Last month was the anniversary of the death of James Connolly. In this article John Wight examines the life and times of this great socialist figure. 

May 12^th each year marks the anniversary of the death of James Connolly.

Executed in Dublin by the British after taking up arms in the 1916 Easter Rising to not only liberate Ireland from 800 years of uninterrupted occupation, but more importantly to stir the Irish working class from its slumber and inspire it to rise from its knees, Connolly died a martyr to the cause of self determination and social and economic justice. 

The story of that rising - of the Irishmen and women who so bravely took on the might of British imperialism and held out for four days; of the leaders who were rounded up afterwards and executed, each of them defiant to the end; of the aftermath and the armed struggle waged by the IRA under Michael Collins, leading to the formation in 1921 of the Free State Republic and a two year civil war - has been well documented.

The life of James Connolly, however, in its ceaseless and unwavering commitment to the cause of socialism, despite obstacles that would have deterred even the most dedicated of his kind, is surely worthy of special tribute.    

It is a story which begins amid the grinding poverty of a disease-ridden slum populated by Irish immigrants in Edinburgh towards the end of the 19th century.

Anti-Irish sentiment in Scotland was commonplace during this period, with the poison of religious sectarianism exacerbated by the poverty suffered by the working class as a direct result of a laissez faire capitalist model which pitted all against all in an unremitting struggle for the crumbs from the bosses’ table.  In Edinburgh poor Irish immigrants were squeezed together in their own ghetto in the centre of the city. The locals named it 'Little Ireland' and here the ravages of poverty – in the shape of alcoholism, crime, and diseases such as cholera and typhus - were part of every day life.

James Connolly, born 5 June 1868, was the youngest of three brothers. At the age of ten, after his mother died, he lied about his age and began work in the print-shop of a local newspaper.

At an age when his life should have consisted of going to school and running free with other boys his age, here he was being introduced to the cruel world of wage slavery, a mere child experiencing all the dirt and noise and smells of heavy machinery amongst the worn and broken men who toiled long hours for starvation wages.

Desperate to escape such a fate, at the age of fourteen Connolly once again lied about his age and joined the British Army. He was posted to Ireland, the birthplace of his parents, and it was there, witnessing the atrocities being carried out against the Irish people by the British Army, that the seeds of class consciousness and hatred of oppression were planted.

It was also during this period that he met his wife, Lillie Reynolds, who worked as a domestic servant for a prominent unionist family in Dublin. Lillie would remain by her husband’s side to the end of his life, sharing in his triumphs and defeats, her dedication to the struggle marking her out as an outstanding figure in her own right.

Connolly deserted from the British Army at the age of 21, moved back to Scotland with Lillie and there began his involvement in the class struggle, joining the Socialist League in 1889 whilst living in Dundee, an organisation committed to revolutionary internationalism which received the endorsement of Friedrich Engels.  

A year later he moved to Edinburgh with his wife and by then two children, where he returned to the grind of punishing manual labour, picking up work here and there as he and his wife struggled against poverty. Throughout, Connolly continued to find time for politics and he became secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation. He entered a municipal election as a socialist candidate around this period and received 263 votes.

In 1896 Connolly returned to Dublin, a city he'd grown to love while posted there in the British Army, in response to an offer to work for the Dublin Socialist Club.  Shortly after his arrival he founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party. In his first statement on behalf of the ISRP, he wrote:   “The struggle for Irish freedom has two aspects: it is national and it is social. The national ideal can never be realised until Ireland stands forth before the world as a nation, free and independent. It is social and economic, because no matter what the form of government may be, as long as one class owns as private property the land and the instruments of labour from which mankind derive their substance, that class will always have it in their power to plunder and enslave the remainder of their fellow creatures.”   Connolly had decided by this point that the two strands of revolutionary thought in Ireland, national liberation and socialism, rather than being antagonistic, were in fact complementary.

This was a view which ran counter to the prevailing current of socialist theory that obtained across continental Europe at that time, which held to the view that the struggle for socialism must reach across the false divisions of national, ethnic and cultural identity. Nationalist movements as such were scorned and vilified, deemed petit bourgeois in both character and design.

But those European socialists had no experience of living under the yoke of imperialism, and thus for them the national question could only ever exist in the abstract.

Some of Connolly’s most powerful writing and thinking focused on this very issue, demonstrating a development which placed him at the vanguard of Marxist revolutionary theory.

 “The struggle for socialism and national liberation cannot and must not be separated.” 

  “The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland; the cause of Ireland is the cause of Labour.”

Emphasising his status as a theoretician of the first rank, Connolly was also an early champion of women's rights.

 “The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.”

In 1903, as work and finances in Dublin dwindled, Connolly moved to the United States. He'd visited there the year before; travelling across the country lecturing on political philosophy and trade unionism, and his lectures had received a warm reception and much praise from leading figures within the nascent US socialist movement of the period, in particular Daniel De Leon.   

After a hard initial few years in his adopted country, Connolly eventually managed to find stable work, and in 1906 became a paid organiser for the recently formed Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), led by the legendary Big Bill Haywood.  He also joined the American Socialist Labor Party and founded a monthly newspaper, The Harp, with which he aimed to reach the East Coast's huge Irish immigrant population.

Largely due to Connolly's focus on Irish immigrants, he and De Leon soon split. De Leon, an orthodox Marxist, abhorred Connolly's belief that Marxism should be adapted to varying cultures and traditions if a nation of immigrants was to be mobilized in the cause.

The split was acrimonious, Connolly accusing De Leon of being elitist, De Leon questioning Connolly's methods and grasp of Marxist theory and practice. However, Connolly continued on the path he had chosen, and it was obvious by now that a large part of his motivation in doing so was an increasing homesickness for his beloved Ireland.

In 1910 his dream of returning to Ireland became reality. He returned after being invited to become national organizer for the newly-formed Socialist Party of Ireland.  Soon after his return he published a number of pamphlets, one of which, Labour in Irish History, was a major step in the development of an understanding of Irish history from a Marxist viewpoint.

By now possessing an unshakable belief that any hope of revolution lay with the trade union movement, Connolly joined with Larkin in his Irish Transport and General Workers Union.  Connolly moved north to Belfast to organize for the ITGWU, hoping to smash down the barriers of religious sectarianism and unite the working class in the shipyards around which the city was built. 

He had little success.

In 1913 he moved back to Dublin to join Larkin in the titanic struggle which began when the Dublin employers locked out thousands of workers in an attempt to break the increasing influence and strength of the ITGWU.

A protest meeting of the workers was held despite a ban on such meetings having been ordered by the authorities. It was savagely attacked and broken up by baton-wielding police and afterwards Connolly was arrested.  He refused bail for good behaviour and was sentenced to three months in prison. Immediately embarking on a hunger strike, he was released after just one week.

Connolly's first task upon his release was to form a workers' militia. Never again, he vowed, would workers be trampled into the ground by police horses or beaten down under police batons. He called this new militia, which comprised around 250 volunteers, the Irish Citizen Army (ICA).  The day after its formation, Connolly spoke at a meeting.

 “Listen to me, I am going to talk sedition. The next time we are out on a march, I want to be accompanied by four battalions of trained men.”

When Larkin left Ireland for a fundraising tour of the United States in 1914, Connolly became acting general secretary of the ITGWU. The same year, watching as millions of workers went off to be slaughtered in the First World War, he was devastated.

“This war appears to me as the most fearful crime of the centuries. In it the working class are to be sacrificed so that a small clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped, and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.”

All over Europe even socialists succumbed to the poison of patriotism, joining the war efforts in their respective countries and thus heralding the end of the Second International in which socialist parties and figures representing Europe's toiling masses had vowed to campaign against the war and the slaughter of worker by worker. Connolly's analysis of the war was scathing:

“I know of no foreign enemy in this country except the British Government. Should a German army land in Ireland tomorrow, we should be perfectly justified in joining it, if by so doing we could rid this country for once and for all the Brigand Empire that drags us unwillingly to war.”

The British Government attempted to buy off Irish sentiment in support of outright independence from the Empire with a Home Rule bill, which in effect promised devolved power if the political leadership in Ireland at that time - people like John Redmond of the Irish Parliamentary Party - would agree to the recruitment of Irish workers to be slaughtered in the trenches in an imperialist war.

The bill split the Irish national liberation movement into those who supported it as a step towards outright independence and those, like Connolly, who were totally against it.

“If you are itching for a rifle, itching to fight, have a country of your own.  Better to fight for our own country than the robber empire. If ever you shoulder a rifle, let it be for Ireland.”

It was now that Connolly's position shifted with regard to physical force.  Previously, he had wanted no part in it, eschewing it as reckless and contrary to Marxist doctrine of a mass revolution of the working class, whereby consciousness precedes action.

But with the retreat of the European socialists, and the failure of the trade unions to act against the war, Connolly despaired of ever achieving the society he’d dedicated his life to without armed struggle.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood was planning just the kind of insurrection which Connolly had in mind. Connolly had taken a dim view of the IRB and its leaders up until then, viewing them as a bunch of feckless romantics. However, when they revealed their plans to him at a private meeting – plans involving the mobilization of 11,000 volunteers throughout the country - and that a large shipment of arms was on the way from Germany, he agreed to join them with his own ICA volunteers.

Connolly was respected enough by the IRB leaders, in particular Padrig Pearse, to be appointed military commander of Dublin's rebel forces. Pearse, a school teacher, was certain that they would all be slaughtered. He was imbued with a belief in the necessity of a blood sacrifice to awaken the Irish people, holding obscurantist beliefs that were steeped in Irish history and the Gaelic culture. But for all that he was no less committed to his cause than Connolly to his, and as a consequence they soon developed a grudging respect for one another.

In the end, the plan for the Easter Sunday insurrection went awry.  Rebel army volunteers deployed out with Dublin received conflicting orders and failed to mobilize, leaving Dublin isolated. After postponing the insurrection for a day due to the confusion, the Dublin leadership decided to press on regardless. Connolly assembled his men outside their union headquarters, known as Liberty Hall. By now he knew their chances for success were slim at best, and indeed it is said that he turned to a trusted aide as the men formed up and, in a low voice, announced:

  “We’re going out to be slaughtered.”

 With Pearse beside him, Connolly marched his men to their military objective, the General Post Office building on O'Connell Street in the centre of Dublin. They rushed in, took control of the building, and barricaded themselves in to await the inevitable military response from the British.

Connolly, Pearse and another leader of the insurrection, Thomas C. Clarke, marched out into the street to read out the now famous proclamation of the Irish Republic. In it, at Connolly's insistence, the rights of the Irish people to the ownership of Ireland, to equality and to the ending religious of sectarianism were included.

“The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious to the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.”

After holding out against the British Army for four days, during which Connolly inspired the men under his command with his determination and courage, in the process suffering wounds to the chest and ankle, British reinforcements and artillery arrived from the mainland to begin shelling rebel positions throughout the city.

The leadership, upon realizing the hopelessness of their situation, and in order to prevent the deaths of any more of their volunteers and civilians in a losing fight, reluctantly decided to surrender.

In the aftermath the ringleaders of the Rising were executed. Connolly was saved for last, the severity of his wounds failing to deter the British from taking their revenge as they tied him to a chair in the courtyard of Kilmainham Jail, where he was executed by firing squad.

At his court martial days prior, held in his cell in deference to those same wounds, James Connolly made the following statement:

 “Believing that the British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the presence, in any one generation of Irishmen, of even a respectable minority, ready to die to affirm that truth, makes the Government forever a usurpation and a crime against human progress.  

“I personally thank God that I have lived to see the day when thousands of Irishmen and boys, and hundreds of women and girls, were ready to affirm that truth, and to attest to it with their lives if need be.”

When news of the Rising was released, some leading European socialists dismissed it as a putsch of little or no great consequence. However, Lenin was not one of those, and went so far as to refute such criticisms in his article, The Results of the Discussion on self-determination. To him the Easter Rising stood as an example of the awakening of the proletariat that was taking place across Europe, providing hope that world revolution was on the horizon. He wrote:   “Those who can term such a rising a Putsch are either the worst kind of reactionaries or hopeless doctrinaires, incapable of imagining the social revolution as a living phenomenon.”   Today a statue of James Connolly stands pride of place in the centre of Dublin. A brass engraving of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic also sits pride of place in the window of the General Post Office headquarters, where Connolly made his stand for the liberty of his nation and his class during those four fateful days in April 1916.