15/11/24

James Connolly, lost and found

by Sean Bell
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For what should be obvious reasons, you can’t review family. You can try, but no one is going to mistake your efforts for objective judgement, nor should they. 

So, full disclosure: James Connolly, the Edinburgh-born Irish republican revolutionary, Marxist theorist, syndicalist labour organiser and lifelong agitator executed in the aftermath of the Easter Rising he was instrumental in leading, was also a distant relation of mine – specifically, the brother of my great-great-grandfather John Connolly. With all that in mind, any resemblance the following article may bear to a review is purely coincidental.

As I am far from the only one who has drawn inspiration from Connolly’s thought, I doubt I will be the only one grateful for the recently published volume The Lost & Early Writings of James Connolly 1889-1898, edited, annotated and introduced by Conor McCabe. One needs no personal connection to Connolly to appreciate how immeasurably the works collected here add to Connolly’s voice, and provide a better picture of who he was as a person, even if that picture will never be entirely complete.

In his endeavours to assure that picture is as accurate as possible, McCabe has approached his project not only with a scrupulous and astonishing faculty for assembling and organising the scattered jigsaw of Connolly’s early work, but a keen awareness of how earlier republications of his writing have done Connolly a disservice.

Almost from the moment of his death, there were those who sought to change James Connolly into a divergent version of himself more amenable to their own preferences, prejudices and purposes. Infamously, his daughter Nora – though she was far from alone – stubbornly refused to believe her father could have been born in Edinburgh instead of Ireland. Growing up in Scotland’s capital himself, my father once encountered a trade unionist who, rather hilariously, could not countenance the idea that the great James Connolly could be of Catholic heritage. (Of course, there is also the bizarrely resilient legend that Connolly was a kit boy for Hibernian FC, but we’ll leave that one for now.)

Yet it is those who attempted to edit or warp Connolly’s distinctive political philosophy who are simultaneously the most frustrating and the most baffling, not least because you will – if you’ll excuse my bias once again – rarely find a theorist more cohesive and free from contradiction in their thought. 

Pictured: The statue of James Connolly outside Áras Uí Chonghaile, the James Connolly Visitor Centre, in west Belfast.

There have been no shortage of mainstream Irish republicans happy to valorise the martyrs of the Rising, who consider Connolly’s Marxism an unfortunate eccentricity that can and should be safely ignored; meanwhile, plenty of Marxists themselves – displaying exactly the poor comprehension of nationalism Tom Nairn would set out to correct roughly half a century after Connolly’s death – expressed condescending regret that such an impressive socialist should be swept away in petty, pointless nationalist struggle (though to his credit, Lenin – as one might expect from the conceptual progenitor of national liberation – gave this bullshit short shrift).

As McCabe’s introduction makes clear, these attempts started early. William O’Brien, future general secretary of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, set out in 1937 to prepare what he described as “the first complete edition” of Connolly’s writings, though McCabe plausibly suggests that O’Brien was fabricating wildly when he claimed to have Connolly’s blessing, and that O’Brien instead intended his proposed collection to “justify, as much as it could, the direction the ITGWU and the Irish Labour Party had taken since 1922, using Connolly as cover”. Subsequent publications of Connolly’s work and correspondence were edited in order to remove any complimentary references to James Larkin, with whom O’Brien struggled viciously and eventually triumphed over for control of the ITGWU, and portray Connolly as a trade unionist and ‘Christian socialist’.

A new collection in 1968 – an appropriate enough year – from the Irish Workers Party press New Books reframed Connolly as a radical who prefigured what was to come, linking his thought and legacy to “the Russian October Revolution, the liberation of China, the Spanish Peoples Anti-Fascist War, the Anti-Nazi resistance, in Cuba, and in countless battles in other parts of the world”, including “the revolutionary people of Vietnam”.

McCabe makes a compelling case that retrofitting Connolly as a proto-soixante-huitard was a more honest and accurate interpretation than some might think. “The James Connolly that that emerges from these early writings was a socialist internationalist and an anti-imperialist Irish republican”, he argues. “If there was a contradiction in this – as others have suggested – then it was one that was shared by Marxist anti-imperialist nationalists across what is now known as the Global South.” 

Connolly did not see nationalism as “some kind of tactic to win over the Irish working classes to socialism”, but as a “scientific necessity”, a view born out repeatedly in even these early writings, such as the 1896 manifesto of the Irish Socialist Republican Party: “[T]he struggle for Irish freedom has two aspects: it is national and it is social.” 

As will be recognised by those more familiar with his later work encountering these earlier writings for the first time, “there is no break to speak of, no ‘mature’ and ‘immature’ Connolly to any major degree,” but only a growing concern with the Irish question, which McCabe correctly states was “not done at the expense of his Marxism but rather was an expansion of it”.

If ‘68ers were finding echoes of Connolly in Vietnam, there is still no difficulty in detecting his relevance in 2024. It is apposite to read, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s re-election to the White House, Connolly’s yearning for the day “when a majority of the electorate of the United States vote for the installation of a socialist administration, pledged to uproot the last and meanest form of human slavery, the wage system of capitalism.” 

Elsewhere, an 1895 address to the Edinburgh electors finds Connolly enumerating the crimes and betrayals of the Liberals, which range from siding with the Tories “to protect the interests of the landlords” to having “plenty time to pass votes of congratulation on the birth of one ‘royal’ baby”. Plus ça change, etc. 

Connolly’s more artistic expressions have long been known in poetry and song – “Our demands most moderate are, we only want the Earth” remains, as they say, a banger – yet the forays into fiction collected here were a complete revelation to me and an even more surprising delight, the best being a short play entitled An Agitator’s Wife. Consisting of two monologues, the wife in question first gives a withering appraisal of her husband upon his return home at midnight:

 “My husband, my intelligent husband, ‘our gifted and energetic comrade’, spends his days at work, and his nights at committee or other meetings, and his Sundays on top of a four-legged stool ranting like a Hallelujah lassie, while I am left stuck up here to look after his squalling children, and cook his meals, and wash his clothes, and then he will mount the platform and tell the crowd that the Socialist party are the only party who, in seeking the emancipation of women, are actuated by principle, and not by expediency.

“Oh, for a right hypocrite, give me a socialist.”

After suffering through this tirade, the agitator can only marvel at what an “excellent propagandist” his wife would make: “And such eloquent invective, such fine sarcasm, such cutting irony!” Comrades, I cannot tell you how gratifying it is to discover that the author of Labour in Irish History is, among other things, really fucking funny.

Though the play is not explicitly dedicated to Connolly’s wife Lillie, the letters included in this collection demonstrate that a relationship with James, devoted though he evidently was, must have been a continuous challenge. “Let me know all about yourself and everything you are interested in,” he implores in one epistle of longing, before adding the important afterthought: “Except the Protestant Girls Society of Ireland”. Even love, apparently, has its limits.

Less intimate but equally fascinating, to this reader at least, are a few samples of writing from Connolly’s older brother John, who by almost every account inducted James into socialism during their youth in Edinburgh. McCabe does not presume too much, but he reasonably suggests that given his demonstrable closeness to his brother John, it would be “highly unusual… that Connolly made this journey to an anti-colonial Irish republican Marxism all on his own”.

The brothers, it transpires, shared not only politics, but a similar eloquence: “Thus, though the enemies of progress may vent upon our heads all the malice, the meanness, and the calumny at the command of the supporters of a slowly-dying tyranny, serene and unruffled amidst the storm, we can await the dawning of the new industrial era with a confidence, a trust, and a joy that passeth all non-socialist understanding.”

“So much has been lost over the years, especially in regard to John,” writes McCabe, “but even with that it is still possible to move him, however gently, back into the picture.” 

For that, I am indebted to Mr McCabe, as I suppose is the late Helen Bell – granddaughter to John, grandmother to me. There are many, after all, who deserve to be in the picture.

  • The Lost and Early Writings of James Connolly, 1889-98, edited by Conor McCabe. Published by Iskra Books.
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Sean Bell is a writer and journalist based in Edinburgh. His work has appeared in The National, The Herald, Source and Jacobin.

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