On Sunday 13 May—Connolly Sunday—two commemorations took place in
Arbour Hill to honour James Connolly and the other leaders of the 1916
Rising. The afternoon event, organised by the Communist Party of Ireland
and the Connolly Youth Movement, was addressed by Rob Griffiths,
general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, and Eddie Glackin,
member of the National Executive Committee of the CPI. The morning
event, organised by the Labour Party, was addressed by Jack O’Connor,
general president of SIPTU.
All three speakers took as their theme the relevance of James
Connolly to the present crisis; but there, I’m afraid, the commonality
ceased between the a.m. and the p.m. events.
Jack O’Connor is generally well respected—if not always agreed
with—by the serious left in this country as a thoughtful, honest trade
unionist with strong working-class roots and values. In fact he stands
apart from many of our contemporary trade union “leaders” for those
reasons.
It is therefore more than disappointing, actually shameful, to
see him trundled out at Arbour Hill, this sacred place, to give
credibility to and provide excuses for the Labour Party’s dreadful role
in government. And this was not done as an individual member of the
Labour Party but as general president of the largest union in Ireland.
Jack has never been flavour of the month with the leadership of
the Labour Party, or indeed with many in the ICTU, yet over the past
month or two he is being quoted approvingly by those elements and put
forward as a spokesperson—for two reasons: to justify the role of the
Labour party in the coalition government, and to provide some cover
within the labour movement for the Yes campaign in the last referendum.
Both these roles came together at Arbour Hill.
James Connolly, as O’Connor acknowledges, “was arguably the
greatest intellect of his generation.” Born in extreme poverty in
Edinburgh, he was a boy soldier in the British army, a labourer,
cobbler, journalist, trade union organiser and leader, committed
socialist and patriot, self-taught intellectual, writer, historian, and
military tactician. He has left the Irish working class an enormous
legacy in his writings and in his political practice, his
anti-sectarianism, and his determination to build alliances with other
progressive forces. He has left an indelible mark on the labour movement
not just in Ireland but also in Scotland and in the United States. He
is honoured internationally as an important Marxist writer on the
relationship between the struggles for independence and for socialism.
Central to Connolly’s political life was precisely his belief
in the role of the working class as “the incorruptible inheritors of the
fight for freedom in Ireland.” In fairness, this was acknowledged by
O’Connor early in his address. Having first of all put in the health
warning that “we cannot blindly accept all that Connolly wrote as
gospel” (where have we heard that before?), he then said: “We would be
well advised to stick with the principles he gave us. One of those is an
unwavering belief that the working class was the one class that never
betrayed Ireland, for the simple reason that it would be betraying
itself.”
It is tempting at this point to lash in a few quotations. But
the point about Connolly (only Oscar Wilde is quoted and misquoted more
frequently than him—often for equally dubious reasons) is not just to
engage in the type of “battle of quotations” beloved by the ultra-left
but to read and study him.
Central to Connolly’s politics was that it was based on a class
analysis. Connolly was a revolutionary Marxist and, notwithstanding his
role in the foundation of what became the Irish Labour Party, could not
be remotely construed as a social democrat in the modern sense. He had
earlier been involved in the founding of Ireland’s first Marxist party,
the Irish Socialist Republican Party, and subsequently the Socialist
Party of Ireland, forerunner of the CPI. Of course he was also an
outstanding leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union and
founder of the Irish Citizen Army.
For many years Connolly’s principal writings were publicly
available to ordinary workers only because they were published in
pamphlet form by the Irish Workers’ Party and subsequently the CPI.
Generations of left activists in this country were politically weaned on
Labour in Irish History, Labour, Nationality and Religion, The Reconquest of Ireland,
etc., which they got from the party’s bookshop in Dublin or Belfast.
The Labour Party, the “party of Connolly,” did not consider the making
of Connolly’s writings available to workers a task worthy or important
enough for them. The truth of Connolly’s legacy to the workers of
Ireland was deliberately hidden from the people for decades, and the
Labour Party did nothing to change that situation.
Connolly attached a huge importance to political education and
the study of Marxist theory. It was this that led him to an
understanding of imperialism and its role in Ireland and in the world.
In this he was far ahead of all his contemporaries in Ireland and also
of many in the international socialist movement of the time. This was
starkly shown with the outbreak of war in 1914, when most of the
European socialist parties, despite being pledged to oppose the coming
war and refuse to lead workers to slaughter each other for the benefit
of their masters, supported “their” governments in the ensuing imperial
slaughter. Connolly—like Lenin in Russia—was with the minority who
determined to turn the imperialist war against imperialism, in Ireland’s
case by striking a blow for independence.
In his address Jack O’Connor referred to this time in rather
strange terms, which can be construed only as an attempt to undermine or
minimise the role of the revolutionary left (which subsequently became
the communist movement after the split in the Socialist International)
in opposing the war or, conversely, to boost the anti-imperial, anti-war
credentials of the reformist majority. He said: “We tend to think of
opposition to that war today purely in terms of the stance taken by the
Bolsheviks. But the Socialist International in 1914 was much broader
than the Bolsheviks. Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Jean
Jaurès in France and George Lansbury in England were also among those
who took a principled stand against the blood lust of Europe’s competing
imperialisms. Indeed Jaurès, Liebknecht and Luxemburg would pay with
their lives for their principles.”
As the next couple of years are going to see a veritable orgy
of historical revisionism—for example, the First World War was actually a
noble endeavour, because Irish Protestants and Catholics were equally
slaughtering and being slaughtered by workers of other countries, and
sure didn’t they all do it for the best of reasons—this rather selective
and inaccurate reference needs to be corrected.
It is true that some individuals and groupings within the
Socialist International, to their credit, took principled positions
against the war hysteria; but the vast majority supported “their”
governments, and this was the main reason for the split between the
reformist and revolutionary wings in the International.
Lansbury did oppose the war; but what did the British Labour
Party do? Jaurès was assassinated at the outbreak of the war by a French
supporter of war against Germany; but what did the French Socialist
Party do? And how can Luxemburg and Liebknecht—who left the Socialist
International to become founders of the German Communist Party and were
subsequently murdered by agents of the post-war German government, which
included the Social Democrats—be held up as exemplars of the Socialist
International?
The lesson for social democrats, socialists and communists of
all hues to learn from the First World War is about the nature and role
of imperialism. According to the latter-day ideologues of social
democracy—devotees of a better, fairer capitalism—imperialism seems to
have disappeared unnoticed somewhere along the road in the second half
of the twentieth century. Understanding imperialism was never a strong
point of the Labour Party, right from the early days of the Free State,
which imposed the imperialist settlement on Ireland. Labour saw it as a
squabble between contending groups of nationalists, not understanding
either the class forces involved or the role of the imperial
puppet-masters.
And so it remains today. The Labour Party, eschewing the type
of class analysis that inspired Connolly and underpinned all his
policies and actions, cannot see how modern imperialism—state monopoly
capitalism—functions as a system. Because they don’t see armies
marauding backwards and forwards across Europe, obviously there is no
more imperialism (unless you’re in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya,
or Syria; but of course that’s “humanitarian,” isn’t it?).
The socialist and social-democratic parties throughout Europe,
when in office, have shown themselves to be staunch defenders of the
status quo. The British Labour Party has never needed lessons from the
Tories on how to be arch-imperialists. When in opposition they tut-tut
at some excesses of the Right but never present a fundamental challenge
to the rotten system of capitalism and imperialism, preferring instead
to wait their turn at the trough. Who formed the British government that
joined Bush’s invasion of Iraq?
The chosen instrument of contemporary capitalism is the
European Union. This is not some benign social-democratic Eurodisney
theme park where we are all partners together. The myth that the Common
Market, EEC, European Community or now EU exists to promote the greater
well-being of the people of Europe is precisely that: a myth. There is a
narrative, echoed in Jack O’Connor’s speech at Arbour Hill, that
everything was grand back in the days of those great socialists
Mitterand and Delors until the nasty neo-liberals came along and spoiled
it with deregulation etc. What about the free movement of capital? Has
that nothing to do with the present mess? Or the free movement of
labour, which is designed to shunt cheap labour around Europe to the
area of greatest need (for the employers)?
This wholly uncritical view of the EU by the Labour Party has
been a disaster for the movement in this country. When there is a need
for a party of the working class to stand up and shout “Enough!” to
organise the working people to fight back, the Labour Party is not to be
found. Its leaders sit snugly in the corridors of power, repeating the
economically illiterate banalities of the “pundits” who have been so
spectacularly wrong on every major economic question over the last
half-century. They have become active builders of the internal Troika
(Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and Labour Party), which sees its task as being
gatekeepers for the external Troika (EU, ECB, IMF) of international
capital, especially the major German and French banks, to whom they are
in thrall and to whom this country and its children unborn are in hock.
Jack O’Connor lauds the Labour Party’s “courageous decision to
go into Government in the very worst of times, when staying out would
have been much easier.” This is turning reality on its head. Of course
Labour got thrown a few crumbs for its role in government; don’t they
always? The question is, how does this contribute to building the type
of movement that can break the power of the monopolies, defeat
capitalism, and build the type of society Connolly fought and died for?
Does Labour’s role as handmaiden to Fine Gael not actively postpone the
day when such a movement can be built?
We have to build a movement that can see in the day-to-day
struggles the necessity for a vision of the future. Short-termism, and
misguided short-termism at that, will never build that movement.
A final point. Alone among the labour movements of Europe, the
ICTU did not call for opposition to the noxious “Fiscal Stability”
Treaty. Even the ETUC, arch-defenders of all things “European,” opposed
it; but it was a bridge too far for the ICTU and, shockingly, for SIPTU,
Connolly’s union. Thankfully, some unions—TEEU, Mandate, CPSU, and
Unite—maintained the honour of our movement by actively campaigning for a
No vote.
One can only conclude that the SIPTU-ICTU position was to avoid
embarrassing the lamentable Labour Party. It was a wrong call. The
present (and previous) leadership of the Labour Party set out a couple
of years ago, à la “New Labour” in Britain, to sever its organic links
with the trade union movement, the movement that actually established
the party in Clonmel a hundred years ago (a recent centenary that
couldn’t be celebrated, for “security reasons”!). The idea was that this
would make Labour more attractive to the chattering classes and Dublin 4
brigade and therefore “more electable.”
That is exactly the level of principle and type of reciprocal
“loyalty” the trade union movement can expect from the Labour Party as
it stands. And it is exactly the type of political approach that is
rapidly making the Labour Party and mainstream social democracy in this
country nothing but a “Fine Gael Lite,” as is consistently demonstrated
by the plummeting levels of support for Labour in working-class
constituencies.
Imperialism doesn’t send gunboats up the Liffey any more,
because it doesn’t need to. The finance houses of “Europe” control us
just as surely as the British Empire did in James Connolly’s time.
As Connolly might have said, “Whoop it up for liberty!”
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