James Connolly: National liberation and socialism

Doug Enaa Greene speaks about James Connolly: National liberation and socialism.

In terms of his legacy, Connolly was not just one of the first socialists in an colonial country to take up arms to overthrow the coloniser, but he tried to build the type of revolutionary movement that could link national liberation to socialist revolution. The questions, alliances, tactics, strategies and theories that Connolly had to deal with in Ireland would be faced by other socialists in different forms, in national liberation struggles throughout the colonial and semi-colonial world, such as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral, Carlos Fonseca and many others.

In Ireland, following Connolly's death, his dream of an all-Ireland Socialist Republic was unrealised.

During the years of the Irish war for independence and civil war, his leadership was sorely missed. While the IRA's war effort get most of the credit for driving the British to the bargaining table, we should not forget that the Irish working class launched radical actions in support of the national liberation struggle — general strikes, factory seizures, sabotage of the occupation forces and even the proclamation of soviets. However, there was no revolutionary working-class party in Ireland to channel this energy and to put forward a socialist program and banner. Rather, the working-class leaders who followed Connolly subordinated the struggle of the labour movement to that of the bourgeois nationalists. As a result, Ireland was partitioned between the British-ruled North and the conservative neocolony in the south.

Emphasis Mine

In any revolutionary struggle, a revolutionary party, on the Leninist model, is vital. For this party encompasses the theoretical and practical knowledge and expertise bourne out of the long, difficult struggle. Such knowledge and experise cannot ne acquired overnight in the heat of the insurrection.

The importance of Connolly is that he linked national liberation with socialism. The true liberation of a nation required the liberation of the working-class as well, and vice verse, for the Capitalist class is internationalist in composition, but not in idealism. The Capitalists will stop fighting each other long enough to fight their true enemy: the working class.

It is time for the working class to follow suit by adopting an internationalist approach to fighting the Capitalist, but also to truly embrace the internationalist ideal in order to sustain the struggle. For always there lurks the evils of racism and xenophobia to disrupt and destroy any internationalist movements in order to get the workers to fight among theirselves.