The Life and Times of James Connolly

Epilogue
Throughout Ireland are streets, houses and here and there a fine hospital, called after
James Connolly. Respect for his memory is universal. He is venerated as becomes a
national martyr. But as a thinker he is little understood. The most diverse estimations
exist side by side. Indeed, of all the leaders of 1916 he alone remains a figure of
controversy as acute as in his lifetime.
How is his significance to be assessed? It has two related aspects, one for Ireland
the other for the international working-class movement.
The juxtaposition of two ideas, socialism and national independence, is at the heart
of Connolly’s contribution to Irish history. At the outset he advanced the view that “the
two currents of revolutionary thought in Ireland, the socialist and the national, were not
antagonistic but complementary”. This had been Marx’s opinion. But it was not the
majority view among Irish Socialists, many of whom had been affected by the
cosmopolitanising influences of British craft unionism.
It was Connolly’s first great service to Ireland that he rallied the scattered Marxian
elements and built a single organisation, the I.S.R.P., based on revolutionary socialdemocracy.
Essential to this was the conception that Irish socialism was a native growth,
arising from the necessities of the class struggle as it developed through Irish history.
Connolly held that the national revolution was a prerequisite of the socialist
revolution. But he did not arrive easily at a clear conception of their mutual relationship.
At first he was inclined to identify them. Later he distinguished them as the political
and economic aspects of one process. Finally he reached the conclusion that they were
two stages of one democratic reorganisation of society, each involving economic changes
which it was the function of political change to promote. This is the significance of his
phrase, “the first days of freedom”.
It is therefore not sufficient for a man to hold up a red banner, call himself a
“socialist” and then claim the paternity of Connolly. Connolly distinguished three trends
in Irish socialism. His own, socialist republicanism, regarded national independence as
a primary goal. The other two, really varieties of one, he condemned as opportunist.
Belfast socialists tended to capitulate to sectarian feeling, push the national question
out of sight, and concentrate on “gas and water socialism” and the trade union movement.
This made them respected “public figures” but left the working class substantially where
it was. The same tendency in Dublin took the form of admitting the importance of the
national liberation struggle, but trying to present socialist tasks separately, as if the two
had no connection in actually existing conditions. This was to hand over leadership of
the national struggle to the bourgeoisie.
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