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>When Socialism Made Easy was published first, its author, James Connolly, was forty. He had had eighteen years experience as a Socialist agitator in Scotland, Ireland and the U.S.A. However, it was this pamphlet that made his reputation as a theorist. C. Desmond Greaves (for all his bias, Connolly’s best biographer, yet) writes:
“This was the first pamphlet from which Connolly earned money. Its impact was immediate and spread far afield. The following May, Tom Mann, then in Australia, greeted it enthusiastically and even discarded one of his own in its favour. The expository section was in 1911 incorporated into the Year Book of the Australian ‘One Big Union’ movement under the title of The Axe to the Root. Distributed in Britain it helped to infuse the idea of class struggle into both trade unions and I.L.P. and was still being reprinted in Ireland in the thirties. Echoes of its arguments could still be heard in the debates of the Republican Congress movement” ...
The Life and Times of James Connolly, p. 185. Lawrence & Wishart, 1960.
Until 1968 the pamphlet was practically forgotten. In the late 1940s, all but one chapter was excluded from the four volume selection of Connolly’s works, though these books contain much that is both as irrelevant as, and less creditable to their author than, it. The reason is clear: At the time, the sponsors of the selections, Connolly’s old comrades of the Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union were flirting with Fianna Fáil (and the Catholic Church). Connolly’s Socialism had to be played down. It seems quite possible that, but for the continuing popularity of the latter work, his pamphlet, Labour Nationality & Religion, would have been excluded. But this was more generally Socialist and less associated with specific views that time had discredited.
In 1968, the Plough Book Service republished the edited version of Socialism Made Easy that the Socialist Labour Party in Britain had published in the early 1920s. In the 1968 edition, the present editor wrote:
“The pamphlet’s name is in some aspects as true to-day, as it was nearly sixty years ago. It is vital for the understanding of Connolly’s theory in its entirety. It is important for the understanding of the Irish Labour Party after his death. For these reasons it is being republished.”
The new production was incomplete, however. The British Socialist Labour Party felt it necessary to expunge certain of the references in Part II that referred to specifically American matters. More important, it removed more than half the first Part, including the Workshop Talks that dealt with the questions of Religion, the practicality of Socialist politics and certain aspects of the effects of Socialism and Capitalism on personal character and enjoyment.
In 1969, the now liquidated Saor Éire Group of Cork republished the full text of the Workshop Talks by itself.
However, this new edition is the first for many years to include the full text of both parts of the pamphlet.
James Connolly went to America in 1903. By that date, he was already a considerable theorist, and had produced many of those of his writings that still have validity. It was in this period that he proclaimed his aim to be the Republic, though:
“Not a Republic as in France, where a capitalist monarchy with an elective head parodies the constitutional abortions of England ... [nor] as in the United States where the power of the purse has established a new tyranny under the forms of freedom”. Shan Van Vocht, January 1897.
His Republicanism was essentially the demand for:
“the only power which would show in the full light of day all these class antagonisms and lines of economic demarcation now obscured by the mists of bourgeois patriotism”. L’Irlande Libre, 1897.
“The Socialist Republic is the application to agriculture, and industry to the farm, the field, the workshop, of the democratic principle of the Republican ideal.” The Workers’ Republic, 27th August 1898.
And his words on Irish farming are still particularly apt:
“We do not need to fight peasant proprietary, we only need to allow free scope for the development of capitalist enterprise in order to see the system of small farming crushed out by the competition of great farm and scientific cultivation of America and Australia”. Ibid.
In points 8 and 9 of the Programme of his Irish Socialist Republican Party, inaugurated on 29th May, 1896, demands are made for: “Public control and management of National Schools by boards elected by popular ballot for that purpose alone” and “Free education up to the highest university grades”.
On the revival of the Irish Language, he pointed out:
“The chief enemy of a Celtic revival today is the crushing force of capitalism.” The Workers’ Republic, 1 October 1898.
And most important of all was his empirical use of the tactics he chose to achieve his aim:
“The whole of Ireland for the people of Ireland – their public property to be owned and operated as a National heritage, by the labour of free men in a free country. That is our ideal and when you ask us what are our methods, we reply: “Those which lie nearest our hands”’. The Workers’ Republic, 5 August 1899.
It must be emphasised that such statements are not significant simply as examples of Connolly’s superior wisdom, or inspired guesswork. Their importance lies also in the fact that their correctness comes from a certain method of analysis, that was rejected by, or unknown to, Connolly’s Irish contemporaries.
This discipline was Scientific Socialism, the theory of Karl Marx, also known as Marxism, Communism and Dialectical Materialism.
The core of this lies in the thought:
“... that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and the intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primitive communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie) without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles ...” Engels (Introduction to the 1883 edition of The Manifesto of the Communist Party).
Even this was discovered by a certain intellectual method, just as were Connolly’s developments of it in the Irish circumstances. Dialectical Materialism begins with the assumption of a universe continually moving in all its interacting parts, in which the effective movement is limited to the ascertainable material facts. Once this is understood, there appears the possibility of mankind guiding the progress of society for the common good. In turn, this acts as an incentive (where any such theoretical incentive is needed) to look for the improvement of mankind in the same way as the universal law of motion was discovered. The present social chaos is clarified in the manner described shortly, by Engels, above, or by Marx, at much greater length, in the three volumes of his book, Capital. Roughly, it is that the material progress of society has continued on the basis of the private ownership of productive property (and, thus, its with-holding from everyone else, except on the private owners’ terms) until, under capitalism, not only is further progress impossible except by ending private ownership, but the extent of its expansion has meant the creation of vast numbers of people cut off from this ownership while being disciplined to act as workers for its benefit. This latter class is the proletariat and it can, alone, lead the overthrow of capitalism. Since the capitalists control the repressive machinery of the State, through their ownership of property their overthrowing is likely to be difficult and bloody, as we are seeing to-day.
This is a rough condensation of the extent of Marxist theory at the time of the death of Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, in 1895, a year before the I.S.R.P. was formed. The application of this theory was supposed to be in the hands of an International Organisation, to which the I.S.R.P. affiliated itself. However, the differing rates of material progress from country to country encouraged divergence between the national sections thereof. Thus the British section based on the world’s oldest proletariat, tended to be the least theoretically developed. On the other hand, the Russian section was based on the newest, and most mechanised, industrial working-class and was able to develop its Marxism to achieve its own Workers’ Republic.
The I.S.R.P. had to work under conditions, both objective and subjective, that made a Socialist revolution in Ireland more of a hazard than it was in any other nation in the North Atlantic seaboard.
Class relationships there were undeveloped in connection with both external relationships and internal confrontations.
Ireland was placed as a colony of Britain, ruled directly by a foreign Parliament through a bureaucracy and constabulary appointed by the same.
The bourgeoisie was divided between the so-called “national” bourgeoisie and the straight collaborators (or, as they called themselves, “Unionists”). The difference between these groups was one of clear economic interest. Due to the closeness of the British Market, the exporters had acclimatised themselves to it and now provided the backbone of Irish Unionism. On the other hand, the “national” bourgeoisie had an economic base that was usurious and mercantile (or, as the Irish term it “gombeen”-interest) Its support for nationalism was in that aspect of the ideal that centred on the control of government patronage, of which the Unionists had far more than their fair share.
It was the workers who had to put forward the objective national demands. Here was the central weakness in the prospects for Irish Marxism. The lack of economic development meant a lack of industrial development, outside the north-east of Ireland, where large-scale industry had developed on a basis of a religiously-divided working class and integration to the British economy. Except around Belfast, there was no industry on a scale comparable to the factories of St Petersburg. Thus the Irish proletariat was bound to be less disciplined to mass action and less politically developed.
What was more, it was still undeveloped industrially. Until 1907, trade unionism was generally limited to the skilled workers and artisans. These were possessed of a strong, traditional bourgeois consciousness: that of Republicanism, or Fenianism. In a non-industrial society, they had little expectation of any order other than that of capitalism. It was England, rather than capitalism that was the enemy and that prevented the small craftsman from setting up as his own master. The lowest politically-active class looked to National Capitalism rather than Socialism. It was in opposition to this outlook that Connolly wrote his earliest pamphlet: Erin’s Hope, The End and The Means (1897), exposing the impossibility of building a viable independent Irish capitalism in a country without its own full resources and in a world where national capitalisms were being swallowed by the financial monopolies: Imperialism.
The weakness of the Irish proletariat helped, and, was helped by, in its turn, the dominance of agriculture in the Irish economy and the Churches, with their control of education.
Within these unpromising circumstances, there was some immediate political opportunity. Both the bourgeois (Parliamentary) and petty bourgeois (Fenian) wings of the nationalist movement were in disarray after the fall of the Nationalist Leader, Parnell, in 1890. The Parliamentarians were still divided, having been demoralised and discredited more than ever by the defeat of the second Home Rule Bill in 1893. The Fenians had placed their hopes on a misalliance with Parnell, and had seen them shattered by the latter’s death and his succession by the genteel John Redmond.
Furthermore, opportunities for nationalist agitation were obvious. In 1897 “The Famine Queen”, Victoria, would have been on the throne sixty years and the next year, 1898, would be the centenary of the United Irish-men’s Rising.
The I.S.R.P. spearheaded agitation on both these occasions. In addition it diffused Socialist propaganda and sent delegates to the 1900 Congress of the Second International.
The latter activities had little apparent immediate effect; the former were used by others. A new United Irish League used stolen Republican thunder to reunite the Irish Parliamentary Party. The I.S.R.P. had no decisive electoral success and became demoralised. Internal feuds led to Connolly emigrating to America to carry on Agitation there.
He seemed to have moved to a more promising environment. In the 1900’s, each of the two American working-class parties (Socialist Labour and Social Democratic, later Socialist) could win representation at local, state, and even national, level.
The contrast between the American (and British) situations and that in Ireland was obvious. What was the explanation? He knew from experience the immediate advantage possessed by Britain in its lack of need to achieve, political independence. Was this all? On the contrary, he saw, too, in Britain and America, the advantage that was given the workers’ cause by the extension of trade unionism to the unskilled: the industrial union.
The trouble was that, in America, this organisation, the Industrial Workers of the World, was formed only during Connolly’s period there, in 1905. What was more it was, on any level, by far the most militant Socialist political body in the country at the time. It compared very favourably to the proletariat’s official vanguard political bodies both in Britain and in its own country. These caricatured the ideal, which Lenin & the Bolsheviks were building in Russia. The political development of the working classes of Britain & America was handicapped alike by the age of the first and the latter’s participation in the expansion of American power. Thus Connolly turned from De Leon’s Socialist Labour Party to the I.W.W. not only as an industrial body but as a political one.
He became prominent in the new industrial union. His experiences therein led him to formulate his theory and to declare it as he did in his first successful pamphlet.
The work is in two parts, the first, and shorter, one is composed of addresses written (mainly when he was in the I.S.R.P.) to win recruits. The second springs wholly from his American experiences.
For talking to non-Socialists, then, the first section (Workshop Talks) is of the greater importance. The talks answer various, objections to Socialism; its “foreign” nature, its irrelevance to Irish conditions (especially the national question), its “immorality” its impracticality, and its “base material” opposition to Christianity. They are not sophisticated, but they are the more effective for this, since they go directly to the heart of the issues concerned.
All the talks are still relevant, though some are more basic than others. On the one hand, the anti-Socialist attack in the first talk in Chapter 1 (“Socialism is a foreign importation”) now needs to be combated by new weapons, as it has been reinforced since it was put up, by examples drawing on the antics of post-Bolshevik Russia and Maoite China.
On the other hand, the example that Connolly uses to answer his attackers, along with his arguments in the third talk of Chapter I (“The Socialist proposals, they say, would destroy the individual character of the worker”) have, today, a new relevancy. During the quarter century after 1945, the arguments that Connolly destroys here were used only by isolated individuals on the ultra-right. Capitalism was booming. It could loosen its restrictions on the workers’ living standards. Now, the feast is over and in Britain (traditional pace-setter for Irish capitalism) the voice of Prime Minister Heath comes loud and clear against even the puny reforms won by the workers in the Welfare State: they “destroy the individual character of the worker”. Back to Means test, soup-kitchen and workhouse! Yet once again, Britain’s judges get increases in their pensions, “and are not corrupted thereby – at least not more than usual”.
The other talks are as relevant and more basic, not least for understanding Connolly. The middle section of Chapter 1 justifies Socialist internationalism by exploring the cosmopolitanism of capital. However, it is worth noting that it does so in a manner that leaves open the prospective development of his argument whether towards the Syndicalist avoidance of the national question or towards the Scientific Socialist analyses of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.
Though in his pamphlet Erin’s Hope, (similarly excluded from the I.T.G.W.U. collections), Connolly showed signs of approaching the latter position, his statement in Socialism Made Easy in his fullest explanation of his general position on international capitalism.
In Chapter 2, he expounds clearly and well the Labour theory of value:
“According to Socialists, profit only exists when all other items of production are paid for. The workers by their labour must create enough wealth to pay for certain items before profit appears. They must pay for the cost of raw material, the wear and tear of machinery, buildings, etc. (the depreciation of capital) the wages of superintendence, their own wages, and a certain amount to be left aside as a reserve fund to meet all possible contingencies. After, and only after, all these items have been paid for by their labour, all that is left is profit.”
At the end of this chapter, he rams home, again, just what the Boss’s monopolising of profit means:
“Without our toil [our bosses] would never get the education necessary to develop their brains; if we were not defrauded by their class of the fruits of our toil we could provide for education enough to develop the mental powers of all, and so deprive the ruling class of the last vestige of an excuse for clinging to mastership, viz., their assumed intellectual superiority.”
The last three Chapters of this first part of Socialism Made Easy provide a general attack on the apparently neutral arguments of the bosses and their petty bourgeois hangers-on.
Chapter 3 exposes the timid plea to reject Socialism for something more practical. Connolly replies to this that:
“In the phraseology of politics, a party too indifferent to the sorrow and sufferings of humanity to raise its voice in protest, is a moderate, practical party, whilst a party totally indifferent to the personality of leaders, or questions of leadership, but hot to enthusiasm on every question affecting the well-being of the toiling masses is an extreme, a dangerous party.”
“To effect its emancipation Labour must reorganise society on the basis of labour; this cannot be done while the forces of government are in the hands of the rich, therefore the governing power must be wrested from the hands of the rich peaceably if possible, forcibly if necessary.”
“In the phraseology of the master class and its pressmen the trade unionist who is not a Socialist is more practical than he who is, and the worker who is neither one nor the other but can resign himself to the State in which he was born, is the most practical of all men ...”
“Revolution is never practical – until the hour of the Revolution strikes”.
Chapter 4 attacks the anti-Socialist Christian propagandists in Connolly’s usual fashion. He was not a complete Dialectical Materialist, later on, in his polemic with the Irish Unionist Social Democrat, William Walker, he could talk of Catholicism as “our religion”. Similarly, here, he declares:
“Personally I am opposed to any system wherein the capitalist is more than God Almighty”.
His argument here, as in his other writings, most notably The New Evangel and, of course, Labour, Nationality & Religion, takes its stand on a narrow, but, within its limits, correct, line:
“That the question to be settled by Socialism is the effect of private ownership of the means of production upon the well-being of the race; that we are determined to have a straight fight upon the question between those who believe that such private ownership is destructive of human well-being and those who believe it to be beneficial, that as men of all religions and of none are on the side of the workers the attempt to make religion an issue in the question is an intrusion, an impertinence and an absurdity.”
Had Connolly understood the concept of the revolutionary working-class party, he would have found it necessary to take a firmer opposition to the claims of religion.
And, finally, Chapter 5, apparently the least applicable outside Ireland (and no doubt for this reason, the only part of the pamphlet republished in the I.T.G.W.U. selections of Connolly) gives its warning against bourgeois “anti-colonialism”.
“After Ireland is free, says the patriot who won’t touch Socialism we will protect all classes, and if you won’t pay your rent you will be evicted, same as now. But the evicting party under command of the sheriff will wear green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the road will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic.
“Now, isn’t that worth fighting for?”
But, even in their full form, the Workshop Talks make up no more than half the total pamphlet. Its second part deals with the means of achieving the Socialism preached in Section 1. It is here that we see how America developed Connolly’s theory.
The first chapter of this section (Chapter 6 – Industrial and Political Unity) is the most practical and, accordingly, the best and most relevant. It deals with the question of industrial organisation. It states the lesson that Connolly learnt concerning the superiority of industrial to craft unions. In doing so, it expounds the concept of what Ireland was beginning to learn as “Larkinism”, practised, then, in Scandinavia, and, in principle, in the Irish Land League.
It must be stated that, in his lesson, he gives clear indications of the assumptions that guide his theory in the latter chapters:
“It is an axiom enforced by all the experience of the ages that they who rule industrially will rule politically.”
“The Irish tenant had to contend against the overwhelming power of a foreign empire backing up the economic power of a native tyranny, yet he conquered, whilst the British worker able to become the political sovereign of the country remains the sport of the political factions of his masters and the slave of their social power.”
Chapter 7 (Industrial Unionism and Constructive Socialism) develops Connolly’s Syndicalist assumptions at length. He uses as his text a speech of Delegate Stirton, the editor of The Wage Slave, of Hancock, Michigan:
“Only the industrial form of organisation offers us even a theoretical constructive Socialist programme. There is no constructive Socialism except in the industrial field.”
In turn Connolly tries:
“To show how they who are engaged in building up industrial organisations for the practical purposes of to-day are at the same time preparing the framework of the society of the future.”
To-day the attraction of this chapter lies in its designation of the said society (the fullest description that Connolly ever gave):
“Social-Democracy, as its name implies, is the application to industry or to the social life of the nation, of the fundamental principles of democracy. Such application will necessarily have to begin in the workshop, and proceed logically and consecutively upward through all the grades of industrial organisation until it reaches the culminating point of national executive power and direction. In other words, Socialism must proceed from the bottom upward, whereas capitalist political society is organised from above downward ...”
“... This 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. In short it blends the fullest democratic control with the most absolute expert supervision, something unthinkable of any society built upon the political state ...”
“Under Socialism, states, territories or provinces will exist only as geographical expressions, and have no existence as sources of governmental power, though they may be seats of administrative bodies.”
All the above (especially the last paragraph) may seem strange coming from a man who was to be executed for his role as leader of a national revolt, such as would set up a new separate bourgeois state in the world. But Connolly never suggested that the success of the Proclamation of 1916 was his sole aim; indeed, on several occasions, he stated the opposite. His pamphlets Erin’s Hope, Labour in Irish History and The Reconquest of Ireland all show him to have been acutely conscious of Ireland’s weakness in the capitalist world economy. Like all his contemporaries, he saw Socialism coming on an international scale. His view of the Irish revolution was like that of a younger man, the Russian, Leon Trotsky, who, with V. I. Lenin, would begin to put into operation the social organisation described in this pamphlet. In 1905 Trotsky had written:
“The Political emancipation of Russia led by the working class will raise that class to a height as yet unknown in history; will transfer to it colossal power and resources, and will make it the initiator of the liquidation of world capitalism, for which history has created all the objective conditions.”
Foreword to Lasalle’s Address to the Jury quoted in Results & Prospects p. 108, 1969 Edition, Merit Publishers, New York.
If Connolly’s orthodoxy in his concept of Socialism is shown in Chapter 7, it cannot be denied that he develops this view to justify a thoroughly utopian strategy. As in Syndicalist writing, the state’s formidability is dismissed. The fact that its institutions “are simply the coercive forces of capitalist society” is remarked upon without any understanding of its significance. Similarly the concept of the Socialist vanguard party is ignored completely. The reader is told:
“They who are engaged in building up industrial organisations for the practical purposes of today are at the same time preparing the framework of the society of the future”.
Thus “the enrolment of the workers in unions patterned closely after the structure of modern industries, and following the organic lines of industrial development is par excellence the swiftest, safest, and most peaceful form of constructive work the Socialist can engage in.”
“The power of this idea to transform the dry detail work of trade union organisation into the constructive work of revolutionary Socialism, and thus to make, of the unimaginative trade unionist, a potent factor in the launching of a new system of society cannot be overestimated.”
“In the light of this principle of Industrial Unionism every fresh shop or factory organised under its banner is a fort wrenched from the control of the capitalist class and manned with the soldiers of the Revolution to be held by them for the workers”.
This is somewhat modified by Chapter 8 (The Future of Labour):
“Industrial organisation will have its political expression. If we accept the definition of working-class political action as that which brings the workers as a class into direct conflict with the possessing class as a class and keeps them there then we must realise that nothing can do that so readily as action at the ballot box.
“In the process of building (the Socialist society), during the period of maturing, the mechanism of the political State can be utilised to assist in the formation of the embryo Industrial Republic.”.
Yet these conclusions are made within the framework of an historical analysis that projects mechanically on to the proletarian revolution the shape of the bourgeois revolutions of the past:
“The capitalist class became a revolutionary class when it realised that it held control of the economic heart of the nation. I may add when the working class is in the same position it will also as a class become revolutionary. It will also give effective political expression to its economic strength.
“The fight for the conquest of the political state is not the battle, it is only the echo of the battle.”
Accordingly,
“The real battle is the battle being fought out every day for the power to control industry, and the gauge of the progress of that battle is not to be found in the number of voters making a cross beneath the symbol of a political party, but in the number of these workers who enrol themselves in an industrial organisation with the definite purpose of making themselves masters of the industrial equipment of society in general.
“If you belong to the working class your duty is clear. Your union must he perfected until it embraces every one who toils in the service of your employer, or as a unit in your industry. The fact that your employers find it necessary to secure the services of any individual worker is or ought to be that individual’s highest and best title to be a member of your union.
“Let us be clear as to the function of Industrial Unionism. That function is to build up the industrial republic inside the shell of the political State in order that when that industrial republic is fully organised it may crack the shell of the political State or step into its place in the scheme of the Universe.”
In these circumstances the role of the political vanguard party is limited:
“The workers will be industrially organised on the economic field, and until that organisation is perfected, whilst the resultant feeling of class consciousness is permeating the minds of the workers, the Socialist Political Party will carry on an independent campaign of education and attack upon the political field, and as a consequence will remain the sole representative of the Socialist idea in politics. But as industrial organisation grows, feels its strength, and develops the revolutionary instincts of its members, there will grow also the desire for a closer union and identification of the two wings of the army of Labour ...
“I look forward to the time when every economic organisation will have its Political Committee, just as it has its Organisation Committee or its Strike Committee, and when it will be counted to be as great a crime, as much an act of scabbery, to act against the former as against any of the latter. When that time comes we will he able to count our effective vote before troubling the official ballot box, simply by counting our membership in the allied organisations; we will be able to estimate our capacity for the revolutionary act of Social Transformation simply by taking stock of the number of industries we control and their importance relative to the whole social system, and when we find that we control the strategic industries in society, then society must bend to our will or break.
“Compare the political action of such a body with that of any party we know ... Such a body can make propaganda, and good propaganda, for Socialist principles, but it can never function as the weapon of an industrially organised working class. To it such a party will always be an outside body, a body not under its direct control, but the political weapon of the Industrially Organised Working Class will be a weapon of its own forging and wielded by its own hand.”
In short, “the conquest of political power by the working class waits upon the conquest of economic power, and must function through the economic organisation.”
Of course there have been certain misunderstandings made over Connolly’s organisational theories. He did not go as far into Syndicalism as many tend to assume. As has been noted, he emphasised the value of political action, and, in a later article he wrote defending a tight central control of the working class organisations:
“In the modern State the capitalist class has evolved for its own purposes of offence what it calls a Cabinet. This Cabinet controls its fighting forces, which must obey it implicitly. If the Cabinet thinks the time and opportunity is ripe for war, it declares war at the most favourable moment, and explains its reasons in Parliament afterwards.
“Can we trust our members with such a weapon as the capitalist class trust theirs? I think so” (Forward, May 23rd, 1914).
Connolly’s unorthodoxy in the matter lies, simply, in his choice of the industrial union (albeit guided by its Central Committee) as being the instrument that would supersede the Political State in the name of the Industrial or Workers’ Republic. In his conception, there is no room (except for a very early period) for anything that is not, in some way, a Committee of that Union. The makers of the revolution are the industrially organised workers as a whole. Any revolutionary members of the petty-bourgeoisie have to prove themselves to this tribunal, alone and face to face. (One of Connolly’s jibes at De Leon in their final break was that: “Now the 2 De Leons and comrade Chase hold the fort ... and not one of them a typical proletarian or a representative of the possibilities of proletarian revolt” – The Connolly Controversy, 1907.) The revolution (for Connolly) would come as a result of the spontaneous growth of working-class consciousness created by consciousness of strategic position vis-a-vis the means of production, distribution and exchange.
The view seemed correct in the U.S.A. and in Ireland and to a man with Connolly’s experience. However, earlier, in Russia, where the contradictions of world capitalism were more extreme, the majority of the Social Democrats had recognised the correctness of different principles of organisation: ones that would eventually lead them to the world’s first Workers’ Republic. The leader of these “Bolsheviks”, V.I. Lenin, noted the limitations of the outlook of the workers without the leadership of a trained group of professional revolutionaries:
“The spontaneous working-class movement is by itself able to create (and inevitably does create) only trade [or industrial-Ed] unionism and working-class trade-unionist politics is precisely working-class bourgeois politics. That fact that the working class participates in the political struggle, and even in the political revolution, does not in itself make its politics Social-Democratic politics”. – What is To Be Done, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969, p. 94.
“The political struggle of Social-Democracy is far more extensive and complex than the economic struggle of the workers against the employers and the government. Similarly (indeed for that reason), the organisation of the revolutionary Social-Democratic Party must inevitably be of a kind different from the organisation of the workers designed for this struggle. The workers’ organisation must in the first place be a trade-union organisation; secondly, it must be as broad as possible, and thirdly, it must be as public as conditions will allow (here and further on, of course, I refer only to absolutist Russia). On the other hand, the organisation of the revolutionaries must consist first and foremost of people who make revolutionary activity their profession (for which reason I speak of the organisation of revolutionaries, meaning revolutionary Social-Democrats). In view of this common characteristic of the members of such an organisation, all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals, not to speak of distinctions of trade and profession in both categories must be effaced.” Ibid., p. 109.
“I assert: 1) That no revolutionary movement can endure without a stable organisation of leaders maintaining continuity, 2) That the broader the popular mass drawn spontaneously into the struggle, which forms the basis of the movement and participates in it, the more urgent the need for such an organisation, and the more solid this organisation must be (for it is much easier for all sorts of demagogues to side-track the more back-ward sections of the masses) 3) that such an organisation must consist chiefly of people professionally engaged in revolutionary activity.” Ibid., p. 121.
“The distributing groups should belong to the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and know a certain number of its members and functionaries. The groups for studying labour conditions and drawing up trade union demands need not necessarily belong to the R.S.D.L.P.” – A letter to a Comrade, quoted in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1969, p. 63.
Both Lenin & Connolly knew the danger of degeneration of the workers’ organisations, Lenin fought it by training professional revolutionaries drawn from various classes to direct the workers to take power: Connolly by relying strictly on the existing working class, and its spontaneous organisations. Lenin’s method led to the October revolution and the world’s first workers’ state. Connolly’s to the Easter Rebellion – and then to the beheading of the Irish working-class, and a partitioned, compromising Irish Republic.
Just how the Industrial Union will, in fact, displace the “Political State”, Connolly is unclear in Socialism Made Easy. In general he states that “the proletarian revolution will ... most likely follow the lines of the capitalist revolutions in the past ...”
That is as “but the expression of the will of a class already in possession of economic power”.
Admittedly this means “the governing power must be wrested from the hands of the rich peaceably, if possible, forcibly, if necessary”.
Yet, despite its lack of clarity, and Syndicalist overtones Socialism Made Easy has a contemporary, as well as an historical significance. Since Connolly’s time, the failure of Syndicalism has gone hand in hand in Socialist theory with an over exaltation of the national state and its bureaucracy. Too many are ready to translate Lenin’s dictum of the necessity to “smash the state” into the practice of futile attempts to take it over by peaceful means. This pamphlet provides a useful corrective to such loose thinking.
And, apart from that, there are the Workshop Talks.
The contemporaneousness of the message of Socialism Made Easy should not be allowed to obscure its other point of importance. It represents half of what appeared in Connolly’s theory, what later existed contradictorily in Irish Labour practice. And it includes the organisational weakness that encouraged the degeneration from the former to the latter.
On the other hand it omits any mention of the political struggle of Irish Republicanism – the other side of Connolly’s strategy. However, it does not make such concern impossible. The basis of his Nationalism was never expanded qualitatively beyond his I.S.R.P. period and its clash with his Syndicalist views was never more than formal.
The dialectic between these two sides was shown, while he was still in America. In the Irish emigrant Socialist paper, The Harp, he wrote (March 1909):
“An Irish Republic, the only purely political change in Ireland worth crossing the street for, will never be realised except by a revolutionary party that proceeds upon the premise that the capitalist and landlord classes in town and country in Ireland are particeps criminis (criminal accomplices) with the British Government in the enslavement and subjugation of the nation.
“Such a revolutionary party must be socialist, and from Socialism alone can the salvation of Ireland come.”
On the other hand, he wrote in The International Socialist Review, of the following October:
“In facing [the zeppelins of the bourgeois state] in the hands of our remorseless and unscrupulous masters, the gun of comrade Victor Berger [who had advocated armed revolution] will be as ineffective as the paper in the hands of the reformer”.
But
“We still have the opportunity to forge a weapon capable of winning the fight for us against political usurpation and all the military powers of earth, sea and air. That weapon is to be forged in the furnace of the struggle in the workshop, mine, factory or railroad and its name is industrial unionism”.
How were these statements reconciled? Precisely by Connolly’s Scientific Socialism. His early statement as to method that he would use to achieve the Workers’ Republic “those methods which lay nearest his hands” was saved from opportunism by his grasp of Dialectical Materialism. For him, the proclamation of the Irish Republic was to be merely the beginning of an uninterrupted or “permanent” revolution that would pit Irish labour against many of its erstwhile political allies and end only when the last European “capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the last war lord”. Irish Worker, August 26th 1914.
The trouble was that this vision was essentially personal. Since Connolly was uninterested in developing a Scientific Socialist cadre of Lenin’s Bolshevik type, because he looked to the workers to create spontaneous revolutionary institutions, he never troubled to educate others to understand it as a whole.
Nor were his organisational illusions weakened. His return to Ireland in 1910 was encouraged by the growth of working class agitation centred on the person of James Larkin and on his new Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union. Although Connolly returned as an organiser for the Socialist Party of Ireland, successor to his I.S.R.P., he soon renounced this post for “the swiftest, safest, and most peaceful form of constructive work the Socialist can engage in”, as Belfast Organiser for the I.T.G.W.U. He and Larkin did nothing to expand the S.P.I. into “the weapon of an industrially organised working class.” Indeed at the Irish Trade Union Congress of 1912, they moved and got passed, the resolution that created a new Irish Labour Party in the form of that body’s Political Committee:
“That the independent representation of Iabour upon all public boards be, and is hereby, included amongst the objects of this Congress”.
In practice, this weakened the S.P.I. without providing a potential revolutionary alternative. The Irish Trade Union Congress became the Irish T.U.C. and Labour Party in that order, both in name and practice. The 1914 Congress which amended its Rules to provide for the political activities rejected a proposal that affiliation be extended to non-trade union bodies ( such as the S.P.I.) and Connolly did not object.
A third possible revolutionary vanguard was the Irish Citizen Army. This was independent of Congress (and even, formally, of the I.T.G.W.U.). Yet, again, it was never expanded outside Dublin and (in embryo) Belfast and Cork. During Connolly’s period as Commander in Chief (1914–1916) he was simultaneously holding the full-time job of Acting General Secretary to the I.T.G.W.U. while Larkin was in America. Political training was at a minimum. After all, the membership of the I.C.A. was proletarian, surely, it could see what Connolly saw, surely it had his method?
So his writings and practice offered his followers two separate strategies and left them to synthesise them as well as they could. On the one hand, he was a Republican, but a Republican Socialist who was able to develop useful insights.
On Ulster:
“... the Catholic dispossessed by force, the Protestant dispossessed by fraud. Each hating and blaming the other, a situation which the dominant aristocracy knew well how, as their descendants know today, to profit by to their advantage.” The Reconquest of Ireland, Chapter 1.
And:
“At one time in the industrial world of Great Britain and Ireland the skilled labourer looked down with contempt upon the un-skilled and bitterly resented his attempt to get his children taught any of the unskilled trades, the feeling of the Orangemen of Ireland towards Catholics is but a glorified representation on a big stage of the same passions inspired by the same unworthy motives.” Forward, 2 August, 1913.
And (stimulated by the First World War) on Metropolitan Labour (albeit British Metropolitan Labour, specifically):
“Enslaved socially at home the British people have been taught that what little political liberty they do enjoy can only be bought at the price of the national destruction of every people rising into social or economic rivalry with the British master class.” Irish Worker, 31 October, 1914.
And, above all, Connolly maintained the Citizen Army as an anti-imperialist force and used it as a pacesetter to stimulate the Irish Volunteers to move against Britain in April 1916 (although this was a first move in a European struggle against imperialism).
Yet, alongside this, Connolly maintained his Syndicalism.
In Labour, Nationality and Religion (1910) one reads:
“With a working class thoroughly organised and already as workers in possession of the railroads, shops, factories and ships, we do not need to fear [capitalist] violence, The hired assassin armies of the capitalist class will be impotent for evil when the railroad men refuse to transport them, the miners to furnish coal for their ships of war, the dock labourers to load or coal these ships, the clothing workers to make uniforms, the sailors to provision them, the telegraphists to serve them, or the farmers to feed them. In the vote, the strike, the boycott and the lockout exercised against the master class, the Socialists have weapons that will make this social revolution comparatively bloodless or peaceable.” Chapter VI.
In The Reconquest of Ireland (1912–1915):
“Political power must, for the working classes, come straight out of the Industrial battle-field as the expression of the organised economic force of Labour, else it cannot come at all.” Chapter IX.
In the same pamphlet (Chapter VIII), Connolly shows a readiness to accept the propaganda of the agricultural co-operative movement as representing a continuance of the traditions of Gaelic primitive “Socialism”.
“Nor yet had all the insidious tendency of leaders, infatuated with capitalism, and too ignorant of their country’s real history to understand its ancient institutions, ever been able to take from the peasantry, the possession of traditions which kept alive in their midst the memory of the common ownership and common control of land by their ancestors – an ownership and control which were the very flower of co-operation.”
Accordingly the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society was a viable ally for the working class in the latter’s building of the Industrial Republic within the Political State:
“Mr. George Russell, the gifted editor of The Irish Homestead, points out that the fact that the overwhelming proportion of Irish farmers employ no labour, but generally work their own farms, makes that problem [of a programme of joint farmer-labour action] not so difficult in Ireland as it would be in countries where the farmers were employers and therefore supposedly hostile to claims of labour ...
“Stocking the products of the agricultural co-operative societies in time of industrial peace, the workers would enjoy their credit in time of war, then the trades union in time of peace could invest its funds in the co-operative societies; in time of lock-outs or strikes it would fight with food guaranteed to its members by such societies which, for the food required, would be able to pledge their credit to the organised co-operative farming community ...
“If, to that combination of agriculturalists and urban labourers we have just hinted at as a possibility of co-operation upon the economic field, we add the further possible development of an understanding upon the political field between these two groups of co-operators, we begin to realise the great and fundamental change now slowly maturing in our midst.”
At the outbreak of the War Connolly’s reaction was to call not for a rising but “to refuse to allow agricultural produce to leave Ireland until provision is made for the Irish working class”. Irish Worker, 8 August, 1914.
And, as late as the day of his return from negotiating the decisive alliance with the Military Council of the I.R.B. he had published:
“Should it come to a test in Ireland ... between those who stood for the Irish Nation and those who stood for the foreign rule, the greatest civil asset in the hand of the Irish nation for use in the struggle would be the control of Irish docks, shipping, railways and production by unions that gave sole allegiance to Ireland”. Workers’ Republic, 22 January, 1916.
And, in the International Socialist Review of March, 1915, he had re-stated his views:
“How could this war have been prevented, which is another way of saying how and why did the Socialist movement fail to prevent it?
“The full answer to that question can only be grasped by those who are familiar with the propaganda that from 1905 onwards has been known as ‘Industrial’ in the United States, and, though not so accurately, has been called ‘Syndicalist’ in Europe.
“The essence of that propaganda lay in two principles. To take them in the order of their immediate effectiveness: First, that Labour could only enforce its wishes by organising its strength at the point of production, i.e. the farms, factories, workshops, railways, docks, ships, where the work of the world is carried on, the effectiveness of the political vote depending primarily upon the economic power of the workers organised behind it. Secondly, that the process of organising that economic power would also build the industrial fabric of the Socialist Republic, build the new society within the old.
“It is upon the first of these two principles I wish my readers to concentrate their attention in order to find the answer to the question we are asking ...
“The failure of European Socialism to avert the war is primarily due to the divorce between the industrial and political movements of Labour. The Socialist voter, as such, is helpless between elections. He requires to organise power to enforce the mandate of the elections, and the only power he can so organise is economic power – the power to stop the wheels of commerce, to control the heart that sends the life-blood pulsating through the social organisms.”
Of course, had Connolly survived (or even had Larkin the superb revolutionary opportunist been present to take back the leadership of Irish Socialist Republicanism) his successors would probably not have made all the errors they did. The point is that the organisational theories of both Connolly and Larkin meant that once they were effectively eliminated, the full revolutionary potential of their Labour Movement began to deteriorate instantly and without anything to prevent it doing so.
Because of Connolly’s faith in the Workers’ spontaneous (trade union) consciousness, his killing on 12 May 1916 meant that Scientific Socialism in Ireland went into suspended animation for the next half century.
That the Irish Labour Movement should have enjoyed the leadership of Connolly, and, indeed, Larkin, was not fortuitous; both had sprung from Irish working-class emigrants and had thus been able to synthesise British Industrial Unionism with Irish Republicanism. But it was equally natural that once it was deprived of them, Irish labour should be unable to make up the loss.
The leadership of Irish labour after 1916 were trained only in Industrial Unionism. The Citizen Army leaders were either dead, with Connolly, fled to petty-bourgeois Republicanism, with Marcievicz, or without prestige as opposed to their movement’s most prominent spokesmen. None of these latter had been involved deeply in the national struggle. P.T. Daly, the General Secretary of the I.T.U.C, and L.P. had mistrusted the I.C.A.’s involvement therein. William O’Brien, who was to succeed him in 1918 and who succeeded Connolly as Acting General Secretary of the I.T.G.W.U. had been kept by the latter in ignorance of his negotiations with the I.R.B. until the last possible moment. David Campbell, the Treasurer, and Thomas Johnson, the President and future Treasurer of the Congress, were Belfast trade unionists, who had kept their organisation intact by trying not to offend either side in Ulster on national issues. Thomas Foran, the General President of the I.T.G.W.U., was an organisation man.
Such leaders were bound to try to develop Connolly without his Marxist method. They were not hostile to the struggle for independence. But, for them, it was essentially a purely “political” struggle of which the importance was that it would clear the ground for the class war. This would be fought in achieving Socialism. The whole process was summarised in a mechanical formula: “First the Republic: then the Workers’ Republic”.
Thus, the Labour leaders saw their first duty as being one of pre-paring their industrial strength for the Republic. Between 1916–1920, total membership of unions affiliated to the I.T.U.C. rose from 40,000 to 250,000. In the same period, the I.T.G.W.U.’s membership figures rose from 5,000 to 100,000. Once again, this rise in trade union consciousness did not mean any rise in Socialist consciousness, amongst the workers. Growth was achieved by a formal, political neutralism. The Citizen Army was encouraged to die. Organised Labour accepted readily de Valera’s statement “Labour Must Wait” and turned down Sinn Féin’s offer of four Dublin City candidacies in the general election of 1918.
Labour did offer support to the Republic in the way proposed by the Syndicalist Connolly. On 23rd April 1918, it staged a one-day general strike against the British threat to conscript Ireland. On 13 and 14 April 1920, it carried out a successful general strike for the release of hunger-striking Sinn Féin prisoners. Less effective were longer efforts, a two-week general strike in Limerick, in April 1919, against the enforcement of a system of military passes, a strike of Irish motor-car drivers, from November 1919 to February 1920, against a similar system and, from May to December, 1920, a refusal by railwaymen to work trains carrying arms for the occupying forces. These three long struggles ended in compromise; the Labour leaders were unwilling to risk their growth rate by exerting strength beyond a certain pressure. The national general strikes probably frightened them as much as the British. Certainly, while they welcomed them as harbingers of the Workers’ Republic, they were careful to emphasise their limitations, after each victory. They were even more cautious about the workers’ takeovers of Irish factories that started in 1919.
The fact was that the expansion of the Irish industrial unions without Scientific Socialist leadership meant a growth rate of bureaucracy and the alienation of the existing leaders from the rank and file. The I.T.G.W.U.’s Rules were tightened up in 1918 and in 1923; this was necessary, but meant, inevitably, in the circumstances, greater centralism without more democracy.
Organisational alienation had its counterpart in political alienation. Few of the new trade unionists followed their industrial leaders into Socialism. On the contrary, many long-term rank and filers entered Sinn Féin or the Volunteers to achieve the Republic.
And then what actually happened in the political struggle was that the bourgeois 32-County Republic could not be achieved. Firstly from July 1920, in the north-east, the sectarian passions that the trade unionists had sidestepped flared up, burning many of the said workers. The partition of Ireland became an accomplished fact. In December, 1921, plenipotentiaries from Dáil Éireann signed Articles of Agreement in London such as renounced the immediate prospect of an Irish Republic.
In these circumstances, the small, suppressed, Socialist bodies revived in opposition to the Labour leadership. But what could they do? Both the Citizen Army and the Socialist (now Communist) Party of Ireland had accepted that the Republic come first. Now they tried to use it to gain support for themselves from opponents of the Treaty, while appealing to the leaders of these opponents that they give their struggle a social outlook. Since the Anti-Treaty leaders (whatever about their rank and file) were often as conservative as the Treatyites, this strategy meant only that the Socialist Republicans did little to help the soviets in Munster until it was too late. The Citizen Army disappeared into the Executive I.R.A.; the C.P.I. was liquidated into Larkin’s Irish Worker League.
The Labour Party itself, still joined to the Trade Union Congress, accepted the Treaty; and fought the 1922 elections on a “Workers’ Republic” ticket. Since this was just “the shadow of the battle”, it did not, of course, put up enough candidates to win an overall majority. Nonetheless, it won all but one of the seats it contested.
Then it changed further. In the first place, the Irish reaction (of which the Civil War was indeed, the political “shadow”), hit the movement. Membership of trade unions affiliated to the T.U.C. fell to 95,000. The I.T.G.W.U.’s membership fell to some 60,000. Larkin, returned from America, formed a breakaway Workers’ Union of Ireland unaffiliated to Congress which won the allegiance of the majority of Dublin’s organised unskilled workers. The immediate prospects for a Syndicalist Workers’ Republic weakened considerably. On the other hand, the Party leaders in Dáil Éireann found the “shadow struggle” more rewarding than they had expected. The political wing challenged its industrial partner for supremacy. Finally, in 1930, Party and Congress were formally separated.
Socialism Made Easy, which, from 1916 and until the mid-twenties, had been the most published of Connolly’s works, now disappeared. The last republication of any part of it before the 1960s was in 1934. Then the I.T.G.W.U. republished The Axe to the Root to maintain its hegemony in the Labour Party and to protect itself against foreign union’s poaching of its members. Its moves were in vain against the opportunism of the new Labour Party leader, William Norton. Within ten years the I.T.G.W.U. was wooing Fianna Fáil, and pretending that Syndicalism had never existed.
But, although renounced, Syndicalist assumptions survived. Because of Irish Labour’s early refusal to take the lead in the national struggle, because of its insistence on the dominance of the industrial union within itself, it encouraged in its rank and file a tendency to keep its mind split between the political and the industrial. This was bound to exist in the material circumstances, However, the impossible assumption of Connolly’s heirs that the achievement of national political freedom would be done as a separate introduction to, rather than as a part of, the struggle towards, Socialism has continued to guide Irish working class actions to this day.
At the end of the sixties, the development of Irish industry provided a basis for trade unionists to act politically in their class interests. This was done in Dublin in 1965, 1967 and 1969 during a period of economic unrest. Already there is dissatisfaction with the results; the workers have not got value for their votes. It is likely that the next election will lead to wide-spread abstention, possibly, the revival of Republican action in a Terrorist form. There is certainly likely to be a continuance in industrial militancy.
There is only one, short, hope for the future. It lies in building a real vanguard Party of the working-class such as will carry out Connolly’s strategy, as adapted in scientific manner to present circumstances.
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