1939 Bombs are exploding again in Ireland and England. Under the very nose of the Home Office in London, under monument of English kings in Belfast, beneath prisons walls where thousands of Irish patriots have served time, and under customs houses along the Ulster border, loud and sudden blasts usher in the twenty-third anniversary of Easter Week. And no mere memorial, these explosions. They serve to remind the world of the fight for national independence by a people who have relentlessly ought for seven hundred years against the most powerful and most ruthless oppressor of all colonial peoples – the ruling class of the British Empire. Easter Week! The very words are magic to all Irish patriots and revolutionists. And yet, to some they are without meaning, while others who lack a clear understanding of this event – which is to Ireland what the Paris Commune is to France – the heroic and historic attempt of the Irish people to free themselves from the bloody and desperate grip of Great Britain is considered either a wild adventure of poets and dreamers or a “putsch” undertaken by idealistic nationalists. It was neither. One need only examine a few of the hundreds of available documents plus the published opinions of both Lenin and Connolly to realize that Easter Week was a manifestation of the serious crisis of imperialism, a crisis which in 1917-1918 led to the collapse of several imperialist states and to the Russian Revolution. Perhaps it is because Ireland, despite its revolutionary significance in the international scene, has not greatly figured in the historic drama of Marxism, that little attention is given to its present possibility as a force in the struggle against imperialism. The decline of the revolutionary labor movement in Ireland and the rise of isolated acts of violence against the Crown are important factors which must be carefully investigated and understood by all revolutionary socialists. Ireland with its complicated conditions and special difficulties must be examined by any who wish to further the interests of colonial peoples as against the powerful and crafty might of Great Britain. The British ruling class for centuries managed to keep not only the outside world but also England ignorant of conditions in Ireland and thus was able to isolate the Irish fighters for freedom. It is for this reason that the writings of James Connolly must be unearthed to shed light on the fact that in Ireland there lived and struggled a Marxist who takes his place beside the honored pioneers of socialism. Connolly was a Marxist who stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries in the labor movement of the British Isles, and he not only understood but gave his life in a vigorous attempt to carry out the basic theories of Marx and Lenin. His contributions to the working class of Ireland include not only the Marxist analysis of the history of labor in Ireland, Labor in Irish History, and his keenly critical articles in the Irish Worker – the official organ of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union – but also the tremendous lessons of the Dublin strike of 1913 and rebellion which he organized and directed. His death remains a symbol of the effectiveness of his courageous and brilliant leadership. Propped up in a wheel-chair (his wounds would not permit him to stand) he was shot by order of a frenzied and terrified capitalism. Connolly’s ideas and the 1916 Rebellion can only be grasped in the light of Irish history, and it is important to read what Marx and Engels and Lenin had to say concerning the nature of conditions there in relation to the inter-national situation. These leaders of the world revolutionary movements of their time each saw what Connolly so naturally and quickly understood. They were Connolly’s guides and they confirm the correctness of his tactics and approach. Engels visited Ireland in 1855 and again in 1869. His description of Ireland on his first visit is classic. “Gendarmes, priests, lawyers, officials, landlords, in numbers to gladden the eyes, the complete absence of any industry, so that it would be difficult to understand how all these parasites live, were it not for the corresponding contrast of the peasants’ poverty.” He noted the fine ruins, dating from the Fifth and Sixth century right up to the 19th century, the most ancient ones, churches and castles, the most modern ruins – peasants’ huts. Traces of the awful famine of ’46 were still seen in the deserted villages which stood alongside the beautiful parks of the landlords. As a result of famine, emigration, evictions and executions, Ireland was a desert. “The country has been completely ruined,” he wrote to Marx, “by the English wars of conquest from 1100 to 1850. (In fact the wars and martial law have lasted for all that time.)” Even the native Irish landlords, he noted, in their fine parks are living in decay and semi-poverty, in eternal fear of the Encumbered Estates Courts and the auctioneer’s hammer. In his first work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1848, he described the condition of the Irish peasantry on the eve of the famine. The overdivision of the land, the consequent soaring rents, double, treble, quadruple those paid in England, all for the benefit of the landlord, an army of agricultural proletarians, 75,000 more in Ireland than in England, although more than twice as much land is cultivated there than in England. From Spring until the harvest the wife and children roam the roads while the husband seeks in vain for work in England .... Engels immediately saw through the myth of English “democracy” – English “freedom”. In 1846 the industrial middle class of England forced the aristocracy to repeal the Corn Laws and establish Free Trade. They at once turned to Ireland and there demonstrated that they had assumed not only the role of the former exploiters but had improved on the methods. Ireland was reduced to a poverty which is beyond description. The enforced famine reduced the population from 8,222,664 to less than three million inside of five years! Marx gives us a true and horrible picture of this wholesale depopulation of a country. The Irish tenant farmers before 1846 provided the bulk of the wheat consumed in England, being protected against competition by the general tariff system then in force which went mostly to native landlords. This came to an end with the Corn Laws. The peasant’s wretched tenant-farm could not compete with the great feudal estates of Europe or the young and strong capitalist farming of the United States. The native landlords, almost identically with the English landlords, stopped tilling and turned the land into pasturage. The evicting of tenants began. Marx in an article written in 1855 for the Neue Oder Zeitung described this terrible scourge which cleared Ireland of its peasantry more effectively and quickly than the famine and the plague. “This revolution consists in the Irish agrarian system yielding to the English, the system of small tenantry is being replaced by big tenantry – just as the old landlords are being replaced by new capitalists. The chief stages making way for this change are – the famine of 1847 which killed about one million Irish, the emigration to America and Australia, which has already torn an-other million souls out of Ireland and which continues to uproot fresh millions; the unsuccessful revolt of 1847 ... the Act of Parliament which condemned to auction the property of the indebted Irish nobility ...” This revolution, Marx considered, reached its climax in the ’60s when Ireland was finally converted into “England’s largest pasture”. In the first volume of Capital he gives a detailed analysis of the years 1861-1865, which gave rise to the economic basis of Fenianism, a mass movement with an agrarian socialist tendency directed against the monopoly of the land by the landlords. And for Marx and Engels the Irish question was the agrarian question, the exploitation of the peasant masses by a foreign landlord-capitalist oligarchy. They followed the question very closely and anxiously watched for developments which, in every case, they had predicted. Marx had pointed out early in the ’50’s, in the German and American press, that the process by which the landlord raised the rent whenever the tenant improved the property actually amounted to the tenant paying the landlord interest on his, the tenant’s own money. They concluded that only the expropriation of the landlords by the nationalization of the land, could solve the agrarian question. The program for the Irish revolution, Marx considered, should contain three simple points – self-government and independence from England, an agrarian revolution, protective taxes to help build up again the industries destroyed by the English. Connolly, a few days before the uprising of 1916, is reported to have said that the socialists would not understand his motives. He knew only too well the attitude of the Second International on the question of colonial revolts. The social democrats were not concerned with struggles of the small nations and the colonial slaves of the mother countries. They argued that the proletariat was disinterested in the fate of nationalities as such. The proletariat was international they said, and the revolution would solve all questions of national minorities, oppressed nationalities, etc. Against this view Lenin argued with all his ability. He pointed out that this kind of internationalism was a sham and that the question of oppressed nationalities was a class question. And in his arguments Lenin referred particularly to the example of Ireland. Although much had changed in Ireland since the death of Marx, Lenin was able to analyse the changes and the quick developments which had given rise to new conditions and new class currents. The sudden growth of the Irish working class and its independent class action in the great strike of 1913 in Dublin, the “Home Rule” bosses like Murphy, Sinn Féiners like Griffiths, the representatives of the capitalists and the priests, formed a common front with the British Home Office and its armed police against the Dublin workers. This strike was the beginning of proletarian Ireland, and the lessons of the strike will never be forgotten by Irish workers. It was here that Connolly resolved to organize the rebellion for national independence. Here all revolutionists saw plainly the line-up of forces. The Irish bourgeoisie now were satisfied to rule with the aid and blessings of England, with their own priests, with their own police and with the British navy not far away. Home Rule became a farce in the face of the changed situation. Independence was the only answer to the demands of the trade unions for decent wages. And independence could be won only by a full realization of the exact meaning of the terror and organized violence used by Murphy to smash the strike. The strike became a minor revolution in many aspects – armed conflict between workers and police, barricades in the workers’ districts, occupation by union men of strategic locations with-in the city, arrival of armed forces to assist the local police and the hired strike-breakers and clear, defined lines of combat with all the trade unions and workers and their wives and children on the one side, and the united armed forces of the State on the other. And when the strike was smashed, Connolly knew that only the immediate organization of armed companies of workers by the unions, only preparations for another attempt – larger in scope and bolder – would lift the workers from the demoralization and increased poverty which followed the defeat of the strike. Almost at once Connolly and Captain White set about to organize the Irish Citizen Army. Connolly as a revolutionary fighter against imperialist war was greatly disappointed in the Second International. He felt as though all connections, slim as they were, with the outside world were broken when it voted to support the war. Added to this was the treachery of the Irish bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Nationalists. When, during the World War, the headquarters of the Transport Workers Union – Liberty Hall – in Dublin was decorated with a huge banner which read, “We serve neither King nor Kaiser!”, the Home Rulers, Redmond and his wing of the IRA were busy giving full support to England, including as many recruits as they could muster, for the slaughter to make the world safe for democracy. Connolly, as if in answer to this betrayal of Ireland’s cause, wrote in The Workers’ Republic studies of risings and street fighting in Moscow in 1905, Paris in 1830 and in 1848, the rising in the Tyrol in 1905, and guerilla warfare in India, revolutionary struggles in Mexico and similar events. Once at a meeting of officers of the Irish Volunteer Army he was asked how he happened to know so much about military tactics and he replied, “You forget that revolution is my business.” He preached open revolutionary defeatism. He looked forward to the pending struggle not merely as an Irish affair: “Starting thus, Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture are shriveled up on the funeral pyre of the last war lord.” Easter Week was crushed. The betrayal of the bourgeois leadership and the failure of many to comprehend the bold step taken by Connolly; the separation of the rural areas from the city, the failure of the British workers to respond, especially the cynical opposition of the British Labour Party leadership which voted for resolutions of solidarity but confined their activity to mere voting, all added to the weight and might of the Army of Occupation. And there followed the policy of building Ulster, in the North, to compete with Ireland and to divide the nation. England has built Ulster into an industrial fortress to offset the agrarian South. Today England is attempting to bring about complete separation and division. Divide and rule is an old, old policy. Ulster stands in the path of national independence, and until this question is settled once and for all, England still rules. England does business with Ulster to the detriment of Dublin. And Roosevelt has signed a separate trade treaty with Ulster. But never before has the unity of the people been stronger. It requires the full attention of an Army of Occupation numbering more than 65,000 soldiers and police to keep order in Belfast and Londonderry. In the public streets crowds gathered to burn in public bonfires thousands of Britain’s “Conscription Books” while collections are taken for the IRB. The IRB is an outgrowth of dissatisfaction with de Valera. The Irish Republican Army has given birth to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. This new organization refuses to accept the leadership of men who have betrayed their cause. They are assuming full responsibility for the present wave of bombings. While the Stalinists are denouncing them as agents of Hitler, blood-brothers of fascists, the Irish Republicans go about their business. The re-enactment of DORA – the old Defense of the Realm Act under which men are arrested for what they might be thinking – does not cause a moment’s hesitation. While the Stalinists are busy trying to recruit for the defense of British “democracy” and heaping slander and abuse on all who cannot quite grasp the point – especially in Ireland – the revolutionists are preparing for the next battle with capitalism. While fully understanding that without the combined forces of the Irish working class and the English workers and the revolutionary forces in the colonies, national independence cannot be won completely, we cannot simply dismiss the current bombings as useless or reactionary. They are not mere isolated acts of violence committed by distraught and frustrated individuals. They are, on the contrary, carefully planned and carried out according to an organized plan devised by revolutionists who themselves admit that bombs are merely the first step in the renewal of the struggle. These men know and are planning for the necessary steps to unite the forces of opposition. The bombs are serving to draw attention to the Army of Occupation now in Ireland and the return of the suppression which preceded the last war. Revolutionists everywhere must rally to the support of the movement to wrest freedom and independence from the “greatest landlord in Europe” and thus by striking a blow at the heart of the largest imperialist power in the world, release the forces of revolution in every colonial country before the war engulfs all humanity in a fight to destroy itself for the profits and power of capitalism.

Karl Kautsky: Ireland
Karl Kautsky Ireland (1922) http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1922/ireland/ Written: 1922. First published: in Berlin by Co-operative Publishers. Translated: Angela Clifford Published: January 1974. Foreword 1. The Early History of Ireland 2. 19th Century Decline 3. 19th Century Uprising 4. Ireland in the 20th Century a) Ulster b) New Rebellious Elements c) Civil War d) Reconciliation 5. Outlook for the Future a) The Effect on Ireland of the Solution of the Irish Question b) The Effect outside Ireland of the Solution of the Irish Question