Connolly’s life; Between Comrades letters and correspondence Review

James Connolly is an icon on the Irish socialist and republican left. Connolly cut his political teeth in Scotland where he was involved with the Socialist Democratic Federation and the Scottish Socialist Federation before coming to Ireland in 1896. Following the failure of the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) which he founded that year, Connolly spent seven years in the United States, returning to Ireland in 1910 when he worked with James Larkin and the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU). After the 1913 lockout and the beginning of the First World War the following year, he was commandant of the Irish Citizen Army and joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He took a leading role in the failed Easter 1916 rising in Dublin against British rule and was executed in May.

Between Comrades, Letters and Correspondence 1989 – 1916 is a huge tome. Once you get past the many letters of requests for payment for papers or pamphlets, once you get into the heart of the volume, in particular the longer letters, the book is unputdownable. The frank exchanges between Connolly and Carstairs Matheson, editor of The Socialist in Scotland, which Connolly also co-founded, are riveting. At one point Matheson says he wishes he possessed Connolly’s “manly brutality”. At another, he refers to his “confoundedly disagreeable integrity and incorruptibility”.

And Connolly’s “manly brutality” is certainly in evidence in his vitriol against those who provoked his ire. He was a man who didn’t suffer fools gladly.

His grievance at the Irish comrades who he held responsible for his having to leave Ireland with the failure of the ISRP in 1903 is in evidence here, “Handicapped as I am with a large family, it is not an easy thing to move about the world. And at any rate I regard Ireland, or at least the socialist part of Ireland which is all I care for, as having thrown me out and I do not wish to return like a dog to his vomit.”

He vented his spleen against De Leon, leader of the US Socialist Labor Party, a left wing group in the Second International, at every possible opportunity, for the American’s sectarianism – a running theme right throughout the book.

Laced through the letters is evidence of his abject poverty. In Connolly’s exchanges with William O’Brien written during his stay in the USA, we learn how the comrades in Ireland are looking for a leader and there are many requests for Connolly to come home again.

But Connolly is adamant he will not go back to living in the slums as he had had to do working for the ISRP. He emphatically states that unless he has some way to satisfactorily settle the problem of how to live – nothing less that £2 a week will do – he will not venture back to Ireland.

“I did that once before when they (his children) were very small, and some of them not yet born, and you know that the result was not very satisfactory. It makes me shudder even yet when I think of the hard grind of those poverty stricken years, of the hunger and the wretchedness we endured to build up a party in Ireland. And you know the outcome.” The many letters asking, pleading, pestering people to honor payments for pamphlets or papers are clear evidence of the dire straights he was in for most of his life.

On returning to Ireland in 1910 he worked for the Irish trade union leader “Big Jim Larkin” and founded the Irish Labour Party in 1912. Connolly thought Home Rule for Ireland was inevitable and that the best the working class could do was fight for reforms and socialism through parliament. When the war broke out he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and threw himself behind the nationalists, hoping that England’s involvement in the European war would prove Ireland’s opportunity to break free.

There was a burning need for the total Connolly picture and Between Comrades is very welcome in this regard. But this book lacks context. On its own it in no way explains for example why Connolly is so vehemently against the German Marxist Bebel’s book on women, which explains their oppression and champions their political and social emancipation.

Was there a connection between Connolly’s position on women and his religious sentiments? In joining the IRB in 1914 in the run up to the Easter Rising why did he “lower the red flag to the green”?

The answers to these questions are not to be found in the Letters and Correspondence, nor could they be. Nevertheless any reader who wants to gain a full understanding of Connolly’s political ideology and connect the dots will want to know more.

After reading Between Comrades I sought out the only book I know that answers all the questions that the Letters provoke: Connolly, A Marxist Analysis. Co-written in 1990 by Andy Johnston, Jim Larragy and Eddie McWilliams, all comrades in the Irish Workers Group, it is the most thoroughgoing, and a truly Marxist analysis of Connolly’s politics. These two books make excellent companion pieces. All the questions that arise on reading Between Comrades are explored in depth in the IWG’s Connolly, A Marxist Analysis (available at www.permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=352).

So for example, we learn that on the debate on women’s oppression in the Second International Connolly was on the one hand uninformed, as evident in the many letters excoriating Bebel’s book on women to be found in this volume. But seriously entrenched opposition to the developing consensus in the left of the international socialist movement stemmed from Connolly’s concessions to religion, which he claimed should be left as a sphere outside of politics.

On the national question, Connolly, decided in 1896 that any form of bourgeois national independence was impossible and that freedom from British rule would inevitably see socialism in Ireland. This seriously and fatally underestimated he need for a serious fight to break the working class from illusions in the nationalists who would otherwise use independence to merely enlarge their own exploitation of the Irish working class.

After the trade unions were defeated in the 1913 Dublin lock out, and with the shelving of Home Rule and the threat of partition, Connolly was impatient to use England’s war as Ireland’s chance to strike against imperialism.

To this end he joined the IRB. Connolly’s much acclaimed slogan “The cause of Ireland is the cause of labour, the cause of labour is the cause of Ireland” far from being a leap forward for Marxism in Ireland, in reality embodied a profound confusion. As a slogan it serves to liquidate the political independence of the working class into revolutionary nationalism. That has been the fateful legacy of Connolly to the socialist movement in Ireland.

But Between Comrades let’s us in to the soul and heart of Connolly, a true giant of 20th century Irish and indeed world socialist politics. Captured by the British, gravely wounded and knowing the firing squad awaited him, Connolly writes to his wife, “Don’t cry, Lillie, you’ll unman me”. “But your beautiful life, James,” she says, “your beautiful life”. To which Connolly replies, “Hasn’t it been a full life, Lillie? And isn’t it a good end?”

Sat 04, October 2008 @ 13:16