James Connolly, Socialist Republican

The streets which run from Edinburgh Castle down to Holyrood Palace and the Scottish Parliament are known as the Royal Mile. An absurd bronze sculpture of David Hume dressed as an ancient Greek philosopher lies along the route. Despite Hume’s own condemnation of superstition as the product of a “blind and terrified credulity”,^[1] tourists like to rub the statue’s toe for good luck. Further down the gently sloping hill is another grand statue of a former resident of the Mile: the philosopher and political economist Adam Smith. A few months ago, he was given a fetching red cravat—shortly replaced by a traffic cone balanced on Smith’s head. Other than the stray cone, this is the history which Edinburgh likes to project to the world—an image of itself as home to classical liberal thinkers at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment.

A grimy thoroughfare some two hundred yards away tells a different story. Every year a small crowd assembles to hear speeches and music in memory of the socialist republican James Connolly, who was born here on the Cowgate in the city’s Little Ireland in 1868. We have the James Connolly Society to thank for this annual commemoration, a working-class organisation dedicated to advancing his legacy. That he still inspires such devotion in the city of his birth should not surprise us. Killed in the wake of the Easter Rising which he helped lead, Connolly is a hero of Irish independence. But his politics are not always well-understood, especially when shorn of the socialism which animated them.

Connolly knew the miseries of a capitalist society first hand. The son of a manure carter and domestic servant—both migrants from Ireland—his early prospects were poor. Working from around eleven years of age, he filled ink cans and ran errands for a printer, suffered a collapse in his health during a difficult period at a bakery, then moved to a job at a mosaic tiling factory. But with hunger closing in, Connolly hid his tender age of fourteen and followed his brother in joining the King’s Liverpool Regiment, before being shipped to Cork. The British Army might seem an unlikely destination given his political trajectory, but there was nothing unusual in this path for a budding Irish nationalist otherwise facing destitution. Little is known of these years, with Connolly reluctant to speak of them, but he would meet Lillie Reynolds in Dublin towards the end of his time as a soldier. The couple married in Perth in 1890.

Now in his early twenties, Connolly already had experience as a labour organiser, leading a strike with his brother John of their fellow workers in Dundee, before settling in Edinburgh once more with Lillie. While neither the largest nor most industrialised city in Scotland, it was in Edinburgh where the most vibrant socialist politics was found. Here, Connolly’s socialism was refined among regular meetings, lectures, and even his own run for local government office as a Socialist candidate. His was a democratic socialism emphasising freedom and equality in economic and not simply political life:

Socialism teaches that the industrial system of a free people, like their political system, ought to be administered on the lines of the broadest democracy, by the people, for the people, and in the interests of the people. That the political equality of the ballot-box must be supplemented by the economic equality of the workshop. This, socialism teaches, can only be realised by substituting the public ownership and control of industry for the individual enterprise of the capitalist^[2]

There is nothing particularly remarkable in this early gloss on socialist principles.

More distinctive is precisely how Connolly’s early socialist appeals to freedom counterposes this condition with slavery and dependence. Commenting on the United States, he notes “even under political freedom the owners of land and capital are virtually the masters of the people’s lives”, such that there was a need for an “industrial emancipation” rather than “allowing the life and wellbeing of the entire nation to be at the mercy of contending groups of masters and slaves.”^[3] That criticism was also turned against Tories and Liberals in Britain, with Connolly urging voters to support Independent Labour or Social-Democratic candidates instead, who were

pledged to uproot every form of political or social bondage, to make the people in a democratic state the sole masters of the land and instruments of labour by which they live, to organise and lead the workers in their onward and upward pilgrimage from the dark Egypt of our capitalistic anarchy to the promised land of industrial freedom.^[4]

These lessons were extended to the plight of women, including the wife who “finds herself totally dependent on the exertions of the man, her husband”.^[5] Connolly notes that such a husband “may be an angel or he may be a brute, but whatever he may be he is the bread-winner, and she is to all intents and purposes his slave, bound to obey his will.” If women have to remain within the power of husbands to maintain themselves and their children, rather than the state guaranteeing them the necessities of life, then Connolly concludes that they cannot be free.

This language of freedom, slavery, and dependence is redolent of a longstanding civic republican tradition with origins in the ancient world. This way of thinking emphasises the threat to liberty arising from vulnerability to the will of another—being at someone else’s sheer mercy—whether or not they abuse their position of power. For instance, Cicero warns that the most miserable part of being a slave is that “even if the master happens not to be oppressive, he can be so should he wish.” Under these conditions, everything hangs on the master’s will. That insight was revived in early modern England by opponents of monarchy such as Algernon Sidney, who claims that “he is a slave who serves the best and gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands, and depends upon his will.”^[6] For Connolly, much the same remains true of a people at the mercy of the owners of land and capital, or a wife economically dependent on a breadwinning husband.

Of course, Connolly’s affinities with republicanism do not end there. Even in these early years, he was continually drawn to the national question in Ireland. His opposition to British rule was always combined with the insistence that greater autonomy, or even outright national independence, would not be enough to secure freedom for the people:

Home Rule would be of little use to the Irish worker while he was at the mercy of the Irish landlord, who could throw him out on the roadside, or the Irish employer, who could turn him upon the street.^[7]

Connolly also directed that argument towards fellow residents of Edinburgh sympathetic to criticisms of British dominion over Ireland, whom he urged to look closer to home, too:

Perhaps they will learn how foolish it is to denounce tyranny in Ireland and then to vote for tyrants and the instruments of tyrants at their own door. Perhaps they will begin to see that the landlord who grinds his peasants on a Connemara estate, and the landlord who rack-rents them in a Cowgate slum, are brethren in fact and deed. Perhaps they will realise that the Irish worker who starves in an Irish cabin, and the Scotch worker who is poisoned in an Edinburgh garret, are also brothers with one hope and one destiny.^[8]

The working people of each nation had much in common, including a shared enemy in the propertied classes.

Connolly would soon be able to consider conditions in Ireland from up close once again: accepting an offer as a paid organiser among socialists in Dublin in 1896. He quickly founded the small but influential Irish Socialist Republican Party, which sought to break with the half-measures of Home Rule, or even the struggle for national independence which did not trouble existing divisions of property. Again, Connolly would refuse to disentangle the political fate of Ireland from the circumstances of workers:

[...] the national and economic freedom of the Irish people must be sought in the same direction, viz., the establishment of an Irish Socialist Republic, and the consequent conversion of the means of production, distribution and exchange into the common property of society, to be held and controlled by a democratic state in the interests of the entire community.^[9]

That the solution had to take a republican form was obvious to Connolly. While some of his opponents agreed that Ireland must be subject to its own laws, they professed indifference as to its constitution, and thus whether it was to be a republic or a monarchy. Connolly dismissed this combination of opposition to foreign rule with neutrality about what replaced it: “Do our friends only object to tyranny when it is English? Would they hug their chains if they were guaranteed of Irish manufacture?”^[10] But the mere form of republican government alone was insufficient. Other republics had failed in the task of bringing freedom to their citizens, with the French Republic being nothing more than “a capitalist monarchy with an elective head”, whereas in the United States, “the power of the purse has established a new tyranny under the forms of freedom.”^[11]

The case for a decidedly socialist republic in Ireland was twofold. Without uprooting capitalism, there would be no end to foreign domination, since the economic power of capitalists knows no borders. Indeed, specifically English domination over Ireland would remain:

If you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country^[12]

Political independence for the nation without economic independence from distant capitalists was an illusion. But subjection to homegrown economic masters would not be enough either. Under these conditions, “when Ireland is free of foreign domination, the green-coated Irish soldiers will guard the fraudulent gains of capitalist and landlord from ‘the thin hands of the poor’ just as remorselessly and just as effectually as the scarlet-coated emissaries of England do today.”^[13] The class rule of the propertied in Ireland had to be defeated no less surely than the imperial rule of the British.

That fundamental analysis informs Connolly’s political activities throughout the rest of his life. But his conception of a socialist society is importantly modulated by his encounters with industrial unionism. The poverty which had prompted his move to Dublin continued to bite for many years thereafter. After visiting the United States on a months-long speaking tour, he emigrated to the country in 1903, hoping to achieve greater economic security for his family. His time there, including as an organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World, helped to entrench syndicalist politics as his preferred means for achieving a socialist republic. This strategy would have two strands: the industrial union and the ballot box.

Industrial unionism attempts to organise workers under the auspices of ‘one big union’. Connolly became convinced that this was the tool which the working classes needed in order to transform society:

to build up an industrial republic inside the shell of the political State, in order that when the industrial republic is fully organized it may crack the shell of the political State and step into its place^[14]

The model he envisions is implicitly federalist, with workers organising themselves into unions which govern the ordinary operations of each industry, while electing representatives who would form a national government. But in working towards this destination, workers would also use their power as citizens in casting votes to weaken the props of capitalism.

Connolly was not uncritical in his attitude towards industrial unionism, warning that simple amalgamation of unions would represent little advance unless their members were animated by a “proper revolutionary spirit”.^[15] But we might still worry that the citizen rather than simply the worker goes missing when “the administrative force of the Socialist republic of the future will function through unions industrially organized”.^[16] After all, not everyone does or can work, whether due to age, disability, or other circumstances. Nor are all our interests and aspirations best articulated from the standpoint of our working lives. Any revival of Connolly’s socialist republican politics ought to address these seeming limitations of his institutional and strategic thinking.

When Connolly returned to Ireland in 1910, he launched himself into further political work as national organiser for the Socialist Party of Ireland, including a campaign to introduce school meals for needy children. He would soon head to Belfast to work on behalf of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, becoming involved in labour struggles in the linen industry. An implicitly republican language had not left him, with an address to the “linen slaves of Belfast” condemning not only their working conditions but their own “slavish and servile nature in submitting to them”, which they must shed if they were to improve their lot.^[17] Connolly returned to Dublin in 1913, and was involved in supporting workers during the Dublin lock-out that escalated after William Martin Murphy dismissed hundreds of trade unionists from his employ. Particularly fateful was Connolly’s role in setting up the Irish Citizen Army to protect worker demonstrations.

When the First World War broke out in July 1914, Connolly was aghast at the prospect of men “slaughtering and slaughtered by their brothers that tyrants and profiteers might live”.^[18] But he also began to sense new opportunities in the struggle for national independence against the British. Nor was he the only one having such thoughts, with the Irish Republican Brotherhood planning their own uprising, and eventually but somewhat reluctantly admitting Connolly to their military council. He was aware that the Brotherhood did not share all his movement’s aims, and a week before the rising he addressed the Irish Citizen Army with a warning:

In the event of victory, hold on to your rifles, as those with whom we are fighting may stop before our goal is reached. We are out for economic as well as political liberty.^[19]

Any suggestion that Connolly’s involvement in the armed struggle for independence represented a shift from socialism to nationalism is rather undermined by such evidence.

The Easter Rising was put in motion on Easter Monday 1916 by around 1200 members of the Irish Volunteers, Citizen Army, and Women’s Council. Commandant Connolly led troops in capturing Dublin’s General Post Office, which became the headquarters of the rebellion. He was one of the seven signatories to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic which was read from its steps. But the rising was not a military success, with Connolly being wounded twice in the course of the fighting. Repeated shelling of the General Post Office made the remaining rebels’ position untenable, and they began to surrender on the Saturday of Easter Week. Connolly, still seriously wounded, was court-martialled for his role. Unable to stand when the sentence was carried out, he was tied to a chair and executed by firing squad on 12th May 1916.

Socialists can look upon Connolly’s courage and energy with admiration, including his lifelong commitment to supporting workers in their concrete labour struggles. He also provides us with a compelling socialist republican mode of thought, which holds that citizens cannot be fully free while they remain at the mercy of capitalists and landlords. In this he joins his American comrade Eugene Debs, who also believed economic freedom would only be possible when there was collective ownership of property, and that this would be “the basis of the real republic yet to be.” But in neither case was this to be a highly statist socialism, with Connolly being alert to the danger that “public control of our industrial affairs is still marked by tyranny and despotic officialism”, long before the tragedies of Stalinism.^[20] We still have much to learn from this socialist republicanism which puts economic liberty at the heart of its efforts. What Connolly offers in particular is an analysis that shows how anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism can be articulated in terms of a common opposition to dependence on the will of others. His thought and his life stand as compelling exemplars of a figure he would rightly praise: “the Socialist, enthusiastic in the cause of human freedom”.^[21]