The way to a workers’ republic: A workers' guide to Ireland

What is wrong with physical force republicanism?

By James Connolly

Ireland occupies a position among the nations of the earth unique in a great variety of its aspects, but in no one particular is this singularity more marked than in the possession of what is known as a “physical force party” — a party, that is to say, whose members are united upon no one point, and agree upon no single principle, except upon the use of physical force as the sole means of settling the dispute between the people of this country and the governing power of Great Britain.
Other countries and other peoples have, from time to time, appealed to what the first French Revolutionists picturesquely described as the “sacred right of insurrection”, but in so appealing they acted under the inspiration of, and combatted for, some great governing principle of political and social life upon which they, to a man, were in absolute agreement. The latter-day high falutin’ “hillside” man, on the other hand, exalts into a principle that which the revolutionists of other countries have looked upon as a weapon, and in his gatherings prohibits all discussion of those principles which formed the main strength of his prototypes elsewhere and made the successful use of that weapon possible.
Socialists believe that the question of force is of very minor importance; the really important question is of the principles upon which is based the movement that may or may not need the use of force to realise its object.
Here, then, is the immense difference between the Socialist Republicans and our friends the physical force men. The latter, by stifling all discussions of principles, earn the passive and fleeting commendation of the unthinking multitude; the former, by insisting upon a thorough understanding of their basic principles, do not so readily attract the multitude, but do attract the hold the more thoughtful amongst them. It is the difference betwixt a mob in revolt and an army in preparation. The mob who would cheer a speaker referring to the hopes of a physical force movement would, in the very hour of apparent success, be utterly disorganised and divided by the passage through the British Legislature of any trumpery Home Rule Bill. The army of class-conscious workers organising under the banner of the Socialist Republican Party, strong in their knowledge of economic truth and firmly grounded in their revolutionary principles, would remain entirely unaffected by any such manoeuvre and, knowing that it would not change their position as a subject class, would still press forward, resolute and undivided, with their faces set towards their only hope of emancipation — the complete control by the working-class democracy of all the powers of National Government…
James Connolly published the article from which this extract is taken in the Workers’ Republic of 22 July 1899.

A product of the vast Irish diaspora, James Connolly was born in Edinburgh in 1868, a child of Irish parents. Here he is pictured with his wife Lillie and their daughters Mona and Nora, in Edinburgh about 1893. Connolly then worked for the council cleansing department as a “nightsoil’’ man.

The way to a workers’ republic

Ireland’s history is the history of a people seized, despoiled, exploited, robbed, murdered, and driven across the sea — century after century. And, as Marx said, the past weighs like a nightmare on the present.
Ireland’s peoples inherit the memory of their history as song and story, prejudice and hatred, folklore and cold fact, ingrained animosity and half-healed resentment. Our own memories and our lives are sewn into that collective history.
For some fifty years, from 1870 to the 1920s, different groups in the British and Irish ruling classes tried to calm the conflicts through reform from above. They botched it.
The Northern Ireland Six-Counties entity is such a failure on every count that it might have been deliberately designed to repeat Ireland’s history on a smaller scale.
After 1922, the Protestants watched as their worst fears about Home Rule being Rome Rule were richly realised in the 26 Counties. The people of the South saw in the North primarily a British presence and British dupes. They saw Catholics kept down as Catholics, as for so many centuries all the Catholic Irish had been kept down.
The working class was divided, hegemonised on both sides of the border by bourgeois politicians, Green and Orange, and by priests and preachers.
Revolutionary politics remained the politics of Ireland’s strange and archaic Republican movement.
In the late 1960s, after fifty years, the Northern Catholics rebelled, demanding equality. The Republicans were there — themselves impelled, the first Provos, not by reason or political calculation but by instinct as blind and unreasoning as that of the lemming — to lead events in the direction that would allow them to apply “physical force on principle’’. The vicious, panicky, violent reaction of the Protestant Northern Ireland state to the Catholic civil rights agitation, and the botched and brutal intervention of Britain, helped to push many young Catholics behind the Provos.
What the Provisional IRA has been doing has no “anti-imperialist’’ meaning. The policy of slaughtering Irish Protestant workers who do maintenance work on a RUC police barracks can make no Republican or socialist sense, and no sense in terms of the Provos’ own objectives, unless they think the Irish Unionists do not matter because Britain (and maybe Dublin) can be pressed into coercing them.
Such Provo ideas as the idea that Northern Ireland was only “British-occupied Ireland’’ were a sort of collective hysterical denial of Irish reality.
In truth what the Provos have been pushing for, in the real Ireland as distinct from the one enshrined in their myths, is open civil war — and that would lead to repartition, not to a united Ireland.
We believe that the way forward is to build a socialist movement and convert the existing labour movement to the goals and perspectives of the Workers’ Republic. To do that, the socialists must provide answers to the questions dividing the working class. We believe that only some form of federal Ireland, with local autonomy for the Protestant-majority area, linked loosely to Britain and of course to Europe, can provide a political basis for building Irish working-class political unity across the divide.
In Northern Ireland, a great step forward now would be for the trade unions to organise a party of labour. Such a Labour Party, if it were not to shatter at the first test, as have Northern Ireland Labour Parties in the past, would need to have an adequate answer to the “constitutional’’ questions that obsess Northern Ireland workers. In our view, the best answer is the “consistent democracy’’ advocated by the Russian Bolsheviks in 1913:
“In so far as national peace is in any way possible in a capitalist society based on exploitation, profit-making and strife, it is attainable only under a consistently and thoroughly democratic republican system of government… the constitution of which contains a fundamental law that prohibits any privileges whatsoever to any one nation and any encroachment whatsoever upon the rights of a national minority. This particularly calls for wide regional autonomy and fully democratic local government, with the boundaries of the self-governing and autonomous regions determined by the local inhabitants themselves on the basis of their economic and social conditions, national make-up of the population, etc.’’
Britain’s labour movement should not trust its own governments one inch, where Ireland is concerned.
The British state and successive British governments bear the greatest share of the responsibility for what has happened and is happening to Ireland. Even in the most “conciliatory’’ and “constructive’’ of British politicians the wonted note of imperialist arrogance and contempt is never fully silent. It keeps breaking through.
One reason why the labour movement, and in the first place its left wing, has been ineffective against British ruling-class crimes in Ireland is that the left itself is in the grip of vicarious sub-Republican myth and fantasy. Education about Irish history and Irish realities is the best antidote to this self-induced paralysis.
We produce this pictorial Socialist Organiser special in order to help the British labour movement understand Ireland, and to persuade it to take Ireland’s side against the British state.
The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty will continue to help Irish socialists to build an organisation to fight for the Workers’ Republic.