Unlike many previous biographies of James Connolly, Liam McNulty’s tells us a story of Connolly evolving, and shifting and changing politically, under the diverse influences of the intense and lively socialist and revolutionary movements of his time, especially in Britain, in the USA, in Ireland, and in France.
It is not a story of Connolly as a cardboard hero who knew it all from the start. Perhaps one of the greatest values of Connolly’s writings today is in his evolving appreciation of industrial unionism and sympathetic strikes. The ideas originated not from him but from others such as Daniel De Leon. But Connolly synthesised them, gave them vivid form, tied them with practical experience in class struggle, and modified them in line with that experience.
Patrick Murphy’s verdict, “the best biography”, carries conviction. The book is a rich source for studying all the phases of Connolly.
On some issues, though, I think, Liam’s summary judgements contradict the evidence he gathers. Two examples:
Liam shows that Connolly in World War One was not (as sometimes claimed) an “Irish Lenin”. The difference of Connolly from Lenin was not a nuance within the same framework of working-class opposition to all the imperialist powers at war, like the other nuances of Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and the “Baugy” faction of Bolsheviks (Evgenia Bosch, Nikolai Bukharin, and others). Liam shows that after the first few weeks of World War One, “Connolly did pick a side in the war and he picked Germany”. He depicted the war not as the conflict of rival imperialist predators which socialists had been warning against for several years before 1914, but as one where Germany was not predatory: “Germany was fighting for the commerce of the seas and for the means of building up a sane civilisation in Europe”. He fell into “apologism for Germany’s conduct of the war and special pleading regarding the nature of the German Empire” (pp.286-291).
After piling up the evidence, Liam gives a conclusion which flatly contradicts it: “Connolly’s opposition to the war maintained an internationalist and working-class character”.
To support the conclusion Liam notes that sometimes Connolly signalled (in reported conversation, or by implication in articles) hopes of overthrowing the Kaiser. Such hopes did not make his stance internationalist.
Right-wing German Social Democrats not only had those hopes; on 9 November 1918 the right-wing German Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann did overthrow the Kaiser, by declaring the republic from a Reichstag balcony. That did not convert Scheidemann’s previous support for Germany’s war into working-class internationalism.
It was not a matter of Connolly aiming his chief fire against British imperialism because that was the main influence around him, so that his readers would not need to be warned against German imperialism.
On the contrary. A pro-German stance was well-established before 1914 in the “advanced nationalist” milieu in which, increasingly, Connolly moved as the Irish Transport Union dwindled and the Irish Republican Brotherhood grew in influence.
Narrow
The IRB never claimed to be more than narrow Irish nationalists. Their support for Germany in the coming world war — its shape visible to them as it was to the socialists — was a proclaimed principle for years before 1914. In the coming war, they would support Britain’s opponent, because victories for the opponent would weaken Britain, and the opponent might aid the IRB.
Victory for another imperialism might have bad effects for peoples other than Ireland? Not their problem. Their business was to care about Ireland.
(Another question is whether the IRB calculated right even in its own terms. If avoiding partition was a priority, and for some IRB people it was, then surely not. A German army entering Ireland would be unlikely to want, or to be able, to force the north-east under Dublin rule. Germany would have delivered more and better guns to the Unionists than to the nationalists even if the Easter 1916 consignment had succeeded. As far as I can make out, the IRB parked that thought in the “too hard” basket. Connolly too.)
After the USA entered World War One, on 6 April 1917, the IRB’s “parent” organisation, Clan na Gael in the USA, shifted instantly from backing Germany to backing the USA. From their point of view they were entirely consistent. The character of the war as a whole was not their concern.
As long as they could press against the USA backing Britain in the war, and hope for German gains, they did so. Now the USA had entered the war, the Clan must back the USA to have hope of influencing the US government, for example, to allow Ireland a seat at a post-war peace conference.
Liam comments that Connolly’s “backing for the Germans... [fit] into a wider context of widespread pro-German attitudes within the pro-separatist movement, which was a milieu he was hoping to influence” (p.291).
Connolly adopted the position which the IRB took from narrow-nationalist calculations, and worked to give it an internationalist, pro-peace, even socialistic tinge by way of arguments about Germany’s war aims being only scope for peaceful industrial development and so on. That was no service to enlightenment.
In his last chapter, Liam contends that Connolly had a better understanding of national liberation than the Second International. Again, his own evidence contradicts the summary conclusion. As Liam shows, “Connolly had long assumed that a genuinely nationalist revolution would simultaneously be a socialist one”. (In other words, he reconciled the “economics-only” bias of his Marxism with nationalism through the idea that capitalism in Ireland was an “English” imposition on an Irish people otherwise innately communistic). In fact “genuine” revolutionary nationalism and socialism could be and were “dissevered” (p.339-340).
Connolly was not unique in the Second International in enthusiastic support for a national-liberation movement in Europe. Rosa Luxemburg was in a small minority when she held that a restored independent Poland was a fantasy. The bulk of the Second International saw nothing wrong in the Polish Socialist Party (and Jozef Pilsudski, leader of PPS to 1906 and PPS-RF 1906-14) demanding independence.
The Second International, however, tended to see issues in Asia and Africa largely as a distinct “colonial question”. They were against colonialism as it existed (even if some of the right wing speculated about a possible more enlightened colonialism). Connolly learned from the British Social Democratic Federation to denounce British rule in India. But on Asia and Africa the Third International would learn much more.
A genuine forerunner here was Rosa Luxemburg, despite her view that Polish independence was fantasy and her scornful riposte to Lenin that his principle of the rights of nations to self-determination would lead him to independence for Ireland, which she thought absurd.
Socialists opposed Britain in the Boer war of 1899-1902. Most of them implicitly backed the Dutch settlers, the Boers. Luxemburg, unusually, championed the rights and interests of the black-African population subjugated both by the Boers and the British.
Liam shows that Connolly did not follow her on that (p.105); that his US paper, The Harp, had “a blind spot” on the treatment and struggles of African-American workers in the USA (p.163-4); and that Connolly “completely ignored Germany’s colonial dependencies in Africa and downplayed the brutality of German atrocities” (p.287).
More: despite the German Social Democrats’ loud denunciation of German atrocities in South-West Africa (modern Namibia), in early 1916 Connolly reprinted (with a note of broad approval) writings by Meyrick Cramb which positively praised German imperialism in Africa:
“Seeing that none of the German colonies are more than 30 years old, their development has been remarkable. If the Germans are kept out of Africa in the future it will be a greater misfortune to the cause of civilisation in that continent than if the British, French, Belgians, or Portuguese were to be kept out — not that any reasonable person would wish to see the people of any country deprived of their rightful share of a prize which is the common heritage of all Europe. Even English observers admit that in German East Africa ‘an admirable type of official has been evolved’...” (Workers’ Republic, 22 January 1916).
Connolly was a man of his times, living and learning from diverse and sometimes noxious influences. We must learn from the whole record.