The Easter Rising started on 24 April James Connolly was Commandant General of the Dublin Brigade, which effectively made him the senior military commander on the Republican side. The rising was suppressed after six days of heavy fighting, much of it in Dublin. Connolly had been seriously wounded during the fighting, and on 12 May was taken by military ambulance to Kilmainham Jail, where he was tied to a chair and shot by a British firing squad, one of 15 Republicans executed for their part in the uprising.
The British response to the uprising was poorly received by public opinion in the United States, and many believe that by creating martyrs the British only hardened the will of republicans in Ireland. James Connolly is commemorated by a statue in Dublin, and in the name of Dublin Connolly railway station and Connolly Hospital in Dublin. Edinburgh's Cowgate. Relatively few efforts have been made to think of Connolly in theoretical terms.
Why might this be so? But more significant, in Ireland at least, have been other factors : the political weakness and ideological timorousness of the Left generally, but especially after ; the status of labour history as a distinctly minority interest in Irish historiography ; even more, the weak and fragmentary nature of Marxist historical studies of Irish society, and their ideological differences and quarrels ; and more generally, the paucity of studies of ideas or intellectual formations in Irish history.
His personal qualities of intelligence, integrity, courage and hard work are recognised repeatedly, but his ideas tend to be scanted. These places where Connolly developed his ideas varied across his career. These are the focus of vast literatures in political theory ; my use will be loose and tactical. Yet he viewed all of this work as contributing to revolution. Both zones were amenable to revolutionary agitation, he reckoned.
In the programme of the Irish Socialislt Republican Party ISRP , published in , he argues for nothing less than public ownership of the means of production, the nationalisation of infrastructure, free education up to university level, a graduated tax on higher incomes, and universal suffrage. The militancy was there from the start, and the goal was always revolution. The question was always the means by which this would be achieved.
Connolly, across the arc of his career, changed the location from which he considered the revolution best promoted. It was distinctly Leninist in approach : a vanguard party which made propaganda to address the proletariat and contested the political realm with other parties.
Directed by Connolly, it sought to negotiate relationships of alliance or hostility, agreement or critique, with the existing political formations in Ireland : Home Rulers, Unionists, and more importantly and more radically, republicans. Connolly had to work out a position that encompassed national self-determination and class war : no easy feat. In doing this, he was affiliating his goal of proletarian revolution with the goal of national sovereignty, the aim of most other political groupings in Ireland, both constitutional-parliamentary, and armed-militant.
The zone of political party contest and interaction is left largely empty. The purpose of this essay is to examine that trajectory, and to arrive at a stock-taking of the political effectiveness of the various decisions and strategies Connolly followed. From these emerged the world of human affairs, from which all that is merely necessary or instrumental has been excluded. In the polis, action and speech gradually separated, and the stress came to be placed on speech — but on speech as rhetoric and persuasion.
Yet for the Greeks, it was precisely the realm of production that related to the domestic, and hence was, by definition, non-political. In this mode of thought, it was the linkage of the private realm with necessity , with the satisfaction of needs and wants, that rendered it separate from the political ; the latter, by contrast, was a zone of freedom and equality. Yet that freedom associated with the political realm was only achievable on the basis of unfreedom the institution of slavery and inequality in the domestic sphere.
Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence towards others ; violence is the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of the world. This freedom is the essential condition of what the Greeks called felicity, eudaimonia, which was an objective status depending first of all upon wealth and health. To be poor or to be in ill health meant to be subject to physical necessity, and to be a slave meant, in addition, to be subject to man-made violence 4.
To be free meant not to be subject to necessity, and also neither to be ruled by another nor to rule oneself.
Yet the importance of property, as a qualifier for political agency, has ancient antecedents, though we associate it now with the early Enlightenment thought of John Locke. First among these is the fact that in the Middle Ages society was not defined in terms of its political character, as it had been classical times. A society defined in terms of its political constitution is one, Taylor argues, which is therefore always permeable to that kind of power.
But the mediaeval period in Europe was marked by a diffusion of political power, where the authority of the sovereign was one centre of influence amongst others. Furthermore, in Christian Europe, the nature of the Church enhanced this pattern — it gave rise to a separation of temporal and spiritual powers.
The spiritual was subordinate to the secular in some respects, and the opposite structure obtained in others. But neither sphere was wholly under the control of the other, and the individual human subject inhabited both. Not merely this, but in the same context arose the notion of subjective rights. The feudal system of vassalage had a quasi-contractual character. Accordingly, the overlord was bound by obligations as much as the villein. To breach these obligations was a crime, and these rights were privileges enjoyed as a kind of property.
On the wider level, this system meant that the feudal sovereign faced a society conceived as a complex web of rights and duties. Combine this with the transnational authority of the Church, and the chartering of self-governing cities, and one has an overall socio-political formation with multiple and at times competing levels and spaces of authority, where consent must be courted and won for major changes.
The monarch ruled a shifting and unpredictable array of estates, which had to be convened from time to time but whose support could never be merely assumed. But against this idea, which was undermined by economic developments most especially in England and the Low Countries, arose the anti-absolutist theory of Locke, and, indeed, the public sphere earlier mentioned, as a zone from which power could be criticised.
For Locke, the society which lifts individuals out of the state of nature is a formation which pre-exists government. It is a community constituted under natural law, which is enjoined on us by God. The polity which is then created is supreme, but it has to respect that higher law, since those who set it up were bound by it and could not pass on powers they themselves lacked. So the political structure has a fiduciary relationship to society — if it is in breach of its trust, society can reassert its priority.
Noticing that this zone emerged in parallel with capitalism, Hegel and Smith and Ferguson suggested that civil society was the space of private or corporate economic activity : individual rights and private property. Civil society could be further divided into various estates, including agriculture ; trade and industry ; and the universal estate. Marx and Hegel both saw civil society as dominated by the bourgeoisie — with its economic needs and interests — but Marx, of course, saw this from an aggressively critical angle of vision.
Furthermore, Marx held a view of the state very different from that of his great predecessor. Where Hegel had a positive view of the state as the neutral summit of society, as rational and ethical, Marx saw it as shaped and run in the light of the class interests of the bourgeoisie.
Part of the importance of his view was that he widened the idea of civil society to take account not only of economic activity, but the full range of social and cultural activities and institutions in modern societies.
The dominance by the bourgeoisie of civil society reinforces its control of the state. But this also means that civil society is a crucial locus for struggle in social or revolutionary change.
For Gramsci, of course, this worldview would be that of the workers. The subaltern classes in the existing dispensation would prepare the way forward by a variety of civil society activities : building up institutions as most obviously unions, cultural associations, educational institutions, and of course, propaganda, or means of representation : newspapers, pamphlets, posters, songs, plays, performances, meetings, debates, and so on.
This task was to be led, Gramsci suggested, by intellectuals. Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates, together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields The persons engaged in this agon would be the intellectuals, traditional and organic.
Putting the case most bluntly, traditional intellectuals function as the legitimators, at the level of discourse and ideas, of the status quo ; while organic intellectuals forecast, argue for, give shape to, direct, and in significant ways actually embody, the emerging dispensation to come. In so doing, they create a new hegemony. Hegemony is that form of ideological leadership where subaltern sections or classes of society have so introjected the value-system — expressed across the spectrum of the superstructure, in religion, law, education, culture, even aesthetics — of the dominant classes as to recognise it as their own.
His every effort seems to have been given in seeking to expand the sphere of influence of the working class, and he was fully aware of the need to do this not only by setting up parties such as the ISRP, but also by disseminating the ideas of his party via newspapers, meetings, rallies and all the other discursive forms we have enumerated.
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