This instalment in our long-running series on Connolly follows on from a discussion of how Connolly sought to root socialism in a version of Irish history.
In his foreword to Labour in Irish History (early 1910, but already published in sections over some years) Connolly spelled out his fundamental ideas about the necessary link between national liberation and socialism in Ireland. They are suggestive of Trotsky’s development of Marx’s idea of “permanent revolution”, which proved to be an accurate preconception of the dynamics within Russia of the revolution that placed the working class in power there in October 1917.
The fundamental idea that the bourgeoisue could not lead the bourgeois revolution in Russia, was in Lenin’s exposition, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. But Lenin’s political conclusion was that therefore the bourgeois revolution would have to be led by the workers and peasants — “the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”. Trotsky faced the fact that the workers and farmers were not political equals, and that the workers would have to lead the peasants and the revolution. It would therefore be a proletarian revolution spreading into countries ripe for socialism. Becoming an international revolution, it could compensate for Russia’s unripeness for socialist transformation.
Connolly wrote:
“In the evolution of civilisation 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... the shifting of economic and political forces which accompanies the development of the system of capitalist society leads inevitably to the increasing conservatism of the non-working-class element, and to the revolutionary vigour and power of the working class...
“The result of the long-drawn-out struggle of Ireland has been, so far, that the old chieftainry has disappeared, or, through its degenerate descendants, has made terms with iniquity, and become part and parcel of the supporters of the established order; the middle class, growing up in the midst of the national struggle, and at one time, as in 1798, through the stress of the economic rivalry of England almost forced into the position of revolutionary leaders against the political despotism of their industrial competitors, have now also bowed the knee to Baal, and have a thousand economic strings in the shape of investments binding them to English capitalism as against every sentimental or historic attachment drawing them to Irish patriotism; only the Irish working class remain as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland.
“To the unconquered Irish working class this book is dedicated by one of their number”.
It was Ted Grant whom I first heard say that Connolly had “anticipated” the permanent revolution theory of Trotsky. That Ireland could have and was having, in the Provo war (1970-97), “permanent revolution”, later became the dogma of almost all the “Orthodox Trotskyist” groups in the world (though not of Grant), and even of the Socialist Worker current ( Ireland’s Permanent Revolution, by Chris Bambery, 1986). It meant that the Provo war and Provo victory could magically win over the Northern Ireland Protestants. It was never more than outright nonsense.
It is in the difference between Connolly’s formula and Trotsky’s that we can see what is mistaken in Connolly and in the latter-day Orthodox Trotskyists. Trotsky’s exposition of “permanent revolution” started with a precise picture of social forces (workers, peasants, bourgeois, etc.) in the Tsarist Empire. Connolly’s scheme, in so far as it was an analysis of Irish society, was not precise, nor developed clearly. The dynamic of the process that will put the Irish working class in the lead of the Irish struggle is nothing more material than “patriotism” and the desire for “freedom”, which the middle classes lack because of their investments.
Patriotism
Connolly propounded an ideal “patriotism” defined by his idea that the measure of the progress of national liberation was the emancipation of “the most subject class” in that nation. That was an appeal to right and justice, and an attempt to convince nationalists that they should be socialists, but not a clear and objective assessment of forces in Ireland and within a “permanent revolution” that would drive the classes almost mechanically. Mainly it exhorted workers to be nationalists. It was Connolly and his ideas that made the links. In reality they were not otherwise present.
In addition, Connolly seriously misestimated the forces he itemised. He stood on the perspective of a revolutionary social-national resolution of the age-old conflicts. Yet he lived in a world of unfolding national reform on the land, Britain acting from above, making small landlords from tenants (much to the surprise and dismay of Home Rulers like John Dillon, whofeared land reform would take the political drive out of Home Rule). And in the revolutionary phase of the struggle with Britain (1916-21), the Catholic-Irish middle class and the Catholic Church would keep their place; in a civil war (1922-3) in which an alternative to the bourgeoisie would not be posed, they would consolidate their rule [1]. Then there would be another era of national reform under both the Free Staters and De Valera, culminating in effective independence for the 26 Counties.
In any case, once the revolutionary period had ended, Connolly’s lucubrations lost all meaning except the idea that the working class is more nationalist than other classes. That idea merged into the current of mystical populist nationalism. Connolly himself had introduced the doubtful and very porous idea of “real” independence, or “real” freedom, or the real “reconquest of Ireland”: “If you remove the English army tomorrow 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... England would rule you to your ruin”.
Connolly meant to convince revolutionary nationalists to become socialists; but this identification of socialism with “complete” national freedom, the equation of the degree of capitalist rule with the degree of English rule, made it quite plausible later to give “socialism” meanings other than working-class emancipation.
In Trotsky’s exposition of permanent revolution, by contrast, a bourgeois revolution like that of France after 1789 was necessary for the peoples of the Tsarist Empire — an end to autocracy, the overthrow of quasi-feudal landlordism, the liberation of the oppressed nationalities, and the establishment of a democratic republic embodying “the rights of man and the citizen”. All factions of Russian Marxists were agreed on this.
Lenin was not satisfied with the conclusion projected by the Mensheviks, that the revolution, being bourgeois, would have to be led by the bourgeoisie. He insisted that the general schemas were not enough. The reality had to be examined specifically. The Russian bourgeoisie was weak and tied economically to the landlords, whose financial bankruptcy from an agrarian revolution would also be theirs. The Russian working class, concentrated in giant industries built up on advanced technology imported from Western Europe, was a great force, socially and politically militant and influenced and organised by Marxists. The bourgeoisie’s fear of the working class, and their knowledge of what workers had done in European revolutions back to 1848, made them timid and compromising. The compromising English Revolution of 1688 was their ideal. They sought reform from above by a modified Tsarism, not the radical destruction of Tsarism and the whole archaic social and political system at the head of which stood Tsar Nicholas II. After 1880 they looked to the Prussian model of economic and political reform from above.
Reality
This social and political reality, and not an abstract “Marxist” (or what in Connolly is essentially moral) scheme, said Lenin, led to the conclusion that a thoroughgoing radical revolution that would lead to a bourgeois-democratic republic could not be led by the bourgeoisie. The paradox was that although Russia was ripe only for a bourgeois revolution, the Russian bourgeoisie did not want to, and could not, lead such a revolution. Lenin’s conclusion was that the bourgeois revolution in Russia would have to be led by the workers and peasants. His model was the phase of the French Revolution in 1792-4 when, led by Maximilien Robespierre and stimulated by the needs of a desperate war of national self-defence, the Jacobins, at the head of the pre-proletariat, the sans-culottes of Paris, had pushed the revolutionary government considerably beyond what the bourgeoisie wanted. Robespierre, St Just, and the Jacobin terrorists had also stood for universal male suffrage.
Trotsky agreed with Lenin’s analysis, but not with his political conclusion.
Lenin talked of a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” that would force through the revolution and then be overthrown to give way to the social rule for which Russia was ripe, that of the bourgeoisie. Impossible, said Trotsky. It was not conceivable that the workers and the peasants would play an equal role in these developments.
The peasantry, scattered and atomised, is never independent in politics, he argued. It follows one or another of the town-based forces. In anything like what Lenin called the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”, the peasants would be led by the proletariat — or it would be impossible.
And was it conceivable, asked Trotsky, that the working class would lead a revolution, take state power, and not serve its own immediate class interests? He specified such measures as legislation for the eight hour working day; the workers’ proto-government, the St Petersburg Soviet in 1905, had already pronounced itself for this and roused the workers to enforce it by direct action. The workers would take power and they would hold power, carrying through the tasks of the bourgeois revolution but also pursuing their own direct interests and needing to establish social ownership of major industry in order to do that.
But, opponents such as Martov, objected, Russia was not ripe for socialism. A socialist workers’ government was not possible. Even if the Russian workers could take power, they could not inaugurate socialism.
Trotsky replied, and Lenin too in 1917, that though socialist measures would be premature if judged by the development of Russia’s economy alone, the Russian revolution would be part of a chain of revolutions which would bring into play such countries as Germany, where industrial development was, they thought, ripe for socialism. On the international plane, the Russian revolution could thus rise beyond its own inherent limitations, and create a worker-ruled, if relatively backward, part of a broader socialist federation.
So Trotsky alone could have managed without Lenin? No, wrote Trotsky in the diary he kept in 1935. After February 1917, initially the Bolsheviks supported the Provisional Government. When Lenin got back to Russia a major struggle to reorient the Bolshevik party was necessary to turn it towards the workers’ revolution. Lenin won that at the April congress. Trotsky on his own could not have done that. Had Lenin died in exile in January 1917, the Bolsheviks would not have done what only the Bolshevik party could do. In Trotsky’s opinion, the Bolshevik party without Lenin in 1917 would have played a reactionary role. Trotsky himself in 1917 had to concretise his own prophetic scheme and understand that it could not be made reality without Lenin’s Bolshevik Party which in fact, in 1917, adopted (though not by name) Trotsky’s 12-year-old views on the character of the Russian revolution.
Stalinism
Trotsky’s broader international perspective failed because the working-class revolution was defeated in Europe in the years after the end of the World War. Stalinist counter-revolution, with all its peculiarities, and not socialism, was the result in Russia itself; but that is outside our subject here.
By contrast, what is wrong with Connolly’s approximation to “permanent revolution” is that it is not a concrete analysis of possible forces that can achieve what he wants. That national freedom is measured by the progress in liberty of the most subject class in the nation is true only when socialists do the measuring or, here, the exhorting. That economic development leads to “the conservatism of the non-working-class element, and to the revolutionary vigour and power of the working class” is true in general of advanced capitalist countries. It was, ironically enough, potentially true in north-east Ulster, where the working class was socially powerful — but only potentially true.
It scarcely had grip in the rest of Ireland, which lacked industry, and where, moreover, the peasants were becoming small landlords. It was not likely to be true for a very long time. If Connolly’s perspective here was a revolutionary perspective for the medium term ahead, it was not a perspective for Ireland on its own, not even if north-east Ulster were included in Ireland — or it was a perspective for decades ahead — an epochal perspective of socialism, with no particular connection to Ireland as it was in Connolly’s day.
Connolly’s second proposition, about Ireland’s chieftains having disappeared or “made terms with iniquity”, its middle class being tied to England by investments (overseas investment by Irish capitalists was by then sizeable), and only the workers fighting for Irish freedom, was no better grounded.
In historic fact, most of the “old chieftains” were replaced by alien landlords, never bound to the people by ties of affinity, affection or acceptance. Those landlords had, by the time Connolly was writing, been sloughed off and replaced by myriad little Irish landlords — who had already, for themselves and some of their offspring, “reconquered” Ireland, and would hold it against the other Irish. Like the old landlords presiding over evictions, these new landowners already presided over, and through almost all the 20th century would continue to preside over, an incessant mass eviction of millions, including most of their own surplus children, from the country itself. They were already in possession.
Connolly noted the “thousand economic strings in the shape of investments” binding the bigger Irish bourgeoisie to “English capitalism”. He had in mind, perhaps, especially the Unionist bourgeoisie of the north-east — and not only them, but those also who would identify with Arthur Griffith’s pre-1917 Sinn Fein programme of an Anglo-Hibernian monarchy. And who, on the eve as they thought of all-Ireland Home Rule, had banded together to fight the workers whom Connolly, along with Jim Larkin, led in the Labour War in Dublin in 1913-4.
But the farmers and the middle class of the towns, organically tied to them by parenthood, consanguinity, trading and services, etc. and their clerical offspring, were the middle class that mattered in Ireland. Some of the bigger bourgeoisie of the towns and cities were Unionists, but the greater part of the middle class were not. They were behind “the Irish party” and Home Rule.
By identifying the problem as English capitalism, Connolly conflated capitalism and England, and defined away (or as “un-Irish”) Irish capitalism. That perspective also pushed him towards considering the workers of the north-east as socially alien because nationally alien — as not anti-capitalist because they were not anti-English.
Tautology
“Only the Irish working class remain as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland”. Yes, if freedom is equated with socialism. But then what Connolly writes is a tautology.
And, in theorising, he skated over the vast evidence which he himself had repeatedly recorded it and commented on it bitterly, that the working class was very far from being politically or ideologically separated out from the divided Irish middle class, North and South, Green and Orange, Green-White-and-Orange alike, and very far from being at the head of the nation. Connolly wanted that, and posted it as an ideal, but the middle classes would be strong enough to keep that grip.
Connolly’s idea was that there could be a socialist nationalism, that socialist ideas could “invest” and subdue nationalism and turn the green red. He would use the same approach with Catholicism, producing a pioneering version of “liberation theology”.
Connolly’s “permanent revolution” perspective was in fact only general advocacy of socialism wrapped up in a retrospective on Gaelic-Irish history. His arguments were an appeal to the idealism of those who wanted an Ireland unlike the capitalism of England and Western Europe, a call on them to fight for socialism. Such people were numerous, though by 1910 increasingly disabused. They included the romantic elitist W B Yeats, who saw by the time of the great Labour War, and his poem September 1913, that the Ireland of his dreams was giving way to the hucksters’ Ireland.
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
Connolly’s stigmatisation of capitalism as “the English system”, and his hope that Ireland free would be different, were part of a complex of such notions.
There is more, however. Leaving aside the great flaws in Connolly’s conception, the fact remains that even as Connolly expounds it, and though he expounds it as an Irish nationalist unfolding, “permanent revolution” could not be a nationalist perspective. Any international perspective for Irish workers must depend heavily on British and European workers. Connolly in 1910 believed that an international socialist revolution was imminent.
In terms of an Irish movement of a “permanent revolution” sort, even as a plausible bit of “alternative history”, it could only have been by way of working-class leadership of the war for the land from 1879 by the most developed working-class forces back in the 1880s and after — by the mainly Unionist northern working class. But religion, “race”, national identity, townspeople’s hostility to the countryside (triply alien for Belfast workers), and the geographical concentration of the industrial workers in one corner of the island, all worked against that.
The other “alternative history” scenario would have linked the British working class and the Irish land war, in a variant of what Marx had postulated and the Social Democratic Federation of Britain had pursued into the 1890s. Both those possibilities were vanishing when Connolly formulated his schemes.
In no case was “permanent revolution” an Ireland-only, still less a nationalist-Ireland-only, perspective. It was not, even when it could be plausibly drawn out of real conditions in Ireland, ever be an Irish national scenario.
Yet “Trotskyist” dialects call “permanent revolution” what the others call “completing the bourgeois revolution”.
[1] Ken Loach’s fine film The Wind that Shakes the Barley does not present a historically true account of the issues in the civil war. The Republicans in the civil war did not represent the workers’ republic, not even the infant Communist Party of Ireland.