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From International Socialism, No. 63, Mid-October 1973, p. 31.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
James Connolly
Samuel Levenson
Martin Brian & O’Keeffe, £4.00
INEVITABLY, this book will be compared and contrasted with Desmond Greaves’ ‘classic’ biography of Connolly, originally published in 1961. Indeed, Mr Levenson foresees this possibility and in his introduction explains why he feels that a new, updated biography is necessary. Firstly he believes that ‘there is room for a biography which highlights Connolly as a person and as an individual rather than as a figure in a history of the Irish working class’ and hopes that by exercising the ‘economic and political data’ Connolly ‘the man’ will appear more clearly. This proves to be a highly redundant exercise, and in this respect Levenson’s book is much less satisfying than Greaves’.
The second reason given for the new biography is much more important. With the death in 1968 of William O’Brien, who for nearly 30 years had controlled the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, his unrivalled collection of Connolly’s writings and correspondence was made public for the first time. The importance of this new material was that it might illuminate some of the more vague aspects of Connolly’s political and revolutionary activity – especially his commitment to syndicalism during his stay in the US and his eventual involvement with the bourgeois Irish Volunteers leading up to his participation in, and the leadership of, the Irish Citizens Army during the Easter Rising in 1916.
There can be little doubt that despite his subsequent split with Daniel De Leon (described by Levenson as ‘an authentic genius, with talents not much inferior to those of Lenin’) and the Wobblies, Connolly fully supported the syndicalist perspective on the means of achieving the workers’ state. In 1905 he wrote, ‘all actions of our class at the ballot box are in the nature of mere preliminary skirmishes and ... the conquest of political power by the working class waits upon the conquest of economic power and must function through the economic organisation.’ The organisation in question was the IWW.
Connolly’s shift from this outright syndicalist position to one which attempted to make the connection between economic and political radicalism came with his return to the historical circumstances of Ireland during the years after 1910.
In Ireland the issues were the fight of the workers against the Irish capitalist class and the fight of the Irish against British imperialism. There Connolly the revolutionary socialist comes to the fore as he tries to make the essential connection between the two superficially separate struggles. While the tactics of both Larkin and Connolly, leading the ITGWU were ideally suited to the workers’ economic struggle, the political struggle against imperialism was led by the nationalist bourgeoisie under the banner of Home Rule for Ireland. Even as the Rising was taking place during Easter 1916, Connolly remained highly suspicious of the Irish Volunteers’ leadership, but as early as 1914 he had already indicated the road which would eventually lead the working-class Irish Citizens Army into battle alongside the bourgeois Volunteers. In a letter to O’Brien he wrote (in 1914):
‘We are at present in a very critical stage for the whole of Ireland as well as for the labour movement. One result of this is that we have the opportunity of taking the lead of the real nationalist movement, and a certainty of acquiring great prestige among nationalists outside of the Home Rule gang, provided that our movement is in charge of somebody in whom the nationalists have confidence.’
By 1916, even though he had developed his perspectives greatly, Connolly had only vaguely specified the connection between socialism and nationalism. The impression remains that Connolly had the potential for resolving the dichotomy between these two philosophies in a specifically Irish context. But his execution after the Rising brought his political development to a sharp and brutal end.
So, there is very little that is new about this latest biography, despite the fact that the newly available correspondence is very useful in filling in some of the gaps in Connolly’s development as a socialist and a revolutionary. Given the choice between Greaves’ assessment and Levenson’s, I’d certainly opt for the former, despite Greaves’ straight CP line on revolution and socialism. Given the difference in price (the paperback re-issue of Greaves’ costs £1) that choice is confirmed. Yet the Levenson book should be read by all serious students of Irish history – and that’s what public libraries are for.
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Last updated on 14.9.2013