'Jim' Connolly and Irish Freedom/Introduction
Introduction.
When James Connolly, Marxian socialist and Commander-in-Chief of the Irish revolutionary army of Easter Week, 1916, was awaiting his doom at the hands of a British firing squad, his last words spoken to his daughter Nora, expressed a fear that his comrades in the socialist movement would not understand this action. And few of them did. British socialists in particular, not all of them tho, regarded Connolly's heroic act as a nationalist gesture, not having any relation whatever to the class struggle. That Connolly was a revolutionist of the new type, a man who knew all the weak spots in the imperialist structure and also knew how to mobilize all the anti-imperialist forces against the enemy, is proven by Comrade Schuller in his excellent article to which those few words are an introduction.
James Connolly was born of proletarian parents in the northern part of Ireland. He was obliged to go to work for a boss at an early age. In fact, he had to lie about his age in order to evade the law regarding child labor. Early in his life he became interested in the socialist movement and agitated in Scotland, England and Ireland, before his first visit to the United States for a speaking tour.
Tho extremely active in the American working class movement, despite the mental agony he suffered owing to the distress of his family, thru poverty, Connolly never lost interest in the Irish revolutionary movement, nationalist and proletarian. He attached considerable importance to the necessity of reaching the Irish nationalist workers in the United States with the message of socialism. He founded the Irish Socialist Federation and The Harp, as its official organ. Of this monthly sheet Connolly was editor, printer and newsboy.
The Federation, and its mission, was sneered at in a superior manner by the official socialists and it gradually declined. In 1910 Connolly returned to Ireland at the invitation of some of his old comrades and he went to work in Belfast as organizer for the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, which was founded by Jim Larkin. Connolly held this position until 1914, when Larkin went to the United States on a speaking tour and remained there involuntarily for over eight years.
After Larkin left Ireland Connolly took charge of the I. T. and G. W. U. The union existed chiefly on paper. It was demoralized after the defeat inflicted on it in the great lockout of 1913–14. With all Connolly's ability as an organizer, he was unable to bring the membership up to more than 5,000 when the Easter Week uprising took place.
When Connolly took charge of the union, one of his first acts was to establish a printing plant for turning out illegal literature in Liberty Hall, the union headquarters. It was on this press that most of the revolutionary literature was turned out in the early days of the war.
Connolly was everything but a pacifist. A student or military tactics, particularly of street fighting he developed the Citizen Army, a military organization composed of trade unionists which grew out of the Dublin strike. This little army was the back bone of the force that challenged the mighty power of imperial Britain in 1916. The Citizen Army guarded Liberty Hall against the British soldiers and defended the illegal printing press with their lives.
Connolly was determined that the opportunity presented by the imperialist war must not be allowed to pass without revolutionary Ireland rising in arms against the empire. With this end in view he sought an alliance with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the descendant of the Fenian Brotherhood, which gave England a nightmare after the American Civil War. The alliance was consummated and thus Connolly brought about a union between the revolutionary nationalists and the militant section of labor, tho taking care to preserve the independence of the labor movement. He consistently pointed out that Irish labor was always betrayed in the past when it allowed itself to be made the tool of the bourgeois class who always sold out to the foreign enemy at the first opportunity.
When the world war broke out Connolly like other revolutionists expected that the social democratic leaders would raise the standard of revolt. He gave vent to his disappointment in language that burns and sears. He excoriated the social patriots and spurious pacifists with voice and pen. He said that the declaration of war by the capitalists should be the signal for civil war on the part of the European working class, that the workers should raise the banner of revolution when the "first note from the bugle of war rang out upon their ears". Instead the traitorous leaders "who pledged the life long love of comrades in the international army of labor" because the hangmen and murderers of the working class and the bullets that snuffed out the life of James Connolly were fired by guns directed by a British cabinet in which sat a member of the Second International, the Honorable Arthur Henderson.
When Connolly bid bood bye to his comrades in the union headquarters as he was leaving for his last fight he said to one of them with a smile on his lip and that laughing glint in his eye: "We are going out to get slaughtered. Stay with the union. It needs you."
When the gallant little army of rebels surrendered, neither Connolly nor his comrades asked for quarter. They insisted that their followers be exempted from the death penalty. The promise was made only to be broken, in harmony with Britain's record thru Irish history. Connolly was carried on a stretcher to the place of execution, propped up against a wall and murdered. The British knew what they were doing when they murdered James Connolly but they paid thru the nose for it since then and the debt is still unpaid.
In Connolly's death the Irish labor movement lost its only revolutionary theoretician. Connolly had little use for the windy blatherskite or for the cloister sociologist. He was a well-rounded revolutionary, indeed, as Comrade Schuller points out a true Leninist before that word was coined into the English language. His life, his work and his heroic death should be an inspiration to those who must carry forward the flag where it dropped, torn and blodostained from his hands. Not only is Connolly's memory a heritage of the Irish working class but his tactics in the Irish struggle against British imperialism can be studied to advantage by the workers of all lands. He is Ireland's most precious contribution to the international proletariat.
In publishing this little book the Workers (Communist) Party, not only pays a deserving tribute to our martyred comrade, but it also wishes to bring the attention of workers of Irish birth or descent in the United States to the necessity of joining hands with workers of all races in the land in which they are exploited to the end that they may emancipate themselves from the thralldom of the system which Connolly died fighting against and to erect upon its ruins the Workers' Republic which Connolly laid down his life fighting for.
December 20, 1926.