Saturday, April 27, 2019

Nationalism - heads they win, tails we lose.

On Sunday the 28th, Lambhill Cemetery in Glasgow is to be the scene of a wreath laying ceremony and commemoration for some of those who took part in Dubln's Easter Rising rebellion and are buried in Glasgow. There may well be in addition to Irish nationalists attending, some who call themselves socialists and seek to remember the memory of James Connolly and the Irish Citizens Army. Let Socialist Courier disillusion you.

The conditions for revolutionary action expressly did not exist in 1916. They did not exist in Ireland and they did not exist in Europe. In Ireland, the Citizen Army were only relatively few in number. As a self-avowed Marxist, Connolly forgot that it takes the working class to change society, not a handful of individuals to do it for them.

Connolly used his charismatic authority as a party leader and a trade union organiser, to drag his men behind him into an alliance with their class enemies from only a few years earlier during the Dublin Lockout because his sights were set on action, no matter how futile.

A large section of the workers’ movement was destroyed and into the vacuum stepped the nationalist opportunists, happy to lavish praise Connolly, but even happier to divert the working class struggle. Connolly had not fought for workers’ demands on the question of hours of work, of wages, of factory conditions, or of the ownership of the land and industry but for a purely nationalist proclamation. 

Those who advocate alliances between workers’ organisations and pro-capitalist political parties on the basis of Connolly’s participation in the 1916 rising should heed the consequences.

Post-war Ireland saw the Limerick Soviet in the south and, in the north, the Belfast 40-Hour Strike where “Bolsheviks and Sinn Feiners” were leading astray many “good loyalist protestants” to the dismay of the Orange Lodge, where the composition of the strike committee was a majority of Protestant, but the chairman was a Catholic. Sectarianism was being challenged. Working class militancy had entered the Shankill Road and Sandy Row. The National Union of Railwaymen in a resolution at a conference in Belfast stated:“without complete unity amongst the working classes, (we should not allow either religious or political differences to prevent their emancipation) which can be achieved through a great international brotherhood the world over, no satisfactory progress could be made.”

Instead of a James Connolly to make the most of this opportunity for working class unity and solidarity, we had De Valera declaring his policy of “Labour must wait”, the interests of the nation must come first (read “the interests of the capitalists”). It was to be national unity, not class unity. By pressing their interests the workers were said to be “endangering” the unity of the republican forces! On the land where the tenants were seizing the estates, they found themselves being held back by Sinn Fein and the IRA, who even went to the lengths of carrying out evictions in order to break the back of the land-seizure movement.

The labour movement and working-class unity were the real victims of the 1916 Dublin Easter Rising when James Connolly subordinated their class interests to the nationalist interests of Ireland's aspiring capitalists.

In “The Story of the Irish Citizen Army”, Sean O'Casey rightly explains that, in participating in the 1916 insurrection, Connolly was not acting as a socialist.

Connolly had stepped from the narrow by-way of Irish Socialism on to the crowded highway of Irish Nationalism”.

He gave “fixing on the frontage of Liberty Hall a scroll on which was written ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland’” as an example of Connolly’s “determined attachment to the principles enunciated by Sinn Fein and the Irish Volunteers, which were, in many instances, directly contrary to his life-long teaching of Socialism”.

As a result, O’Casey went on, “Liberty Hall was no longer the Headquarters of Irish Labour, but the centre of Irish disaffection”.

THE COST OF IRISH NATIONALISM


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