Socialism and nationalism The nature of Connolly's socialism, and its role in his decision to join the IRB in the Easter Rising, was disputed by his Socialist contemporaries in both Europe and the United States. It is the central point of contention in the extensive literature that has developed since on his political life and thought. Writing in 1934,
Seán Ó Faoláin described Connolly's political ideas as:an amalgamation of everything he had read that could, according to his viewpoint, be applied to Irish ills, a synthesis of
Marx,
Davitt,
Lalor,
Robert Owen,
Tone,
Mitchel and the rest, all welded together in his Socialist-Separatist ideal. He favoured
industrial unionism as the method of approach to what he called variously, the Workers' Republic, the Irish Socialist Republic, the Co-operative State, the Democratic Co-operative Commonwealth... [The unions] would be he means of popular representation in the Workers' Parliament; and they would be the power controlling the national wealth ... In a word he believed in vocational representation combined with "all power to the Unions".
Constance Markievicz was also to interpret Connolly's socialism in purely national, purely Irish, terms. Seizing on Connolly's portrait of
Gaelic society in
The Reconquest of Ireland, she summarised his doctrine as the "application of the social principle which underlay the
Brehon laws of our ancestors". At the same time, there were writers who, convinced that "Connolly's Irish Catholicism had not been irrevocably blemished by atheistic
Marxism", Beginning in 1961, with the publication of a major new biography by
Desmond Greaves, there was a concerted effort to rehabilitate Connolly as a revolutionary socialist. Greaves is the source for Connolly's oft-quoted "hold on to your rifles" admonition to his ICA volunteers, which might suggest that Connolly did see the Easter Rising as the prelude to this larger revolutionary struggle. In 1908, Connolly accused De Leon of knocking "the feet from under" his party's alliance with the
IWW by arguing that, as prices rise with wages, the gains the union secures for labour are only nominal. The implication was that the One Big Union was merely a "ward-heeling club" for the
SLP, a place from which militants could be recruited to the real task: building a party to take state power. Since it suggests that within capitalism there is no prospect of the working class improving its position, Connolly allowed that the "theory that a rise in prices always destroys the value of a rise in wages" sounds "revolutionary", but maintained that it was not Marxist and not true. In a last statement of his credo,
The Re-conquest of Ireland (1915), Connolly affirmed that the outcome of this struggle, the worker's republic, is not an overweening state. Rather it is an industrial commonwealth in which "the workshops, factories, docks, railways, shipyards, &c., shall be owned by the nation, but administered by the Industrial Unions of the respective industries". In "State Monopoly versus Socialism" (1899) he had been clear that "without this co-operative control the public ownership by the State is not Socialism – it is only State capitalism". An early compiler of his ideas, notes that Connolly "nowhere attempts to explain how the general interests of the State, as distinguished from specific interests of the Industrial Unions, are to be provided for". It was only certain that Connolly was not a "state socialist". Connolly was, himself, confident that his:... conception of Socialism destroys at one blow all the fears of a bureaucratic state, ruling and ordering the lives of every individual from above, and thus gives assurance that the social order of the future will be an extension of the freedom of the individual, and not a suppression of it. He made no attempt, prior to or during the Rising, to appeal to workers to join the insurgency. In an address published just one week before the Rising on the forthcoming congress of the Irish TUC, there is no intimation of the impending action. In reference to the war, Connolly's only advice was that the congress should proceed in August as planned.
A two-stage struggle At the beginning of 1916, Connolly drew "a crucial distinction between the struggle for socialism and for national liberation".In ''Erin's Hope'' (1897), Connolly had claimed that socialists would succeed where the
Fenians, and the
Young Irelanders before them, had failed, in preparing "the public mind for revolution". Greaves insists that little had changed in Connolly's fundamental thinking. Rather than being "dragged away from his labour convictions",
R.M. Fox argues that under the unique conditions of the
Great War Connolly was compelled to "force the independence issue to the point of armed struggle". For
Richard English, while this may have been so, it is Connolly's failure "to persuade any but a tiny number of the Irish people" of his argument that accounts for his "gesture" in 1916. Acceding to the IRB's "inclusive, cross-class approach to the nation", his hope was only of an "eventual" vindication of his belief that, once national rebellion had secured "the national powers needed by our class", social revolution would follow. In this he was greatly influenced by
Alice Stopford Green's
The Making of Ireland and its Undoing: 1200–1600 (1908), and by the work of other historians and anthropologists, "who suggested that common ownership of land had been the basis of primitive society in most countries before its replacement by capitalist relations of production." Apart from what he may have witnessed as a soldier, Connolly's only sustained experience of rural Ireland was three weeks spent in
County Kerry in 1898, in the company of Maud Gonne, Connolly had concluded that "the root cause" of the distress was not landlordism per se or an "alien government", but rather a "system of small farming and small industry" in which the Irish peasant "reaps none of the benefits of the progress . . . [and] organisation of industry". In either case it was an analysis that suggested that "the most important struggles for the Irish peasantry would occur not in the countryside, but between labour and capital in the cities". There is no discussion of the role the rural population itself might play in the creation of the new republic. But after the
Wyndham Act (1903), the peasant "was, or else was well on the way to becoming, a freehold farmer--a man of property". A "large self-confident class of farmer owners" was shifting the balance of class forces in Catholic Ireland against Connolly's identification of the national cause with labour. Their emancipation from taxation imposed in the working-class interest would be "the main economic achievement of independence". Yet while claiming that the "system of petty farming conveys no hope to the minds of the working class", In
The Reconquest of Ireland (1915), Connolly celebrates the development and, recalling the co-operative stores his union had opened in Dublin after the Lock-out, "confidently" predicts that, "in the very near future", the labour movement will create its own "crop of co-operative enterprises". The stage would then be set for town and country to heal their "latent antagonism" and converge on a common ideal — the "Co-operative Commonwealth". It was a seeming mixture of "
Sinn Féinism,
Co-operativism, and
Municipalism" for which he was criticised by his friend, and editor of the paper Connolly had established in Scotland,
The Socialist, John Carstairs Matheson. Later, when in Belfast for the Socialist Party and the ITGWU, he identified "religious bigotry" as the one obstacle remaining to the acceptance of Irish self-government and thus to the achievement of socialist unity on a separate all-Ireland basis. But he understood this as a political force arising, not from confessional differences, but from the deliberate recall and accentuation of ancient native-
planter divisions. In 1913, as a new Home Rule bill progressed through
Westminster, Connolly appeared to concede the objection of
William Walker, the Protestant leader of the
Independent Labour Party in Belfast, in a parliament of their own,
Home Rulers would likely set a bad example to "reactionists everywhere". Connolly was also dismissive of the appeal to northern workers of the potential parliamentary opposition, Arthur Griffith's
Sinn Féin.Connolly also allowed religious bigotry was not alone the mark of Empire loyalists: he had applauded the even-handedness of the Grand-Master of the
Independent Orange Order,
Lindsay Crawford, in castigating sectarian influences — both "
Orange and Green". But in an "ill-tempered and discursive" exchange with Walker, Connolly admitted no case for labour sticking with the
Imperial Parliament in London. It represented an Orange-inflected Protestantism that had become "synonymous" with what
Catholicism represented in much of the rest of Europe; that is, with "
Toryism, lickspittle loyalty, servile worship of
aristocracy and hatred of all that savours of genuine political independence on the part of the lower classes". It was a spirit that might be expected of prominent Home Rulers, those whom in welcoming
King George V to Dublin in July 1911 Connolly described as "grovelling, dirt eating capitalist traitors". But suffused by unionism among Protestant workers, it resulted in his encountering in Ireland's industrial capital, not what socialist theory would have predicted, its most politically-advanced working class, but rather those he despairingly characterised as "least rebellious slaves in the industrial world". That the Protestant working people of Ulster could regard themselves as a free people within the United Kingdom, he dismissed, effectively, as "false consciousness". it could not be long sustained. But sensitive to the unpopularity of Home Rule, they did not carry their commitment over, when in May, Connolly secured a resolution at the
Irish Trades Union Congress in favour of an
Irish Labour Party without ties to the ILP or other British groups. they adhered to what in Belfast became, after partition, the
Northern Ireland Labour Party.
Socialism and religion In 1907, Connolly confessed that while he "usually posed as a Catholic", he had not done his "duty" for fifteen years, and had "not the slightest tincture of faith left". He argued that Irish Catholics could in all conscience reject their bishops' dealings with the British authorities,In 1910, he published
Labour, Nationality and Religion in which he defended socialists against the clerical charge that they are "beasts of immorality". He noted, for example, that the "enormous increase of divorces [in the United States] was almost entirely among the classes least affected by Socialist teaching". (In
The Forward he was content to publish in a paper that ran a column from
John Wheatley's Catholic Socialist Society).
Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was convinced that, of "all the Irish labour men", Connolly was "the soundest and most thorough-going feminist". In
The Reconquest of Ireland (1915), Connolly traced oppression of women, like the oppression of the worker, to “a social and political order based upon the private ownership of property”. If the "worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave". In a series articles from 1897 on "the coming revolt in India", Connolly argued that such progress that had made under British rule in the sub-continent could have been independently attained “by an intellectual people with a continuity of literary and philosophic activity stretching back for two thousand years or more”. In Connolly’s view the issue was not modernity but "the colonial mode of its
imposition". In observations that
Robert Young suggests prefigure
Mao,
Fanon,
Cabral and
Guevara, Connolly proposed that such impositions could accelerate revolutionary potentialities not only on the periphery but also, given the necessity of "colonial expansion and the conquest of new markets . . . for the prolongation of the life of capitalism", Finding similarities with the work of
José Carlos Mariategui, founder of the
syndicalist-influenced Peruvian Socialist Party, others have proposed that, in works such as
Labour in Irish History (1910), Connolly was among the first marxists to attempt an anti-imperialist form of historiography conceptualised from the standpoint of the colonized.
On antisemitism During his 1902 election campaign in the
Wood Quay ward in Dublin, in which many streets were occupied by
Jewish immigrants from
Russia, Connolly's campaign became the first in Irish history to distribute leaflets in
Yiddish. The leaflet condemned antisemitism as a tool of the capitalist class. In 1898,
Workers Republic published an article "The Ideal Government of the Jew", advocating "the establishment of an Isrealitish [sic] nation in
Palestine". ==Family==