Resolution of Sympathy with the Boer Republics
James Connolly
The Fighting Race
(1898)
From Workers’ Republic, August 13, 1898
Transcribed by The James Connolly Society in 1997.
We gather from the American newspapers that our countrymen in the United States army and navy have been highly distinguishing themselves in the cause of the war with Spain.
This is as it should be and in consonance with all our Irish traditions. We are a fighting race, we are told, and every Irishman is always proud to hear our politicians and journalists tell of our exploits in the fighting line – in other countries, in other climes and in other times.
Yes, we are a fighting race. Whether it is under the Stars and Stripes or under the Union Jack; planting the flag of America over the walls of Santiago or helping our own oppressors to extend their hated rule over other unfortunate nations our brave Irish boys are ever to the front.
When the Boer has to be robbed of his freedom, the Egyptian has to be hurled back under the heel of his taskmaster, the Zulu to be dynamited in his caves, the Matabele slaughtered beside the ruins of his smoking village or Afridi to be hunted from his desolated homestead, wheresoever, in short, the bloody standard of the oppressors of Ireland is to be found over some unusually atrocious piece of scoundrelism, look then for the sons of our Emerald Isle, and under the red coats of the hired assassin army you will find them.
Yes, we are a fighting race. In Africa, India or America, wherever blood is to be spilt, there you will find Irishmen, eager and anxious for a fight, under any flag, in anybody's quarrel, in any cause – except their own.
In that cause, for our own freedom and own land, we have for the last century consistently refused to fight. On any other part of the earth's surface we can shed our blood with the blessing of Mother Church and the prayers of the faithful to strengthen our arms, but in Ireland and for the freedom of the Irish people.
Anathema.
It is an impious thought and we must avoid it. Whatever we do let us keep on the safe side of the road and not quarrel with the Church – which denounced the United Irishmen and excommunicated the Fenians.
Faith and Fatherland. Oh, yes. But don’t forget that when the Englishman was a Catholic and worshipped at the same altar as the Irishman, he plundered, robbed and murdered the Irishman as relentlessly as he did when, with sword in one hand and Bible in the other, he came snuffily chanting his psalms in the train of Oliver Cromwell.
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The question of religious faith has precious little bearing upon the question of freedom. Witness Catholic Spain devastating Catholic Cuba, the Catholic capitalists of Italy running down with cannon the unarmed Catholic workmen, the Irish Catholic landlord rackrenting and evicting the Catholic tenant, the wealthy Catholic feasting inside the mansion while the Catholic beggar dies of hunger on the doorstep.
And as a companion picture witness the Protestant workmen of Belfast so often out on strike against their Protestant employers and their Protestant ancestors of 100 years ago in active rebellion against the English Protestant Government.
‘Our institutions in Church and State’ is the catchword with which the wealthy Irish Unionist endeavours to arouse religious bigotry among the Protestant working-class of Ulster and so prevent them coalescing with the working-class Catholic in a united effort for their common emancipation.
And ‘Faith and Fatherland’ by linking the national demands with a specific religious belief serves the same purpose in the mouth of the Home Rule trickster.
For what other purpose than that herein specified are either rallying cries used?
To keep the people of Ireland, and especially the workers, divided is the great object of all our politicians, Home Ruler or Unionist.
And our great object in this journal will be to unite the workers and to bury, in one common grave, the religious hatreds, the provincial jealousies and mutual distrusts upon which oppression has so long depended for security.
The man whose forefathers manned the walls of Derry is as dear to us as he who traces his descent from the women who stood in the breaches of Limerick. Neither fought for Ireland, but only to decide which English king should rule Ireland.
What have we to do with their quarrels? In the words of the United Irishmen – “Let us bury our animosities with the bones of our ancestors.”
In the near future when kings and the classes who are makers of kings no longer encumber the earth with their foul presence, how our Irish youth will smile when they read that 200 years ago Irishmen slaughtered each other to decide which English king should have the right to rob the Irish people.
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And that for 200 years after the descendants of the respective parties conclusively proved to their own satisfaction that the leader of the other side had been a scoundrel.
And the impartial world looking on examined the evidence and came to the conclusion that on that point, at least, both parties were right. Both kings were scoundrels, ergo the followers of both were -
Well, never mind.
British and Russian Imperialism
I
(1898)
Workers’ Republic, 3 September, 1898.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
His Imperial Highness, the Czar of All the Russias, has issued a manifesto in favour of universal disarmament. This is the silly season ... His rule is founded on the sword, and can only be maintained by the sword, and whatever seriousness there is in his latest pronouncement may be translated into an appeal to his brother despots throughout Europe to cease warring with each other in order that their hands may be free to throttle the infant liberty in their own dominions. Humanitarians indeed! Will Russia withdraw her troops from Warsaw and depend only on the loyalty and affection of the Poles ...? The Czar, we repeat is having his little joke. He speaks to-day of universal peace, in order that when, in the near future, he hurls his armies across the frontier into China, India or Constantinople, or whelms in blood the aspirations for freedom on the part of his own subjects, he may be able to point to this action of his as proof that the battle was not of his seeking. From the Cabinets of every European Government all the other conspirators against the freedom of the human race echo his cry, and even while they are ordering new armaments and equipping new fleets, protest the intensity of their desire for peace. ’Twas ever thus ... But universal disarmament is not a dream. The day will come, and perhaps like a bolt from the blue when the frontiers ... will not be sufficient to prevent the handclasp of friendship between the peoples. But that day will come only when the kings and kaisers, queens and czars, financiers and capitalists who now oppress humanity will be hurled from their place and power, and the emancipated workers of the earth, no longer the blind instruments of rich men’s greed will found a new society, a new civilisation, whose corner stone will be labour, whose inspiring principle will be justice, whose limits humanity alone can bound.
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British and Russian Imperialism
II
(1898)
Workers’ Republic, 10 September, 1898.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
When the Russian disarmament proposals were first mooted we, alone among Irish journalists, characterised them as dishonest and the chorus of praise they elicited throughout Europe as hypocritical. One short week has sufficed to prove the truth of our contention ... There is scarcely a capital in Europe from which Great Britain has not been complimented on the successful outcome of the battle before Khartoum; complimented by the very men (and newspapers) who a week ago were ostentatiously singing anthems of brotherly love with all men, and deploring the cruel necessity of war ... The British occupation of Egypt, from the bombardment of Alexandria down to this latest massacre at Omdurman has been one prolonged criminal enterprise, conceived and executed entirely in the interests of the holders of Egyptian bonds and speculating capitalists.
“India is regarded by its alien rulers as a huge human cattle farm to be worked solely in the interest of the dominant nation. Whatever is done for its vast internal resources, is done for the benefit of the Indian people, but primarily with a view to the dividends which the investing classes of England may draw from such development.” Limerick Leader, July, 1897.
The enemy, as our Irish newspapers call them, fought for home and freedom; the British carried fire and sword and desolation into a land and upon a people who had never injured them, a people who could not have disturbed their conquest, even of lower Egypt, had they been ever so willing. But Britain has triumphed. Glorious triumph!
Regicide and Revolution
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(17 September 1898)
Workers’ Republic, 17 September 1898.
Reprinted in Red Banner, No.14.
Transcribed by Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
As most of our readers are probably aware the Empress of Austria was assassinated in the streets of Geneva, Switzerland, on Saturday last.
We deeply regret the untimely death of this lady as we would regret the untimely death of any other unoffending woman, but we cannot see any reason for the hysterics into which our daily papers are attempting to work their readers on the subject. A woman has been foully murdered. Stated thus simply the fact would arouse in all thinking men a righteous horror of the deed. But when column is piled upon column, when we are told “humanity stands aghast,” that the crime is “unparalleled,” that the “world is plunged in mourning,” etc., we begin to suspect the presence of more cant than sincerity in all this newspaper grief. When sailors are lost in rotten ships at sea, miners choked in the mine, labourers killed by falling machinery, women and girls poisoned in match works, etc., our friends on the capitalist press do not shed many tears over or devote many columns to the matter. Wherefore we conclude that these newspaper tears are shed for the Empress and not for the woman.
For our part we regard all human life as equally sacred, whether it be the life of an Empress or the life of a charwoman, and we have no desire to emulate our contemporaries in their attempt to magnify the horror of a crime because the victim belonged to the former rank of life rather than the latter. The deed was the deed of a madman, its perpetrator will be punished, in all probability with the utmost severity the law of Switzerland allows. Had we the power we certainly would not lift a finger to save him from or to modify that punishment, whatever it may be, but we can see nothing in the case to justify the outbreak of savagery to which our Dublin daily and evening papers are at present treating their readers. When we find ‘respectable’ newspapers actually regretting that the barbarous tortures of the Middle Ages are no longer possible, indulging in fearful and disgusting recitals of the fiendish cruelties perpetrated in the name of Law upon regicides in the past, and openly wishing they could be revived, we feel that even the fear of being misrepresented would not justify us in keeping silent longer, in longer refraining from uttering a protest against this outburst of ferocity in those who are so fond of posing as guardians of public morals. The old Mosaic law demanded a life for a life, but our newspaper oracles, who at ordinary times are so fond of mouthing their devotion to the new dispensation which replaced the stern justice of the Mosaic code by the more merciful ethics of Christianity, would now surpass that code in the ferocity of their vengeance. A life for a life, it appears, may serve as a basis of justice among ordinary mortals, but the life of a crowned head must be hedged round with greater terrors, or else the masses of desperate and starving people whom society creates in our midst cannot be kept in subjection. Here, then, we find the real reason of the outcry. The governing classes seek through Press, platform, and all other means to impress the public mind with the divinity of their persons, the ‘divinity’ which doth hedge their positions. A hundred working-class women are murdered in the streets of Milan – bayonetted and shot with their starving babes at their breasts [1]; society grudges a paragraph in its newspapers to chronicle the fact; one Empress is stabbed in the streets of Geneva, and lo! Humanity is Shocked. Yet, perhaps the remorseless hand of history will reverse the procedure: give to that holocaust of the workers a dedicatory chapter as to the martyrs of humanity – and dismiss this murder of an Empress with the curtness of a footnote. As we progress toward a proper recognition of the dignity of humanity we lose the inculcated respect for the tinsel glory of a crown. Democracy is ever merciful and humane. The crime of a Luccessi is in no sense attributable to the revolutionary party in Europe, no more than the Phoenix Park murders were justly attributable to the Nationalist party in Ireland.[2] The criminal passions which blazed out in Geneva last Saturday are nurtured and blossom only in the dark shadows cast by capitalist society and its financial and hereditary rulers. The present social and political order in Europe breeds such criminals. They are its children. Let them deal with each other.
We, who detest equally the criminal and the social order which creates him, work unceasingly for the coming of the day when an enlightened people by abolishing the latter will render impossible the former.
Notes
1. Earlier in the year, workers demonstrating in Milan against food shortages and inflation were brutally attacked by troops.
2. Luigi Luccheni was the actual name of the empress’s killer. In 1882 the colonial Chief Secretary and his deputy were killed in the Phoenix Park by a Fenian splinter group, the Invincibles.
The South African War
I
(1899)
Workers’ Republic, 19 August, 1899.
Transcription & HTML Mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
At the time of going to press it seems probable that in a few weeks at most the British Government will have declared war against the South African Republic. Ostensibly in pursuance of a chivalrous desire to obtain political concessions in their adopted country for British citizens anxious to renounce their citizenship, but in reality for the purpose of enabling an unscrupulous gang of capitalists to get into their hands the immense riches of the diamond fields. Such a war will undoubtedly take rank as one of the most iniquitous wars of the century. Waged by a mighty empire against a nation entirely incapable of replying in any effective manner, by a government of financiers upon a nation of farmers, by a nation of filibusterers upon a nation of workers, by a capitalist ring, who will never see a shot fired during the war, upon a people defending their homes and liberties – such is the war upon which the people of England are criminally or stupidly, and criminally even if stupidly, allowing their government to enter. No better corroboration of the truth of the socialist maxim that the modern state is but a committee of rich men administering public affairs in the interest of the upper class, has been afforded of late years, than is furnished by this spectacle of a gang of South African speculators setting in motion the whole machinery of the British Empire in furtherance of their own private ends. There is no pretence that the war will benefit the English people, yet it is calmly assumed the people will pay for the war, and, if necessary, fight in it.
It must be admitted that the English people are at present doing their utmost to justify the low estimate in which their rulers hold them; a people who for centuries have never heard a shot fired in anger upon their shores, yet who encourage their government in its campaign of robbery and murder against an unoffending nation; a people, who, secure in their own homes, permit their rulers to carry devastation and death into the homes of another people, assuredly deserve little respect no matter how loudly they may boast of their liberty-loving spirit.
For the Irish worker the war will contain some valuable lessons. In the first place it will serve to furnish a commentary upon the hopes of those in our ranks who are so fond of dilating upon the ‘peaceful’ realisation of the aims of socialism. We do not like to theorise upon the function of force as a midwife to progress – that, as we have ere now pointed out, is a matter to be settled by the enemies of progress – but we cannot afford to remain blind to the signs of the time. If, then, we see a small section of the possessing class prepared to launch two nations into war, to shed oceans of blood and spend millions of treasure, in order to maintain intact a small portion of their privileges, how can we expect the entire propertied class to abstain from using the same weapons, and to submit peacefully when called upon to yield up for ever all their privileges? Let the working class democracy of Ireland note that lesson, and, whilst working peacefully while they may, keep constantly before their minds the truth that the capitalist class is a beast of prey, and cannot be moralised, converted, or conciliated but must be extirpated.
One other lesson is, that Ireland is apparently a negligible factor in the calculations of the Imperial Government. In certain ‘advanced’ circles we hear much about the important position of Ireland in international politics. The exact value of such talk may be gauged by the fact that troops are being taken from Ireland to be sent to the Transvaal. The British Government has no fears on the score of Ireland; the Home Rule Party, and their good friends the Constabulary, may be trusted to keep this country quiet. But if the working class of Ireland were only united and understood their power sufficiently well, and had shaken off their backs the Home Rule-Unionist twin brethren – keeping us apart that their class may rob us – they would see in this complication a chance for making a long step forward towards better conditions of life – and, seeing it, act upon it in a manner that would ensure the absence from the Transvaal of a considerable portion of the British army. The class-conscious workers who chafe under our present impotence, and long to remove it, will find the path pointed out to them in the ranks of the Irish Socialist Republican Party.
America and Ireland
Farmers’ Demands
(1898)
Workers’ Republic, 21 October 1899.
Republished in James Connolly: Lost Writings, (ed. Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh), Pluto Press 1997.
The notes, which are © 1997 Pluto Press, have not been included.
HTML Mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
As a general rule we refrain from taking notice in our columns of the quarrels or discussions of the Socialist parties of the world. We regard ourselves as being, at present, primarily a missionary organ, founded for the purpose of presenting to the working class of Ireland a truer and more scientific understanding of the principles of Socialism than they could derive from a perusal of the scant and misleading references to that subject to be found in the ordinary capitalist press. This task also involves, as a matter of course, the criticism and exposure of all the quack remedies and political trickeries with which our masters, or their ignorant imitators in the ranks of the workers themselves, seek to impose upon the people as cure-alls for our social evils. We have all along acted upon the conviction that we must give the revolutionary principles of Socialism an Irish home and habitation before we venture to express our opinions on the minor matters dividing the party abroad. We can say now with some degree of confidence that we have succeeded in that task and that the Socialist Republican Party of Ireland is one of the factors which will play a big part in shaping the future history of this country, and being so confident we now propose to say a word upon a subject at present under discussion in the United States of America; and in which the name of our Party has been cited as following a course of action similar to that adopted by one of the disputants.
The matter is as follows:– There are in the States just now two distinct Socialist parties – The Socialist Labor Party, and the Social Democratic Party. The first named is the longest established of the two and has repeatedly run candidates for the post of President of the United States, polling on the occasion of the last Presidential contest 36,664 votes. The last named has only come into existence since the last Presidential campaign, and is composed for the greater part of men and women who, while avowing themselves Socialists, disapproved of the policy and tactics pursued by the Socialist Labor Party. To the uninitiated in the economics and philosophy of Socialism it is hard to explain the exact point at issue, but it may be briefly summed up in the statement that the Socialist Labor Party adhere uncompromisingly to the policy of identifying themselves as a party with, and basing all their hopes upon, the struggle of the working class against every section of their exploiters, or employers. This involves opposition to every demand made in the interest of the master class, and an attitude of complacency, or even triumph, at the success of the great capitalist in crushing out his smaller competitor – this complacency arising from the, it seems to us, absolutely correct position that the crushing out of small capitalists by large ones will tend to increase the ranks of the working class, concentrate industry under centralised management, decrease the numbers of those interested in private property, and so make the ultimate attainment of Socialism easier.
In other words, theirs is the position known in Europe as the Marxist position, from its being first definitely formulated by the founder of Modern Socialism – Karl Marx.
The Social Democratic Party, on the other hand, look to the fact that the small middle class, and especially the farmers, still wield an enormous voting power, and, looking to the present rather than to the future, they have embodied in their programme certain ‘Farmers’ Demands’ – proposals for legislation to enable the petty farmers to bear up against the competition of those mammoth farms for which the United States is so famous. The object being, of course, to win the votes of the farmers as a class.
Over those ‘Farmers’ Demands’ a battle royal has been raging for some time between the two parties. The Socialist Labor Party denouncing them as reactionary and unscientific, the Social Democratic Party defending them as practical and useful. Lately some members of the latter party have themselves taken up the battle against those proposals being included in their programme, and demand their removal. In the course of this latter discussion in the columns of the Social Democratic Herald published at Chicago, Sept 25th, one writer, F.G.R. Gordon, in defending the proposals, cites our example as a party which, occupying an absolutely scientific position on Socialist doctrines, yet has its ‘Farmers’ Demands’. Here is the quotation:–
The Irish Socialist Republican Party have their Farmers’ Demands; and their party has been endorsed as the par excellent Scientific Socialist Party.
No.3 of our programme is, we presume, the plank alluded to.
Now, we have no wish to be misunderstood by our comrades in America; we value our reputation as a straight Socialist Party too much to allow our name to be used as a cover for any kind of looseness in principles, tactics, or policy, even when it is used accompanied by flattery. Therefore, we would wish to point out to all whom it may concern that the cases of America and Ireland are not at all analogous. Agriculture in America has assumed already its company form, being in many cases administered purely on capitalist lines for the profit of non-resident owners; agriculture in Ireland is still in a semi-feudal form, the largest farm in Ireland would be classed as a petty farm in America, and the absorption of the working farmer by the capitalist managed estate of the non-resident farmer is practically unknown. Now observe this vital point of difference between the programme of the Socialist Republican Party of Ireland, and the programme of the Social Democratic Party of America. Both have demands for farmers, granted, but:–
1. The Farmers’ Demands of the Social Democrats of America are demands which aim at the perpetuation of the system of petty farming by legislation to protect it from the effects of the competition of farms managed on those lines most nearly approximating to the Socialist form of industry, viz, the lines of centralised capital, and agricultural armies. American agriculture, as such, is not in any danger as a source of support for the agriculturist. His status may be endangered, not his existence.
2. The Farmers’ Demands of the Socialist Republican Party of Ireland are demands which aim at preserving Agriculture in Ireland from being annihilated as a native industry by the competition of foreign agriculturists. Irish agriculturists are not threatened with absorption, but with extinction and enforced exile.
In other words the American Farmers’ Demands are in the interest of one particular form of agricultural enterprise, as against another; the Irish Demands are directed towards rescuing agriculture itself, and teaching the agriculturist to look to national co-operation as the factor he should count upon for help in his struggle to remain in the country of his birth.
Things which look alike are not always alike. The apparent identity of the Irish and American proposals is seen to be non-existent when you take into account the different historical and industrial conditions of the two countries. Given American conditions in Ireland, the Irish Socialists would wipe their Farmers’ Demands from off their programme, but in Ireland as it is with the rags of a medieval system of land tenure still choking our life and cramping our industry, with perennial famine destroying our people, with our population dwindling away by emigrations, we consider it right to point out, even if unheeded, that it is the duty of the State to undertake the functions of manufacture and custodian of all implements required for the one important industry of the country – agriculture. This is all we demand in that nature:–
Establishment at public expense of rural depots for the most improved agricultural machinery, to be lent out to the agricultural population at a rent covering cost and management alone.
It is not a sectional demand, but is the outcome of a national exigency.
“The practical application of the principles” (of Socialism), said Marx and Engels in their joint preface to the Communist Manifesto, “everywhere, and at all times will depend on the historical conditions for the time being existing.”
Let our critics please remember that fact, and the Socialist Republicans of Ireland can confidently abide by the result.
The South African War
II
(1899)
Workers’ Republic, 18 November, 1899.
Transcription & HTML Mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
... And what about the war? Well, I think it is the beginning of the end. This great, blustering British Empire; this Empire of truculent bullies, is rushing headlong to its doom. Whether they ultimately win or lose, the Boers have pricked the bubble of England’s fighting reputation. The world knows her weakness now. Have at her, then everywhere and always and in every manner. And before the first decade of the coming century will close, you and I, if we survive, will be able to repeat to our children the tale of how this monstrous tyranny sank in dishonour and disaster.
Resolution of Sympathy with the Boer Republics
(1899)
Workers’ Republic, 30 June, 1900.
Transcription & HTML Mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Resolution Drafted by James Connolly and Adopted at a Public Meeting to Express Sympathy with the Boer Republics,
Held in Foster Place, Dublin on August 27th, 1899
WHEREAS the government of this country is maintained upon the bayonets of an occupying army against the will of the people;
WHEREAS there were in India, Egypt and other portions of the British Empire other and much larger populations also kept down in forced subjection;
WHEREAS a country that thus keeps down subject populations by the use of the hangman, the bullet or the sword, has no right to preach to another about its duties towards its population; THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that this meeting denounces the interference of the British capitalist government in the internal affairs of the Transvaal Republic as an act of criminal aggression, wishes long life to the Republic, and trusts that our fellow-countrymen will, if need be, take up arms in defence of their adopted country.
This meeting was held by the Irish Socialist Republican Party, and was their first public meeting held in Ireland to express sympathy with the Boers.
A GREAT OPPORTUNITY
The British Army is getting its hands full in South Africa. The defeated, demoralised, disheartened, subjugated, routed, dispersed, conquered, disarmed and humiliated Boers are still toppling over British battalions, capturing British convoys, cutting British lines of communication, and keeping Lord Roberts and all his generals in a state of almighty panic and unrest, and not a single soldier can be spared from South Africa for a long time to come.
The Boxers in China have developed a sudden aptitude for war, are prowling around on the hunt for foreign devils, and with a smile that is child-like and bland are offering to box all Europe, with Japan and America thrown in as appetisers. Great Britain is in want of soldiers there also.
Now it only wants a native rising in India, and then would come our Irish opportunity.
With war in Africa, war in China, war in India, we of the unconquered Celtic race would rise up in our millions from Malin Head to Cape Clear, from Dublin to Galway, and – and well, pass ‘strong’ resolutions, and then go home and pray that somebody else may beat the Sasanach.
The Boers are invulnerable on kopjes, the Boxers are death on missionaries, but we are irresistible on ‘resolutions’.
Our “American Mission”
(August 1902)
The Workers’ Republic, August 1902.
Reprinted in Red Banner, No.17 (PO Box 6587, Dublin 6).
Transcribed by Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
We are pleased to be in a position to state that arrangements have been made between the Socialist Labour Party of America and the Socialist Republican Party of Ireland for Mr James Connolly, the editor of this paper, to proceed to the States on a lecturing tour on behalf of both organisations. Our comrade leaves Liverpool on the fourth of September, and will probably remain in America until the first week of December. Meetings are being organised already in many of the great industrial centres where Irishmen have made their home; the Cooper Union, the largest hall in New York, has been secured for his first meeting on the 15th September, and every effort will be made to enable our representative to place his message before the largest number possible of Irish-American workers.
The fact that our comrade has spent so much of his own life (20 years) amongst the Irish exiles of Great Britain fits him in a peculiar manner for the task of understanding and speaking to those other exiles in America, while the thorough knowledge of Irish history and politics he has so well demonstrated in all his speeches and writings qualifies him for the position he now occupies as an exponent of that phenomenon in Irish politics – the revolt of the working class – seeking its independent political expression through the Socialist Republican Party.
We would direct our reader’s attention to the great underlying significance of this visit to the States. All other Irish agitators have gone to America to beg funds for the support of agitations at home on the express or implied understanding that the desire of the agitation in Ireland was to erect in this country the political and economic institutions which prevail in America. Therefore every such agitator had praise of all things American on his tongue as part of his poor stock in trade. But this agitator knows that the misery of Ireland springs from an economic cause operating equally malignantly [in America] as it does in Ireland to the majority of the population; he knows that the comparative comfort of the more fortunate of the American workers is due primarily to the state of the economic development of their country relatively to Ireland, and he knows also that the very nature of that economic development, its very power and insatiableness, will prevent all possibility of creating in Ireland industrial conditions at all similar to those in America. In other words, he knows well that to-day the very success of American enterprise in agriculture and industry strikes a death blow to the hopes of industry and agriculture on a grand scale under capitalism in Ireland, as the Americans are now our greatest competitors. He also knows and it will be his duty to preach that the terms “American Success”, “American Domination”, “American Control” mean Success, Domination and Control by the American Capitalist Class, and that exercised not only against producers on this side of the Atlantic, but quite as relentlessly against the working class on the American side.
And whilst telling the workers of America of the new hope which has arisen in the breasts of the more intelligent of the working class of Ireland – the hope of a Socialist Republic in which our land will be purged of the contaminating presence of the foreign and native tyrants alike, a freedom for which the workers are learning to rely on themselves and on themselves alone – he will not fail to remind them that the progress of capitalism brings for the American worker a slavery as grinding and merciless as that we groan under to-day, even if many of the slaves be better fed and housed than are ours.
This campaign which our comrade Connolly is undertaking in America is, then, for the miscreants at home and abroad who have so long traded on our kindly sentiment to the undoing of the Irish workers, an ominous portent indeed. But to those who value truth, the facts which our comrade will lay before his audience upon the condition of that long neglected portion of the Irish nation, the working class, and the truths he will tell of the inwardness of the political position in Ireland, will make this visit a welcome relief from those of the attitudinising politicians who in the past have sold themselves to every American grinder-of-the-faces-of-the-poor who desired to parade an Irish leader on his platform as a catch for Irish votes.
A few words apropos of the party under whose auspices our representative will travel to the States will not be amiss. Shortly after the establishment of the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896 we opened up communications with the Socialist Labour Party of America. An interchange of views took place between the two bodies, and we then discovered that our ideas upon policy and tactics generally were practically identical, a discovery that immediately led to a friendship lasting to the present time. Since then both parties have gone through severe struggles, the SLP have been subjected to a revolt within and to a malevolent misrepresentation from without unequalled in the socialist movement for bitterness, and the ISRP has undergone a period of financial strain which has left its mark deep on the character and spirits of many of its members [1], but neither party has faltered, and both are as a result stronger than ever before. Our confidence in our SLP friends is still unabated, and we can challenge the world to investigate our conduct, our policy, or our history. The SLP has the only Socialist daily newspaper in the English language, and we intend on the return of our editor from America to permanently re-establish the Workers’ Republic on a weekly basis.
Verily, Labour Conquers All.
Footnote
1. A group had just left the SLP and joined with the party’s competitor the Social Democratic Party to form the Socialist Party of America. The ISRP had gone through serious financial troubles, leading to a degree of internal tension
The New Danger
(1903)
Workers’ Republic, April 1903.
Republished in James Connolly: Lost Writings, (ed. Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh), Pluto Press 1997.
The notes, which are © 1997 Pluto Press, have not been included.
HTML Mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The politics of France are so complicated that to the general public the task of comprehending them would require a closer study than most are able to give. Thus the fact that a leading French Socialist, M Jaurès, has been elected to the position of a Vice-President of the French Chamber was recorded in all our Irish papers as a great victory for the Socialist party, and has been accepted as such by the general reader. But few are aware of the true significance of the situation, viz, that his election is but a move of the French capitalist class to disorganise the Socialist forces by corrupting their leaders. M Jaurès is one of the middle class element which, joining the Socialist party in search of a ‘career’, were, by virtue of their superior education, enabled to make of themselves leaders of the working class movement.
Now, that working class movement having grown so formidable as to convince every one that the day of its triumph is within measurable distance, the capitalist government seeks for the weakest part of the Socialist armour that it might destroy the dreaded force, and so seeking it finds that this weakest part lies in the vanity and ambition of the middle class leaders. First M Millerand accepted the bait, now M Jaurès.
In other words the capitalist governments of the world are now adopting and improving upon the policy of corrupting or ‘nobbling’ the leaders which has enabled the English governing class to disorganise every serious attack upon their privileged position. Here in Ireland we have seen our Home Rule leaders most successfully pursuing the same game. In Dublin we have Mr Nannetti taken into the ranks of the Parliamentary party in order to confuse the working class who were beginning to distrust the Home Rulers; in Tipperary we had Kendal O’Brien, and in Cork county Mr Sheehan, both of the Land and Labour Association, the former a professed Socialist, and the latter being a vehement critic of the enemies of the labourer, now pliant followers of the men who antagonised their Association from its inception. In England we see the capitalist Liberals running a ‘safe’ Labour man for a Tory seat, Woolwich; in the United States we see men like Mayor Schmidt of San Francisco ran by a capitalist party as a Labour Mayor, and boomed as such by the capitalist press throughout the country, even whilst his police were breaking up meetings of the Socialist Trade and Labour Alliance in his own city, and in the eastern states capitalist political parties placing upon their electoral ticket members of a nominally Socialist party.
The universality of this capitalist dodge calls for an equally universal move against it. Up to the present we regret to say there is not much evidence that the Socialist parties of the world are clear upon the course of action to be followed in fighting this insidious scheme. If we except the Socialist Labour Party of the United States, and the Parti Ouvrier of France, there is no Socialist party which does not betray signs of wobbling upon the matter. In Germany the Social Democratic Party has admitted into its ranks in the Reichstag the High Priest of the men who accept such ‘gifts from the Greeks’, Bernstein; and in many other Continental countries the party is in a state of internal war over the matter. In England no one as yet has been asked into the Cabinet from the Socialist ranks, but there are scores fighting to get in a position to be asked, and hungering to accept.
The Social Democratic Federation has been drugged in this matter in the most shameful fashion. At the Paris Congress their representatives were induced to vote for Millerand – the first of the intellectuals to sell out – chiefly by the representations of Quelch and Hyndman, and against the advice and indignant remonstrance of the pioneers and veteran fighters of the Socialist movement in France. Now that all Quelch and Hyndman, & Co, said in favour of the compromise has been utterly falsified, and the most bitter denunciations of Millerand most amply justified, Hyndman joins in the cry against him, but even in doing so he shows no sign of shame for having voted to condone the treachery he now condemns.
This carefully stimulated indignation only excites amazement. In an article in Justice, March 21, after recapitulating all the acts of treachery of which Millerand has been guilty since Hyndman voted against his condemnation the latter says: “But now comes the most serious part of the whole affair. Millerand has just republished his speeches, with an introduction.” And this is “the most serious part of the whole affair”, in Hyndman’s estimation. But to do our London comrade justice he does not propose to leave us without a remedy. What is his remedy? Consider! the Socialist movement is convulsed by this capitalist move, and by the presence in the Socialist ranks of weaklings and ambitious middle class elements ready to be corrupted, and in this moment of international danger the man who is the trusted leader of the Socialist movement in one of the most important countries in Europe, England, proposes as a means, nay, as the only means of settling it all that he should debate the matter with Millerand at a public meeting. This, he says, is the “only way to bring the matter to an issue”.
As a piece of opera-bouffe that would be excellent; as a piece of serious politics it is beneath contempt.
As an exponent of Socialist economics Hyndman has no more ardent admirer than the writer of this article, but we contend that as a political guide his whole career has been one long series of blunders; a fact that explains, as nothing else can explain, the wobbling state of the movement in England. The key note of his character has been to preach revolution and to practise compromise, and to do neither thoroughly.
But why should we criticise an English Socialist? Because what injures the Socialist movement in one country injures it also in others, and because this country is unfortunately tied to England and therefore is influenced by her politics more than by any other. And the weakness of the real revolutionary movement in England is a constant danger to the hopes of freedom in Ireland.
As a matter of fact we would have criticised more often and more unreservedly than we have done the position of our SDF comrades were it not for the fact that they are English, and we had always an uncomfortable feeling that did we criticise them it would please the chauvinist Irishman, and we had no desire to flatter his narrow prejudices at the expense of Socialists, no matter how mistaken these latter were. But such considerations must yield to the greater gravity of the present circumstances.
It is necessary in Ireland as well as in England to emphasise the point that the policy of the capitalist at present throughout the world is the policy of pretended sympathy with working class aspirations – such sympathy taking the form of positions for our leaders – and the man who can not diagnose the motives directing that move BEFORE the harm is done, is a danger to the Socialist movement.
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