Difference between revisions 1012243809 and 1012251764 on enwiki

{{short description|Irish republican and socialist leader}}
{{Other people}}
{{Infobox person
| name          = James Connolly
| image         = James_Connolly2.jpg
| alt = A side view black-and-white photo of Connelly in a suit
| caption       = Connolly in {{circa}} 1900
| nickname      = 
(contracted; show full)hed a [[Shoemaking|cobbler's]] shop in 1895, but this failed after a few months<ref>{{cite web|last=Mac Thomáis|first=Shane|title=Remembering the Past – James Connolly|work=anphoblacht.com|publisher=An Phoblacht|date=8 June 2005|url=http://aprnonline.com/?p=58474|access-date=26 April 2011}}</ref> as his shoe-mending skills were insufficient.<ref>Levenson 1973, p. 39</ref> He was strongly active with the socialist movement at the time, and prioritised this over his cobbling.

==
Socialist involvementCommitted socialist ==
{{quotebox|width=30em|After Ireland is free, says the patriot who won't touch Socialism, we will protect all classes, and if you won't pay your rent you will be evicted same as now. But the evicting party, under command of the sheriff, will wear green uniforms and the [[Coat of arms of Ireland|Harp without the Crown]], and the warrant turning you out on the roadside will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic.|source=James Connolly, in ''Workers' Republic'', 189(contracted; show full)to the [[Irish Socialist Republican Party]] (ISRP).<ref>{{Cite news | last = Hadden | first = Peter | title = The real ideas of James Connolly | magazine = Socialism Today | location = London | issue = 100 | publisher = Socialist Party (England and Wales) | date = Apr–May 2006 | url = http://www.socialismtoday.org/100/connolly.html | access-date =28 April 2011}}</ref> James Connolly articulated its credo in "Socialism and Nationalism" published in January 1896 in the first edition of 
Alice Milligan's Belfast monthly, The Shan Van Vocht. Without a creed capable of challenging the rule of the capitalist, landlord and financier, the nationalism of "Irish Language movements, Literary Societies or [1798] Commemoration Committees" (in which Milligan was heavily engaged) would achieve little.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Connolly|first1=James|date=January 1897|title=Socialism and Nationalism|url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1897/01/socnat.htm|journal=Shan van Vocht|volume=1|issue=1|access-date=26 January 2021}}</ref>  

Sidestepping the link Connolly proposed between national independence and socialism (the "workers' republic"), Milligan responded by taking issue with the party's early suggestion that it participate in Westminster elections. If successful, he ISRP would be drawn, she believed, into "an alliance with the English labour" no less debilitating than the courtship of English [[Liberal Party (UK)|Liberals]] had proved for the [[Irish Parliamentary Party]].<ref name="Steele 1">{{cite book|last1=Steele|first1=Karen|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bAG_MyaeT14C|title=Women, Press, and Politics During the Irish Revival|date=2007|publisher=Syracuse University Press|isbn=9780815631170|location=Syracuse, New York|pages=39-40, 44-45|access-date=31 January 2021}}</ref>   

Ireland's first socialist party failed to branch out beyond Dublin and had never more than 80 active members.<ref>[http://www.davidlynchwriter.com/portfolio.html Radical Politics in Modern Ireland- A History of the Irish Socialist Republican Party 1896-1904 (Irish Academic Press)], David Lynch,</ref> Connolly clashed with the ISRP's other leading light, [[E. W. Stewart|E. W. Stewart,]] managing editor of the party's paper, the ''Worker's Republic,'' and sometime candidate for Dublin City Council, disputing his "reformism" and prioritising of bar bills over printer invoices. 

Discouraged by division within the party, and despairing over his family's poverty, Connolly was persuaded to emigrate to the United States in September 1903..<ref>{{cite book|last1=Greaves|first1=C. Desmond|title=The Life and Times of James Connolly|date=1972|publisher=Lawrence and Wishart|location=London|pages=166–7|edition=2nd|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=j9GfAAAAMAAJ|isbn=978-0853152347|access-date=11 August 2014}}</ref> 

===Socialist agitator in the United States===[[Alice Milligan]]'s Belfast monthly, ''[[The Shan Van Vocht]]''. Without a creed capable of challenging the rule of the capitalist, landlord and financier, the nationalism of "Irish Language movements, Literary Societies or [1798] Commemoration Committees" (in which Milligan was heavily engaged) would achieve little.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Connolly|first1=James|date=January 1897|title=Socialism and Nationalism|url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1897/01/socnat.htm|journal=Shan van Vocht|volume=1|issue=1|access-date=26 January 2021}}</ref>  

Sidestepping the link Connolly proposed between national independence and socialism (the "workers' republic"), Milligan responded by taking issue with the party's early suggestion that it participate in Westminster elections. If successful, he ISRP would be drawn, she believed, into "an alliance with the English labour" no less debilitating than the courtship of English [[Liberal Party (UK)|Liberals]] had proved for the [[Irish Parliamentary Party]].<ref name="Steele 1">{{cite book|last1=Steele|first1=Karen|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bAG_MyaeT14C|title=Women, Press, and Politics During the Irish Revival|date=2007|publisher=Syracuse University Press|isbn=9780815631170|location=Syracuse, New York|pages=39-40, 44-45|access-date=31 January 2021}}</ref>   

Ireland's first socialist party never reached beyond 80 active members.<ref>[http://www.davidlynchwriter.com/portfolio.html Radical Politics in Modern Ireland- A History of the Irish Socialist Republican Party 1896-1904 (Irish Academic Press)], David Lynch,</ref> Connolly clashed with the ISRP's other leading light, [[E. W. Stewart|E. W. Stewart,]] the party's sometime candidate for Dublin City Council. 
==="Irish socialist agitator" in the United States===
In 1902 Connolly embarked on a lecture tour of the United States hosted by [[Daniel De Leon]]'s [[Socialist Labor Party of America|Socialist Labour Party]].  Connolly toured the East Coast and into the Midwest all the while, sending the income from his lectures to the ISRP back in Dublin. 

His return to Dublin in the summer of 1903 was not a happy one as his remittances had used more regularly to settle bar bills than the publishing costs for the party's paper, the ''Worker's Republic'', and that the party was fracturing. At the same time, in spite of newfound political work with Scottish socialists, Connolly was struggling to feed his family. In September choose to return with his family to the United States.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Greaves|first1=C. Desmond|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=j9GfAAAAMAAJ|title=The Life and Times of James Connolly|date=1972|publisher=Lawrence and Wishart|isbn=978-0853152347|edition=2nd|location=London|pages=166–7|access-date=11 August 2014}}</ref>

When he arrived back in the United States late in 1903, he found De Leon cool and unhelpful. Because he was not a card-carrying AFL member, he could not get work with the ''Weekly People,'' as he had hoped. Work as an insurance collector kept his head above water, however.

In early 1904, De Leon and Connolly had a prolonged public quarrel in the pages of the paper over wage-increase campaigns. De Leon argued that wage increases would always be offset by price increases. Connolly saw that this position would drain workers’ campaigning energy and he fought back aggressively.

He also criticized what he saw as the generally anti-religious aspects of the SLP posture. Certainly, reflex atheism was not going to win much support for the SLP among Irish-American workers. But arguing with De Leon put Connolly at variance with the SLP’s rigid Second International view of history, which saw the collapse of capitalism as inevitable.

Where the SLP and the International envisaged capitalism’s demise as entailed by “scientific” laws of history and, hence, fore-ordained, Connolly feared that this attitude would lead to passivity and an unwillingness in supposedly revolutionary socialist parties to support proletarian workplace struggles. For Connolly, who saw the traces of the class war in even the smallest conflict with employers, this was anathema.

Yet it’s notable that, while he was in the US, Connolly wrote his most important book, ''Labour in Irish History'', which, anticipating Lenin by some years, tackles the issue of socialist development in a backward agrarian society head-on.

Connolly eventually brought his family to the United States and settled in New Jersey. Agitating in his free time, he continued to work and speak for the SLP in spite of the tension with De Leon.

The birth of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905 gave Connolly a new organizational and ideological focus. He quickly became involved. As early as 1898, he’d revealed his proto-syndicalist views when he advocated for the revolutionary function of socialist trade unions: “the trade unionist wishes to limit the power of the master but wishes still to have ‘masters,’ the socialist wishes to have done with masters.”

After George Stennenberg’s death in 1906, Connolly joined the Haywood-Moyer defense committee of Newark and became a significant campaigner for the Wobblies on the East Coast. The IWW was impatient with the established US labor organizations because of their craft orientation, their occasional ethnic exclusivity (which sometimes dismissed Irish workers as inherently reactionary), and their neglect of the most impoverished or marginalized workers. The Wobblies were also openly critical of the AFL’s corruption.

Under pressure from the IWW, the SLP was becoming more sympathetic to union activism — a transition Connolly supported. Eventually, the tension between Connolly’s Leninist support of vanguardist parties — the ISRP in Ireland, the SLP (though it advocated industrial unionism) in America — and his Wobbly syndicalism became too great to bear.

Connolly remained a member of the SLP until 1908, but he continued to clash with De Leon at party conventions. In 1907, he became a Wobbly organizer, which allowed him finally to break with De Leon and the SLP. In 1908, he founded the Irish Socialist Federation, an organization designed to appeal to and to recruit Irish-American workers, and started publishing and editing their newspaper, the ''Harp.''

All the time he was in the United States, Connolly strove to keep in touch with Irish comrades and to stay abreast of developments back home. News of the creation of an Irish syndicalist union, the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, in 1909 encouraged him to return to Ireland in 1910.

His American experience was crucial to his ideological and revolutionary development. When he left Ireland, he was the leader of a tiny socialist party that bravely but mostly unsuccessfully contested local elections; he returned with a new organizational and strategic vision based on the mass mobilization of workers — “One Big Union” — and the general strike as a political and revolutionary weapon.

This both strengthened and weakened him. On the one hand, the IWW’s lessons on the importance of mass mobilization and the strike were essential. Syndicalism taught him about the power-in-depth that could be exerted in the realm of civil society. This would rapidly lead to the tremendous struggle of the Dublin Lockout in 1913, when the city’s employers sought to break the ITGWU.

But Connolly’s syndicalist confidence that the revolutionary frontline was largely located in the workplace led him to somewhat sideline the idea of the revolutionary party as such, to argue for the necessity of working with a broad range of socialist, labor, and reformist opinion, and to think that revolutionary activity and even insurrection could succeed without grasping and defeating the machinery of the state.

This left him vulnerable when the ITGWU lost the lockout and when Irish workers responded in overwhelming numbers to John Redmond’s call to serve in the British Army in 1914. It fundamentally shaped his relationship with Irish republican revolutionaries during the rising.

His death deprived the Irish left of its greatest and most fertile leader. The tumultuous labor struggles from 1917 to 1923, when Irish workers declared over one hundred soviets and used the general strike powerfully as a political weapon, suffered from his absence.⏎

While in America he was a member of the [[Socialist Labor Party of America]] (1906), the [[Socialist Party of America]] (1909) and the [[Industrial Workers of the World]], and founded the [[Irish Socialist Federation]] in New York, 1907. He became the editor of the Free Press, a socialist weekly newspaper that was published in New Castle, Lawrence county, Pennsylvania from 25 July 1908 and discontinued in 1913. He famously had a chapter of his 1910 book ''Labour in Irish History'' entit(contracted; show full)[[Category:Members of the Socialist Labor Party of America]]
[[Category:Members of the Socialist Party of America]]
[[Category:Trade unionists from Edinburgh]]
[[Category:Signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic]]
[[Category:Social Democratic Federation members]]
[[Category:Socialist Labour Party (UK, 1903) members]]
[[Category:Socialist League (UK, 1885) members]]
[[Category:Syndicalists]]