WeeklyWorker

27.07.2011

Solidarity with Ireland

A young CPGB sought to rouse the movement in Britain

The dramatic background to the Communist Party of Great Britain’s founding congress over the weekend of July 31-August 1 1920 was the British state’s ruthless war in Ireland.

The republic proclaimed by the 1916 Easter Rising was stillborn and its revolutionaries crushed by the British army. Its defeat prompted some in the international movement to suggest that the cause of Irish nationalism had exhausted itself.

Shortly after the uprising, Karl Radek[1] wrote in the organ of the Zimmerwald group[2] that the defeat of the revolt - and in particular its apparent failure to ignite a wider social uprising - signified, according to the title of his article, “The end of a song”. It could only take the form of a “putsch”, he asserted, as the national movement in Ireland was simply the form that the “agrarian” question took. Therefore, with the peasantry neutralised by reforms, the rebellion was now confined to a “purely urban, petty bourgeois movement, which - despite the great noise it made - had little social backing”.[3]

Similarly, Trotsky declared the “historical basis for the national revolution” in Ireland had “disappeared” for the same reason: “... after the agrarian reforms of 1881-1903[4] the farmers turned into conservative small property owners, whose gaze the green banner of national independence is no longer able to tear away from their plots of land”.[5]

Lenin countered that a Marxist who conceived of the Easter Rising as a “putsch” - that is, “when the attempt at insurrection has revealed nothing but a circle of conspirators or stupid maniacs” with “no sympathy among the masses” - could only be “a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon”. Precisely as a living phenomenon, it “passed through various stages and combinations of class interests”, only one of which was the 1916 rebellion.[6]

In the elections of December 1918, Lenin was proved correct, as the Irish people gave a landslide victory to Sinn Féin, the party of Irish independence. In 1919 the Sinn Féin MPs set up the Dáil Éireann, the Irish parliament in Dublin, and once again declared an Irish republic. Quickly, the British branded the Dáil an illegal assembly and issued warrants for the arrest of its members.

The liberation forces prepared for guerrilla war. The Irish Republican Army was formed from the Irish Volunteers[7] and the Irish Citizens Army, Ireland’s ‘red army’.[8] It seized weapons bound for the British and US military.

Britain poured thousands of troops into Ireland, including the notorious lumpen terror force known as the Black and Tans. IRA actions against military targets were answered by the indiscriminate burning of local villages, farms and factories, by rape, mutilation and murder. In Belfast, the unionists called for a ‘holy war’ against Catholics - 5,000 workers were driven out of their jobs in the shipyards and tens of thousands were forced to abandon their homes.

Irish working class militancy grew. Plants were taken over by the workers and run under the control of workers’ councils; dockers blacked munitions bound for the British troops and railworkers refused to move trains boarded by the Black and Tans. A three-day general strike secured the release of political prisoners on hunger strike.

Yet, despite the heroism of the people of Ireland, the working class in Britain stood aloof. This fatally undermined the struggle; if our class had acted in solidarity the British state might have been staring into the face of total defeat in Ireland - and confronting the prospect of a democratic republic with the stamp of the working class on its doorstep and its mystique of imperial might and omnipotence perhaps fatally undermined in the eyes of the colonial peoples it still oppressed round the world. In Britain too, a victory for Irish revolutionary republicanism could have electrified the workers’ movement and put it in an immensely stronger position to settle accounts with its ‘own’ ruling class.

As Marx had put it in a 1869 letter to Engels, “The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.”[9]

In some ways, ‘get rid of’ is an unfortunate phrase - perhaps the translation is clumsy, but it implies the proletariat of England, Scotland and Wales divesting itself of an unpleasant and distracting burden. In fact, it is clear that what Marx intended to convey was the need for the working class of Britain to draw a sharp and impermeable line of ideological difference between the bourgeoisie and itself; without surrendering its political independence, it should enthusiastically throw in its lot with the struggle for Irish freedom.

The statement from the new CPGB’s executive committee seeking to rouse the movement in Britain was informed precisely by that understanding.

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 railways, 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 rick-yards 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,[10] 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.[11] 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.[12] 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.[13]

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 ‘Buckshot Forster’.[14]
 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 railway men 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 enunciations 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

Notes

  1. Like many other Bolsheviks, Karl Radek (1885-1939) was killed on the orders of Stalin. He had been expelled from the party in 1927 and readmitted in 1930 after the usual sordid farce of self-abasement. He was later accused of treason and confessed at the Trial of the Seventeen (1937, also called the Second Moscow Trial).
  2. Despite the centrist leanings of the majority, the Zimmerwald conference in Switzerland (September 5-8 1915) marked what Lenin called “a step toward the ideological and practical break with opportunism and social chauvinism” that had overwhelmed the majority of the Second International at the outbreak of World War I.
  3. www.marxists.org/archive/radek/1916/05/1916rising.htm
  4. Faced in the Commons with the Irish Party holding the balance of power between the Liberals and the Conservatives, Gladstone moved to conciliate it with the Land Act of 1881. This gave some security of tenure to the Irish peasantry and created land courts for establishing fair rents - far short of the demands of the Land League, however.
  5. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1916/07/dublin.htm
  6. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/x01.htm
  7. The Irish Volunteers were formed in November 1913 and subsequently split over their attitude to World War I.
  8. In 1914 the Irish Citizens Army proclaimed its intention to “to arm and train all Irishmen capable of bearing arms to enforce and defend its [principles]”.
  9. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1869/letters/69_12_10-abs.htm Emphasis in original text.
  10. The bashi-bazouks were much-feared mercenary troops drawn from across the Ottoman empire. They were irregulars, so lived on the proceeds of their plunder rather than payment from the state.
  11. James Finton Laylor (1807-1849) was an Irish revolutionary and an outstanding journalist. Laylor and others split from the Repeal Association of Daniel O’Connell in January 1847 to form the revolutionary-democratic Irish Confederation. After the defeat of the 1848 rising in Ireland, some of its surviving leaders went on to form the Fenians.
  12. Hamar Greenwood (1870-1948) was the last British chief secretary for Ireland, with a seat in the cabinet, from 1920 to 1922. It was on his watch that the notorious Black and Tans were unleashed on the Irish people (see note 13). Greenwood’s name will live in infamy not simply for this, but also for his crass comment in 1920 after the centre of Cork had been torched by these attack dogs of British imperialism: “Sinn Féin rebels” and the people of Cork itself were to blame.
  13. The Black and Tans (named after the colour scheme of their uniforms) were ex-army ‘hards’ and criminals who were granted sentence reductions if they volunteered for service in Ireland.
  14. William Edward Forster (1818-86) introduced the Coercion Bill in the House of Commons on January 24 1881 to deal with the growth of the Land League. One of its provisions was that the Irish government could arrest without trial persons “reasonably suspected” of crime and conspiracy - a forerunner of internment in the 1970s. Suspicions arose that Forster used the bill to order police to fire on a crowd of demonstrators - thus, ‘Buckshot Forster’.