"The Citizen Army is out today and if you wonder why,
Go ask the Lords of the Banking House if their cash returns be high,
For if they are there and we are here and a fight to the knife again,
The Citizen Army is out today, come, workers, [illegible]
James Connolly
It is important for socialists to remember and honour our heroes and martyrs, their example inspires us, lifts us above the day-to-day struggles and petty frustrations, gives us a standard by which to measure our own efforts and a scale by which to judge our disagreements and factional disputes. It is no accident that the murder of Che in Bolivia was followed by a massive radicalisation of youth all over the world, for them the slogan "Che lives!" is as potent and relevant as any economic demand or programme for social advance, and without this spontaneous upsurge of altruism and solidarity a socialist society would be impossible.
This month sees the centenary of the birth of James Connolly, the Irish marxist, trade union leader and republican revolutionary, Connolly was born on June 5th 1868 in Edinburgh to parents who had emigrated to Scotland from County Monaghan.
Connolly did not actually go to Ireland until 1896, when he founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party; his close friend and fellow veteran of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, William O'Brien, recalls him during those early years as "a low sized sturdily built man with a pronounced Scottish accent." In 1898 he founded his first paper THE WORKERS REPUBLIC and spent some years propagandising for socialism before being forced to emigrate to America in 1903,
In America Connolly had a variety of jobs, finally becoming an organiser for the famous WOBBLIES - the Industrial Workers of the World, His experiences of this period had a great effect on him and turned him into an able trade union agitator,
But the call of Ireland was strong, and in 1910 he returned with the aid of Irish friends and well wishers to take up work for the Irish Transport and General Workers Union,
Connolly's experiences and ideas formed in the US helped to build the ITGWU, and the Irish Labour movement into a powerful force, the employers were not slow in reacting to this and in 1913 they provoked the Dublin Lock Out in an attempt to smash trade unionism, Despite all the power of the employers, their attempt to enforce the signing of the "document" - a declaration that employees would repudiate or refrain from joining the ITGWU, the co-operation they received from the British-imperialist forces, the starvation imposed upon thousands of innocent men, women and children, the workers held firm, and despite being forced to give concessions, they won the right to organise the union of their choice,
The outbreak of the First World War was a turning point for Connolly, he had always urged that the Irish Workers fight for Irish independence, recognising the importance of the struggle against imperialism, Now he saw the opportunity. The outbreak of war had meant the selling out of a large section of the petit bourgeois nationalist movement, with Redmond sharing platforms with the British Prime Minister to urge Irishmen to march off to die for their oppressors. But a section stood firm and in September 1915 a conference was called of those sections of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Volunteers, leaders of the Irish labour movement and Irish Citizen Army. At this conference Connolly urged that definite preparations for an armed uprising be made,
Thus on Easter Monday, April 24th 1916, units of the Citizen Army and the Volunteers established positions in the GPO, Stephen's Green and City Hall area, while proclamations of the "Provisional Government of the Irish Republic" were posted all over Dublin, announcing that Ireland was a "sovereign independent state, and claiming the allegiance of all Irish men and women,
The fighting was bitter, and the Volunteers and Citizen Army men fought tenaciously, Despite their small numbers their street fighting methods - worked out by Connolly - were very effective, but the outcome was inevitable and on April 29th Pearse, Connolly, who had been severely wounded during the fighting in the GPO, and McDonagh, signed the instrument of surrender, The decisive factor had been the bringing of gunboats up the Liffey to bombard the GPO, Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the ITGWU, and, incidentally, large areas of Dublin surrounding them,
On May 12th 1916, too ill from his wounds to stand up, Connolly was shot, propped up on a stretcher. How typical of the hatred and baseness with which imperialism treats brave men who defy it!
CONNOLLY'S IDEAS
What of Connolly's ideas? What can we learn from them today? Connolly's writings reveal him as a first class socialist propagandist, with a firm grasp of basic marxist ideas, and a knack of explaining them in simple terms, He did not, however, have a deep theoretical understanding of marxism, and tended to echo syndicalist and De Leonist ideas rather uncritically, but on the major questions which faced him, he was always correct, and he had that quality without which the most brilliant theoretician will inevitably betray, as did Kautsky and Plekhanov, tremendous personal courage,
It has been said that Connolly was wrong to participate in the Easter Rising, and that he should have concentrated on building a workers movement, Such an argument ignores the concrete situation, Irish labour could never emancipate itself until British imperialism had been defeated, It was Connolly's duty as a revolutionary to strike the blow when it was most opportune - the middle of the imperialist war. Connolly had no illusions about his fate. William O'Brien recalls: "As we parted shortly before noon on that Easter Monday of 1916 he whispered to me 'We are going out to be slaughtered!, When I asked 'Is there no hope?!' he replied 'None whatever', Yet I never saw him look happier or more satisfied. [illegible] flame of [illegible] was not [illegible] up at [illegible] embers is a reflection on the other leaders of Irish labour - not on Connolly,