The Life and Times of James Connolly

given. The struggle continued until July 21, when Connolly told the committee frankly
that he could not raise another week’s strike pay. Realistically he advised a return to
work. This was happily averted by a loan from another union, and on August 14 the
employers granted an increase of 2s. a week.
During this period the Workers’ Republic had been reporting the progress of the
struggle in Wales. Connolly’s first comment throws some light on his general prognosis
of the war crisis, and hence on his policy in 1916. He complimented the British
workers on “waking up” but added: “We fear that they are crying out too late; the
master class are now in possession of such impressive powers as they have not
possessed for three-quarters of a century.” He painted a grim picture of the post-war
impotence of trade unionism, weakened by dilution of labour and deprived of its
customary means of defence.
The reason why Connolly saw in these struggles a last touch of autumn rather than a
presage of spring will perhaps not readily occur to the twentieth-century mind,
accustomed as it is to a steady crescendo of revolution. The last century was marked by
the slow advance of democratic reforms within the general framework of capitalist class
power. The suffrage movement carried the process into the new century, where the old
national-democratic movements met and merged with the new colonial movements which
were a popular reaction against imperialism. On the outbreak of war there seemed to be
a full stop followed by a reverse process. Monopoly capitalism was asserting its true
nature cataclysmically. But that it would call forth new democratic forces in proportion
to the check it administered and that these would be of incomparably greater magnitude
than their predecessors it had halted, was not obvious even to those who were most
actively stimulating them. The effect of the war on the labour movement seemed to
Connolly wholly destructive, since it was precisely its destructive aspect which was
uppermost during the year 1914-15. Therefore, he thought, something must be done
before the sands ran out and democracy was lost for a generation. This is the origin of
his deep sense of frustration which led such observers as Louie Bennett to describe him
as “embittered”. He was a living illustration of the historical fact that many a revolution
is begun under “defensive” slogans.
Connolly protested against the proclamation of the mining area of South Wales with
a touch of “I told you so”. But when the pit-owners and the government were forced to
climb down, he was loud in his congratulations. He made the miners’ victory the subject
of his leading article on July 24, pointing out that the “measure of liberty enjoyed in
Great Britain has a direct bearing upon the measure of liberty permitted in Ireland”,
and added: “It shows again that the only rebellious spirit left in the modern world is in
the possession of those who have been accustomed to drop tools at a moment’s notice in
defence of a victimised or unjustly punished comrade.”
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