Communists and the
Easter rising How did Lenin, Trotsky and other leaders of the future Communist International respond to the Easter rising of 1916? Various views have been attributed to them; D R O'CONNOR LYSAGHT looks at how Marx and the classical marxists regarded Irish self-determination. THE ANNIVERSARY of the Easter rising of 1916 provides the opportunity to consider it not only in itself but as a guide to those who reacted to it. This is particularly necessary in the case of the future leaders of the Community International. To them there has been attributed in turn uncritical support and in some circles an equally unscientific rejection of the event.
The two opposing schools of thought have agreed in acting in a manner to which their subjects would have objected. Their alleged praise or strictures are related only to Ireland out of the context of the debates in which their positions were stated. The result tends to benefit the new revisionist school of thought rather than that of its opponents. By the sheer scale of his abuse of Napoleon Ill, Victor Hugo added to that individual's importance when he was trying to minimise it. So, by isolating Ireland in Marxist thinking, those who hope thereby to magnify its importance therein succeed only in making it an individual issue that can be dimissed as unrelated to its advocates' overall views and dismissed accordingly. On the other hand such isolation keeps discussion of the rising at a parochial level that serves to boost the most bourgeois aspects of nationalism and give extra excuse for revisionists to declare their opposition to it.
The isolation technique is expressed in two ways, the one historical and the other geographical. Together they tend to turn the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin on Ireland into holy gospel writ unrelated to their circumstances.
The first point to remember even if it is flogged often enough today is that Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, unlike Arthur Griffith or the old republican Brian O'Higgins had as their priority not to win an independent Ireland but to achieve a socialist world in which such independence would in practice have less significance than 'home rule', through it would not be subject to British or indeed European landlord or capi32 talist imperialist interests. That this aim led
OUR HISTORY them to support Irish national claims gives this backing all the more value. They saw the Irish independence struggle as an important, if small contribution to meeting the overall needs of humanity. Of course, it could not fulfil these needs by itself, but it could help towards fulfilling them. Marx and Engels Certainly today what Marx and Engels decided about Ireland is less important than how they decided it. The world in which they lived was one in which the capitalist system in its then most advanced form (industrialism) was established only in Britain though it was developing in Europe, North America and later Japan. There was no one international economy though the British Empire was already one such.
'they saw Irish independence as a
contribution to meeting the
overall needs of humanity'
In these circumstances, Marx and Engels' approach to national questions could not be formulated as a general principle. They judged each issue according to its effect on the workers' revolution in capitalist Britain, on the democratic struggles in Europe and on the development of capitalism in Asia, Africa and Latin America. On the second basis Engels expressed the doubts that he shared with Marx about the war for Italian unity since it would tend to weaken Austria, then apparently the strongest German power, and hence strengthen Tsarist Russia, the enemy of European democracy.'
The national struggles of the Irish were a different matter. Both Marx and Engels agreed that the parliamentary union with Britain had to be ended in favour of separate assemblies that would be hopefully democratic and certainly more representative of their countries populations than the ald Irish parliament however, there might come federation. They saw that the union strengthened the landlords who dominated British capitalism and believed that because the union had weakened the Irish economy and impoverished Irish workers the latter were reducing wages in Britain, though this is doubtful.?
They changed their opinion as to how this was to be done several times. At the time of the famine and of the British Chartist movement they believed that the said movement's success would result in Britain breaking the union. Then Chartism collapsed, the Fenian movement rose and the American civil war raised the possibility of war between Britain
and the USA. England's difficulty might yet be Ireland's opportunity. Marx and Engels now considered that the Irish might establish their own revolutionary republic. When the Fenians had been defeated and BritishAmerican relations repaired they sought to involve their International Workingman's Association in the struggle by getting Ireland represented on its executive by an ex-Fenian. The International collapsed and British military strength remained too great for an isolated national rebellion so they changed their strategy to one of support for reform of 'home rule' (then understood to be close to what was then dominion status) as a possible means towards the end of full separation. Home rule's positive possibilities were increased by the decline in land prices caused by increased food imports from America and the Empire and the resulting ability of the British government to subsidise the purchase of the landlord's estates for the tenants to buy. Finally, after Marx' death, Engels welcomed the possibility of independent Irish labour candidates though he did not live to see them run. 3 The Irish question and the Second By Engels' death in 1895 a new Second Interdominated by conscious followers of Marx (unlike its predecessor), they had to develop his teachings under different circumstances. Britain was by now merely the oldest and least vigorous of several industrial countries, all dominated by finance capital. To increase its profits each of its concerns had their host country aid them in exporting their capital, thus uniting the world on their own terms.
This had two immediate results. In the first place the national question was no longer simply a series of tactical questions as to the best choice for individual democratic and socialist movements. It was possible to see a pattern in such choices and to deduce from it a principle. More particularly Irish national demands (like those of the Poles also made a priority by Marx and Engels) became those of just another oppressed nation.*
Several leaders of the Second International tried to develop general marxist analyses of the national question. The two most relevant here were on its revolutionary wing: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. (Connolly, another revolutionary was very much on its periphery.) The International's most prominent theorist Karl Kautsky wrote about Ireland in the 1890s and, as an honest reformist, in 1922. The first articles would influence all the revolutionary commentators on 1916 and a subsequent generation of reformists has disinterred and published his later work
International No 9 March/April 198;
William Gladstone: a cartoon after the defeat of the Home Rule Bill in 1886
Partly because she was reacting against the extreme chauvinist, petit bourgeois Polish Socialist Party (PSP), Rosa Luxemburg was for a time the pacesetter for the left. She had little to say about Ireland save in one of her earliest polemics with the PSp when she asked satirically: 'If the national liberation of Poland is elevated to a political goal of the international proletariat, why not also the liberation of Czechoslovakia,
As she considered all four demands (except perhaps the last) were utopian, the historical joke was on her.
However, Rosa Luxemburg's arguments were relevant to revolutionary socialists' approach to the Easter rising because they provided the basis for Radek's article which sparked off the debate.
Her main work on the national question appeared between 1908 and 1909 in a series of articles 'The national question and autonomy'. In them she used a wide range of facts to attack the Russian Social Democrats for their programmatic demand for the self-determination of nations. She insisted that this avoided the real national issues. In prac-
nation was economically selfsufficient enough to determine its destiny under capitalism, while under socialism no nation would need to make such a claim. Either way the valid, essentially cultural, claims of nationhood could be answered best by local autonomy within the existing state boundaries.'
Her premises were not wrong in themselves. Today despite an increase in the number of states bevond anything she imagined only the largest are genuinely economically independen: Similarly. under socialism properly urders:sed the right of the International No9 Var÷*::
OUR HISTORY nation will be reduced to a form of autonomy within the world state. Where she went wrong was in her lack of recognition of nationalism's continuing positive revolutionary
Her attack was not answered by Lenin until 1913. He did not reply to her points so much as transcend them. A nation that desires to separate from a state and is prevented from doing so is oppressed. Not only that but the people in the oppressor state have their liberties curtailed by the bonds of chauvinism preventing them from dealing with their own problems. Contrariwise, the struggle of an oppressed nationality against the oppressor will tend to strengthen that feeling in the latter. To Rosa Luxemburg's point that Polish nationalism involved the claim
'Luxemburg failed to recognise nationalism's continuing positive revolutionary role' just for independence from Russia, Austria and Germany, but for the 'pre-partition frontiers' and the right for Poles to deny self-determination to Luthuanians, Ukrainians and Byelo-Russians he remarked that this limited but did not negate the right; it stopped where it meant denying itself to others. He did not trouble to reply to her economic argument, merely stressing that the concept was a purely political one. As far as it was possible democracy and hence socialism would be served best by the division of Europe and indeed the world into units corresponding as far as possible to national entities.® Lenin's early writings on Ireland It is not coincidental that the period in which Lenin developed his view of the national question, 1913-1916, was the same as that of his major writing on Ireland.
Before 1913 his interest in the country had been centred mainly on Kautsky's description of the British solution of the land problem. He used it as an example of successful capitalist land reform.?
In fact the reform was not as thoroughgoing as he believed. Nor was it the only change that had occurred in Ireland since Marx' time. Then the landlords had been the backbone of resistance even to 'home rule'. Now the core of opposition was in the imperialist centre, the City of London, and its pressure had succeeded in debating the original home rule proposals. Now it feared that to allow Ireland's autonomy would strengthen opposition to its imperialist interests from the British workers and in the imperial colonies. Because of this it had used the Orange Order to stimulate the latest opposition to 'home rule' that existed among the Ulster protestants.
Lenin's Irish articles do not altogether take these factors into account. This gives his evaluation a somewhat one-sided perspective. Accepting the full solution of the land question and ignoring the new base for the
opposition to 'home rule' (the leader, Carson, he described inaccurately as a 'black hundred landlord') he tended to accept the inevitability of that measure (and to over. estimate its significance). '°
The strength of his anlayses lies in their description of the positive aspects of the current struggles; the growth of Larkinism and of a new independent Irish Labour Party with more staying power than that welcomed by Engels. he saw also that both the left (Larkinite) and the anti-home rule struggles had in their different ways the potential for educating the workers of Britain and Ireland about the real nature of their state's constitution. In common with most left-wing commentators, however, he under-estimated the ability of the reformist leaders to keep their followers from learning such lessons!!
Above all his commitment remains clear. In the last of his pre-1916 writings on Ireland, on 12th December 1914, he wrote: 'Our model will always be Marx who, after living in Britain for decades and becoming half-English, demanded freedom and national independence for Ireland in the interests of the socialist movement of the British workers.' The revolutionary socialists' responses to the Easter rising By the time of the last quotation the world situation had changed qualitatively as a result of the first world war. The Second International had collapsed into its different sections. Many once regarded as internationalists had exposed themselves as chauvinists.
In Ireland a possible military struggle against 'home rule' was postponed. The Home Rule Act was passed but it: . eration stalled until peace. Both home rulers and Rosa Luxemburg: polemicised with Lenin on the national question
Children in Belfast's Divis estate — one of the worst living areas in Europe. Worse than this was his complete lack of Luxemburg criticism of the inadequacy of its
unionists joined the British army to fight for catholic Belgium and against catholic Austria according to taste.
The bourgeois nationalist politicians knew the fragility of this agreement. The mere passing of the Home Rule Act could not maintain their followers support. So they claimed that the Act was in operation or that it would be, perhaps before the end of 1915, by which time they expected the war to be over. When neither event took place it was not an immediate disaster. Nonetheless, the failure helped the process of disillusion. 13
In addition, there was an economic factor. Many homes sold their breadwinners or their sons as cannon fodder and got in return a regular economic wage, sometimes higher than they had received previously. Neither this nor the ordinary pay rates, however, could compensate for wartime inflation. Working-class militancy began to revive. The ITGWU led a number of dock strikes. ' This was the background to the rebellion that broke out on 24 April 1916.
'Lenin was interested in
1916 mainly as a precursor
Cof general socialist revolution'
As it was crushed within a week responses to it from abroad even from the Socialist Internationalists, were slow to appear. The first came from the camp of the Luxemburgists. Though Karl Radek had broken organisationally with Rosa Luxemburg he remained her disciple on national issues. On 9 May he published in the Swiss Berner Tagewacht his article 'The End of a Song' based partly on bulletins from Theodore Rothstein, a future British communist leader. In it he applied to Ireland Luxemburg's teaching on national self-determination as an implied attack on Lenin and the Russian Social Democrats' line. 15
Radek's article is well-researched with a quotation from Swift, among others, but its analysis is weakened by its purpose. Its one positive feature is its recognition of Britain's strategic stake in its control of Ireland. Otherwise its argument is summarised in the opening of its second paragraph: "The Irish question was (sic) an agrarian question. ' For Radek the British solved the land problem, the farmers were subsidised ergo the Irish national question was answered. Even autonomy is not mentioned; Radek does not seem to have heard of the Home Rule Act. The rising is thus seen as a putsch by the 'purely urban petit bourgeois movement Sin (sic) Fein'.
The only mention of the working class comes in the last sentence: 'the proletariat — tho' negative, often hostile to (the republicans') ideals — has written their part with blood in the big book of guilt of those who unleashed the world war.' As this is clearly the proletariat of the world not just of Ireland, so it would seem probable that Radek saw the country as inhabited only by farmers : 34 and urban petit bourgeoisie.
Andrew Moore/Reflex perspective. All that matters is that 'the Irish question...has come to an end'. For Radek the rising had no relevance to the struggles against the war whether in Ireland or internationally. Not only was the Irish 'song ended but its singers had no role to play in future struggles. The most for which the Easter rebels could hope was that names be 'written with blood' in the proletariat's 'book of guilt'
Such a verdict could not be revolutionary Social Democracy's last word. on 4th July there appeared in the Paris based Russian emigrant journal Nashe Slovo Leon's Trotsky's article 'Lessons of the Dublin events'. Trotsky was a Russian Social Democrat opposed both to its moderate (Menshevik) wing but also to Lenin's Bolshevik concept of a necessarily highly conscious leadership for the working-class. He supported fully the party's formula of national self-determination but he agreed with Rosa
economic aspects not only objectively but as a subjectively observable fact. Accordingly, he linked national sef-determination to the demand for a United Socialist States of Europe.1
His doubts about the subjective limitations of the self-determination formula led him to make the weakest statement in his article: 'the basis for national revolution has disappeared even in backward Ireland'. Of course he was dealing with the concept of national revolution in the classic nineteenth century sense of a revolution headed by the bourgeoisie and limited to the creation of a capitalist nation-state, not to the phenomenon of which he was among the first analysts — the permanent revolution, which may begin as a revolution for national claims but must become one for working class demands if it is to achieve even its full democratic, political and cultural programme.
International No 9 March/April 1987
That such a struggle was a possibility for Ireland in his eyes is reflected in his admission that the rising 'amounted in practice to a revolt of the workers, albeit with an influx of petit bourgeois nationalist ideas. It was his belief in the spontaneous development of working class consciousness that led him to dismiss the possibility of that influx being the persistent factor it would prove to be. It also strengthened his readiness to dismiss the base for nationalism as he did.
His mistake was the less fortunate in that, as far as marshalling his facts is concerned, Trotsky's article was the best of the three future communists' analyses of the Easter rising. Like both Radek and earlier Lenin he treated the farmers as a bloc. However, not only did he stress the strategic factor (even workers into the reckoning (unlike Radek) and (unlike Lenin) his analysis of their role made clear that, despite himself, there was still a base for a form of Irish national revolution even if it would be fulfilled by turning into part of the greater socialist revolution that he expected for the whole British Isles. At the end he declared that 'the experiment of an Irish national rebellion' was over but that 'the historical role of the Irish proletariat is just beginning'. He did not see that, in practice, his second formulation would can-
• "such a socialist deserves
to be branded with infamy,
Tif not with a bullet," said Trotsky'
In the same month as Trotsky's article appeared Lenin was completing his final polemic against the Luxemburg view of the national question, "The discussion on self-determination summarised'. He published
Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata in including the chapter "The Irish rebellion of 1916', his blistering reply to Radek.'
This work has little descriptive analysis of the event discussed beyond his very definite correction of Radek's description of its class content: 'street fighting conducted by a section of the petit bourgeoisie and a section of the
Its main strength lies rather in its application of the principle that he had developed in his previous works: that the world war was not just leading to 'pure' social revolution, but that such revolution would include struggles for aims far less than socialism.
It has a second strength: a negative one. It avoids Trotsky's mistake of dismissing too readily 'the basis for national revolution'. It does not prophecy, however, a more successful Irish rising. If anything its comment 'it is the misfortune of the Irish that they rose prematurely', tends to imply what Trotsky states more explicitly: that such a struggle is unlikely. That Lenin did not believe this was shown in subsequent comments on the subject over the next few months. However, even these statements remain an assertion of possibilities that are on the same level as a possible rising of France's North African International No 9 March/April 1987
OUR HISTORY possessions. All in all, like Trotsky, he was interested in 1916 mainly as a precursor of general socialist revolution although he considered it a more effective catalyist than other colonial outbreaks by reason of its closeness to Britain. He was, after all, not an Irish republican but a Russian Bolshevik who did not pretend to be an expert on the Irish
For all the differences between Lenin, Trotsky and Radek, they would work together eighteen months after the Easter rising to lead the workers to take state power in Russia and then to found the Third (Communist) International to extend that victory.
this task neither Lenin hesistated to commit themselves to supporting the revived Irish national struggle. At the International's second congress, in August 1920, Lenin proposed: 'In Ireland, for instance, there are two hundred thousand British soldiers who are applying ferocious terror methods to suppress the Irish. The British socialists are not conducting any revolutionary propaganda among the soldiers, our resolutions clearly state that we can accept into the Communist International only the British parties that conduct genuinely revolutionary propaganda among the British workers and soldiers. I emphasise that we have heard no objectives to this either here or in the commissions'.? And Trotsky at the same Congress: 'The British Socialist who fails to support by all possible means the uprisings in Ireland, Egypt and India against the London plutocracy — such a socialist deserves to be branded with infamy, if not with a bullet, but in no case merits either a mandate or the confidence of the proletariat. ' 21 These speeches were made when Britain was
Tand occupying both Ireland Russia. Nonetheless a year after peace of a sort had been made in both struggles, in 1921, revolutionary Russia backed a statement from the International to the Communist parties of Great Britain and Ireland urging them to support the militant Irish opponents of the Articles of Agreement for a
Such were the Communists of seventy years ago. No doubt times have changed the
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circumstances. However, those who would argue that they must change diametrically
their perspectives should give their reasons or be quiet. Moreover, unless they can argue their case with the factual command of Lenin, Trotsky and even Radek, and with the dialectical command of Lenin, they will lose it by default.
Reproduced by permission from An
Reabhloid, journal of Peoples'
Democracy. Footnotes
Friedreich Engels, Po und Rhein 1859 (untranslated) Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, Moscow 1971. pp. 124, 133, 160-163, 281, 292-294, 324-325. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in Marx and Engels, On Britain, Moscow 1962, pp. 126-127. See Fergus D'Arcy, The Irish in 19th Century Britain, Irish History Workshop, 1981, for another view of the Irish emigrant workers' role.
Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, op. cit pp. 45-51, 97, 116, 143, 147-148, 160-163, 316-317, 329
331, 332, 333-336, 353.
Ireland's representation the International Workingmen's Association, see Sean Daly, Ireland and the First International, Cork 1984.
Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, op. cit. D. 3312.
Karl Kautsky, Ireland, Belfast 1974. See also Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon, Henry Patterson, The Stale in Northern Ireland, Manchester 1979. p. 19.
Rosa Luxemburg, The National Question, New York and London 1976, • 103-182: 57-58.
Ibid. pp Most of Lenin's contributions to the debate on nationalism is in Questions of National Policy and Proleterian Nationalism, Moscow 1967; see also Collected Works, Volume 41, 9. 329 3. 4. 325.
Lenin, Collected Works Volume 4, pp. 250-251; Vol 6,
p. 496-497; Vol 13 pp. 287-288; Vol 19, pp. 332-335,
48-349; Vol 20, PP 226-229. 10 Ibid, Vol 19, p. 332, Vol 20, pp. 148-149.
Ibid, Vol 19, p. 332-335, 348-349; Vol 20, pp. 226229. 12 Ibid, Vol 21, p. 106.
See Freeman's Journal, 19th Sept 1914, Ist Oct 1914, 5th Oct 1914, 10th Oct 1914. 14 See Irish Times, 2nd Oct 1915, 7th Oct 1915, 12th Oct 1915, 18th Nov 1915, 5th April 1915; Freeman's Journal, 9th Nov 1915, 10th Nov 1915, 16th Dec 1915, 28th March 1916. 15 An abridged version of Radek's article is in Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, New York 1984, pp. 370-374. 16 Ibid. pp. 370-374: see also Marxist Review, 2 Jan-Feb
Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 22, pp. 353-359 357, 359; Vol 23, pp. 196, 198. Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International Vol 1, New York, 1972, p. 125.
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Andy