22.11.2001

Our history CPGB supports Irish liberation

As the Communist Party of Great Britain emerged at its founding congress in August 1920, the British state was engaged in a ruthless war against the Irish. The republic pro?claimed by the 1916 Easter Rising had been drowned in blood by the British army, and in subsequent elections the Irish people produced land?slide victories for Sinn F?in, which called for Irish independence. In 1919 Sinn F?in MPs set up D?il Eireann, the Irish parliament, in Dublin and once again declared an Irish Republic. Within months the British branded the D?il an illegal assembly and issued warrants to arrest its members. The liberation force prepared for a guerrilla war. The Irish Republican Army was formed from the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizens Army, Ireland?s ?Red Army?. It seized weapons bound for the British army and got them from sympathisers in the USA. Britain poured thousands of troops into Ireland, including the notorious terror force known as the Black and Tans. When the IRA mounted an ambush, the British retaliated by burning villages, farms and factories. In Belfast the unionists called for a ?holy war? against catholics - this resulted in 5,000 workers being driven out of their jobs in the shipyards, and tens of thousands were forced to abandon their homes in nationalist areas. Irish working class militancy grew. Plants were taken over by the workers and run under soviet type control. Dockers refused to unload munitions for British troops, and railworkers refused to start trains if they were boarded by the Black and Tans. A general strike lasting three days secured the release of political prisoners who had been on hunger strike. The absence of any support from the British working class weakened the Irish struggle; with it the British state might have faced total defeat in Ireland and a workers? republic on its doorstep. Needless to say, this would have advanced the cause of British workers too. The following statement from the CPGB?s executive committee outlined the Party?s position on the war in Ireland.

Communists and Ireland

The news that comes daily from Ireland is in itself a summons to the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The recurrent series of assassinations and ?reprisals? is the most dramatic feature of the struggle. But of even deeper consequence is the slow strangling of the economic life of the Irish people. The closing of the rail?ways, the destruction of crops and creameries are having - and are designed to have - the same effect upon Ireland as the wartime blockade upon central Europe.

Step by step, the economic life of the country is being destroyed. Between September 1919 and September 1920, 90 villages and country towns were shot up, and in many cases completely wrecked. Between June 1920 and October 1920 30 creameries were destroyed. Over large areas rickyards have been set on fire by the forces of the crown. The destruction of the hay makes the winter feeding of cattle impossible. Even rich rural areas are threatened with starvation.

A nation is being murdered under our eyes - not in Armenia, but within a hundred miles of our own shores - not by Turks or Kurds or Bashi-Bazouks, but by British men, carrying out the orders of a British government.

There are communists who say, ?This is true. But it is not our concern. This is a nationalist struggle. And we are not nationalists. We are internationalists. This is a race struggle. Our job is the class struggle.?

That is a hasty and a short-sighted judgement. In such a case as Ireland?s - the case of a small nation held in forcible suppression by a great imperialist state - the national struggle and the class struggle are inseparable from one another. The struggle against imperialism for national independence is a necessary phase of the struggle against capitalism for the workers? independence.

Right through its history the domination of England over Ireland has been economic as well as political. It has been an exploitation as well as an oppression; and against that double tyranny the Irish have carried on a double war - for political and economic freedom - ?for our lands and our liberties?, as James Finton Laylor phrased it.

James Connolly was shot (a wounded prisoner, carried to the place of execution because his legs were shattered) as an Irish rebel. He gave his life for the freeing of Ireland. But he gave it too for the freeing of the working class. And the Irish republican movement today is the same movement for which he died.

Connolly himself had grasped very firmly the essential fact of the oneness of the two movements. It is the theme of half his writings. ?In the evolution of civilisation,? he wrote, ?the progress of the fight for national liberty of any subject nation must perforce keep pace with the progress of the struggle for liberty of the most subject class in that nation.? And again: ?The Irish working class remain as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland.?

That is as true today as when Connolly wrote it. The republican movement is essentially a working class movement. There are, it is true, middle class men as well as bourgeois by the chance of birth. But they do not mould it. They are being moulded by it. The strength and vigour and inspiration of the movement lies in the workers and the workers? organisations.

Its ideals go far beyond mere political independence. Even those who are not communists or socialists of any kind have some vision that their job is not merely the ousting of the English government, but the overthrow of the English system - which is the capitalist system. And the workers themselves see in the establishment of the Irish republic the first step - the necessary first step - to the establishment of the Irish workers? republic.

The republican movement is a workers? movement And it is the Irish workers upon whom the chief brunt of the Greenwood terror is falling. The big majority of the men and women killed have been workers. The dwelling houses burnt have been workers? houses. It is the workers who go in want because of the burning of creameries and factories and crops. It is the Irish railwaymen who are being dismissed in hundreds because they refuse to transport the troops and the Black and Tans who are terrorising their countrymen and devastating their country.

The Irish workers are suffering - grimly resolved to stay it out until the finish. And the British do nothing. Is it strange that the Irish speak of us bitterly, as men betrayed by someone on whom they should have been able to count?

They look for nothing from the Tories. They look for nothing from the Liberals. For they know the history of their own country, and they know that Liberal governments have been as prolific as the Tories in the matter of coercion bills. They remember ?Buck? Shot Forster?. They have not forgotten that Mr Asquith?s government, in the year of the rising, shot 14 prisoners, arrested 3,226 men, deported 1,949, and suppressed 13 newspapers. They count Mr Lloyd George and Sir Hamar Greenwood very typical Liberals.

But from the British working class they had expected better things. They have heard talk from us of international solidarity. In practice they see British troops - the sons, many of them, of trade unionists - shooting Irish workers. They see Ireland coerced with munitions made and transported by British trade union labour. They see Irish railwaymen dismissed, and not a murmur from Unity House. They see every foul device of imperialist tyranny employed against them with at any rate the passive acquiescence of the British working class.

They are bitter; they have good reason to be bitter. They have not counted on our assistance. They will not ask for it. They will carry on the struggle themselves, whatever the cost and whatever the issue.

But they know that we have betrayed them; and they despise us for it. They talk of us with contemptuous pity. And we deserve that they should do so. For we have betrayed them, and in doing so we are betraying the working class movement

For us, if we were to connive at these things, to claim for our motto, ?Workers of the world, unite?, would be merely to add hypocrisy to treachery. Not only the Irish but the working class all the world over is looking to us. We are being weighed in the Irish balance, and if we are found wanting, not all the enunciation?s of orthodox formulae, not all the protestations of the purity of our communist faith will save us from contemptuous dismissal as faithful, though sometimes talkative, servants of the British imperial oligarchy.

Executive Committee, Communist Party of Great Britain

The Communist November 25 1920