Connolly's Marxism, part five: Connolly and religion

Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly

The idea that there are three fronts in the class struggle was formulated by Frederick Engels when he praised the German socialists in these terms: "For the first time since a workers’ movement has existed, the struggle is being conducted pursuant to its three sides – the theoretical, the political, and the practical-economic (resistance to the capitalists) – in harmony and in its interconnections, and in a systematic way. It is precisely in this, as it were, concentric attack, that the strength and invincibility of the German movement lies".

This idea of "three fronts" was common in the Socialist (Second) International. It was at the heart of the work that Vladimir Ulianov (Lenin) did in building up the Bolshevik Party. Its absence was at the heart of what James Connolly did in the labour movement.

It was central to his dispute with Daniel De Leon in 1904, though on one issue, Connolly's rejection of the "Iron Law of Wages", his insistence that trade unions can raise wages and that real wages are historically determined and variable, Connolly was surely right.

Connolly believed that the Catholic Church would adapt itself to a triumphant socialism as it had to the capitalism which it had, and for a long time, covering many centuries, opposed. He was either a Catholic or a lapsed Catholic all of his life. He died a Catholic, receiving Extreme Unction and making Confession. He died a proselytising Catholic: he persuaded Lillie, his wife, who had been a Protestant, to convert, which she did a short time after his death.

Of the 15 men killed by the British Army after the 1916 Rising (and Roger Casement was hanged in Pentonville Jail on 3 August 1916), only one refused to be reconciled to the Church. That was not Connolly, but Tom Clarke, an old Fenian, who had survived 15 years in an English jail.

Yet the Catholic Church had actively opposed the Irish Transport Union in the Labour War of 1913/14, only two years earlier. Catholic thugs had attacked union members and sympathisers.

Connolly, after Jim Larkin leader then of the union, was reconcilable. In fact in a polemic against the Jesuit Fr Kane's attack on socialism, he had explained what his conception of Marxism was:

"Socialists are bound as Socialists only to the acceptance of one great principle - the ownership and control of the wealth-producing power by the State, and that, therefore, totally antagonistic interpretations of the Bible or of prophecy and revelation, theories of marriage, and of history, may be held by Socialists without in the slightest degree interfering with their activities".

And in an open letter to Archbishop Walsh:

"Your Grace, we will fight!

"But if your Grace is as solicitous about the poor bodies of those children as we know you to be about their souls, or even if you are but one tenth part as solicitous, may we suggest to you or your laymen that your duty is plain...

"If the employers reject your offer of mediation and still declare their contempt for any public opinion they cannot rig in advance, then it is your manifest duty to organise public support for the workers to defeat their soulless employers".

This, or something even more obsequious, would be the tone of the labour movement to the priests for decades and generations to come. In fact Walsh had endorsed the lie that Dora Montefiore, the organiser for taking starving strikers' children to be cared for by sympathisers, was really a recruiter for the "white slave trade".

Earlier he had tried to explain himself to a personal friend who remained a De Leonite, John Carstairs Matheson:

"For myself tho’ I have usually posed as a Catholic I have not gone to my duty for 15 years, and have not the slightest tincture of faith left. I only assumed the Catholic pose in order to query the raw freethinker whose ridiculous dogmatism did and does annoy me as much as the dogmatism of the Orthodox. In fact I respect the good Catholic more than the average freethinker".

In fact Connolly was always publicly solicitous for the Catholic Church. At the height of the 1913-14 Labour War, Connolly had written as above in an open letter to Archbishop Walsh. Jim Larkin was then in jail, and Connolly wrote on behalf of the union.

This is important for understanding James Connolly and his Marxism. He said what he thought necessary, not necessarily what he thought true. [1]

The Second International had as a central formula: "Religion is a private matter." Originally it meant a private matter as between the individual and the state, so, for example, complete separation of education from the churches.

The Marxists opposed the laws of the Prussian state persecuting Catholic priests in the 1870s. The socialists argued that no laws of the state would get rid of religion. Only changing the conditions that generated religion would do that.

As Marx wrote:

"Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self consciousness and self-feeling of man, who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, a reversed world consciousness, because they are reversed world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm; its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its universal ground for consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore mediately the fight against the other world, of which religion is the spiritual aroma.

"Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and a protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation, It is the opium of the people.

"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion.

"Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he may shake off the chain and cull the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will revolve round himself and therefore round his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolved round man as long as he did not revolve round himself.

"The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world. The immediate task of philosophy, which is at the service of history, once the saintly form of human self-alienation has been unmasked, is to unmask self-alienation in its unholy form. Thus the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of right and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics."

And UIianov (Lenin), in his 1909 article The Attitude of the Workers' Party towards Religion:

"The philosophical basis of Marxism... is dialectical materialism... a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and resolutely hostile to all religion. Let us recall that the whole of Engels' Anti-Dühring, which Marx read in manuscript, is an indictment of the materialist and atheist Dühring for not being a consistent materialist and for leaving loopholes for religion and religious philosophy. Let us recall that in his essay on Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels reproaches Feuerbach for combatting religion not in order to destroy it, but in order to renovate it, to create a new "exalted" religion, and so forth.... Religion is the opium of the people - this dictum of Marx's is the cornerstone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion. Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches and all religious organisations as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to drug the working class."

Even to conceive of the workers taking power demands a level of conscious understanding for them which was unnecessary and anyway unattainable for the bourgeoisie. Because in the bourgeois revolution the aspirant ruling class had already a degree of wealth and control of the means of production, they were able to improvise any ideology, feeling their way from their growing economic power, adapting elements of religion to fit their needs: the revolutionary political changes followed, more or less as a reflection and extension of their developing economic control, more or less piecemeal. Their non-rational ideology was an expression of their immaturity, a mark that they were merely a link, not the end, in the chain of class societies.

By contrast, the proletariat does not develop control of a portion of the means of production within the old system: it remains in wage-slavery up to the point of taking power and expropriating the capitalists, when it must deliberately smash the old state and establish a new workers' type of state to secure its victory. The conscious workers' struggle based on science, the prelude to the conscious domination of reality, is central to the Marxist theory of the proletarian revolution, and an absolute pre-requisite for the members of the revolutionary party aiming to lead the working masses out of wage-slavery, is a consistently scientific, therefore materialist world outlook. Only such an outlook, rigorously pushing aside all obscurantism and reliance on imaginary "powers" other than human activity, can show the working class what its historic interests are and how it can serve them. Dialectical materialism is not an optional but an essential weapon in the struggle of the working class to remake the world.

The founders and leading contributors to the development of Marxism therefore made war on religion as superstition, dream compensation for wage-slavery and anointing oil of class society, providing some of the ideological cement for that society. In the historic Marxism there was no place for gods or for agnostic indifference.

Vladimir Ulianov (Lenin) recalled that "Engels blame[d] the Blanquists for failing to understand that only the class struggle of the working-class masses could in fact, by comprehensively drawing large numbers of the proletariat into conscious revolutionary social practice, free the oppressed masses from the yoke of religion."

But, demanding that religion should be made “a private matter" in relation to the state - i.e. complete secularisation, no subsidies, no religious tampering with education, complete freedom of conscience and worship for all believers coupled with complete freedom for atheist propaganda - Ulianov insisted that religion was not a private matter in relation to the revolutionary party. The Marxists who founded the Communist International in 1919 criticised their predecessors as having changed "religion is a private matter" in practice to mean "religion is a private matter in relation to the Marxist party".

The shift to a softer attitude (religion a "private matter" in relation to the party, not just the state) was, as always, done for "practical" reasons, on the grounds that to do otherwise would stir up needless religious opposition.

Connolly raised that "practical" argument in relation to De Leon and August Bebel. But James Connolly was in a class of his own on religion in the Socialist International. If the right wing interpreted the International's programme that religion was a private matter as meaning private in relation to the Marxist party, Connolly and Larkin saw nothing wrong in the central leaders of the workers being or posing as Catholics. And that in a world in which most of the industrial workers were Protestant, hating Catholics and being hated by Catholics. The Catholic Church officially forbade its supporters to be socialists. (See Solidarity 629 and 630 for the religiosity of Connolly and Larkin).

Connolly interpreted separation of Church and State not only as indifference to labour-movement members being Catholics, but the leaders being or "posing" (Connolly's self description) as Catholics. The reductio ad absurdum here was when Jim Larkin refused, during the Labour War, to speak at a prearranged meeting on the publicly stated grounds that the chairman, a member of the British Socialist Party, had been divorced. The meeting was cancelled.

After 1912 Connolly worked to build a Labour-Party political wing of the unions in Ireland. The Socialist Party of Ireland, successor of Connolly's ISRP, was a loose propaganda society and for Connolly had no essential role. The workers would mechanically see the need for socialism when society was ready, and their awareness of the industrial union would lead them spontaneously to socialism.

In the theory Connolly had shared with De Leon in 1903-08, the party had an essential political role to play. In Connolly's scheme when back in Ireland from 1910, the transition from capitalism to socialism involved no revolutionary party, neither the semi-redundant Socialist Party of Ireland, nor the Irish Labour Party, which reflected the unions: the revolution would occur more or less spontaneously.

Shortly before he died, Connolly wrote Old Wine in New Bottles, which grappled with the inescapable fact that industrial unions and general unions became bureaucratic too, perhaps more so or more quickly than the old craft unions.

Connolly posed the question of socialism and religion as "the known and the unknowable", but that was not how he saw it. As far as Connolly, the Catholic or lapsed Catholic, was concerned, the "unknowable" was known; it was the sacred "knowledge", the ethereal and eternal mystic truths of the Catholic Church. When he "lapsed", it was from that Church that he lapsed; when he rallied, it was to the dogmas of that Church that he rallied.

Connolly's record suggests that it was in the story he told to his De Leonite friend Matheson he was not telling the truth.

There remains the fact that both Orange and Green bourgeoisies expressed their politics and their rivalry as religion. Religion is not something from the distant past that exists now only anachronistically. We are much nearer to it than that: high Stalinism was a form of religion, and whole Muslim areas of the world are in the tight grip of primitive religion.

Ulianov (Lenin) in his 1909 article went on to point out that any contradiction in the Marxist attitude to religion was only apparent:

"It would be a profound mistake to think that the apparent 'moderation' of the Marxist attitude towards religion is due to supposed 'tactical' considerations, by the desire not to "scare away" anybody, and so forth, On the contrary, in this question too the political line of Marxism is inseparably bound up with its philosophical principles.... We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses materialistically. The fight against religion must not be confined to abstract ideological preaching. The fight must be linked up with the concrete practical work of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion...

"'Fear created the Gods'. Fear of the blind forces of capital - blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the people - a force which at every step in life threatens to inflict, and does inflict, on the proletarian and small owner 'sudden', 'unexpected', 'accidental' destruction, ruin, pauperism, prostitution and death from starvation - such is the root of modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and foremost if he does not want to remain an infant-school materialist. No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of the masses, who are crushed by the grinding toil of capitalism and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until the masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, the rule of Capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way...

"The [socialist movement's] atheistic propaganda must be subordinated to its basic task - the development of the class struggle of the exploited masses against the exploiters....

"A Marxist must be able to take cognisance of the concrete situation as a whole, must always be able to determine the boundary between anarchism and opportunism, (this boundary is: relative, shifting and changeable, but it exists) and must succumb neither to the abstract, verbal, and in fact empty 'revolutionism' of the anarchist, nor to the philistinism and opportunism of the petty-bourgeois or liberal intellectual, who fears to fight religion, forgets that this is his duty, reconciles himself to the belief in God, and is guided not by the interests of the class struggle, but by the petty and mean conception of offending nobody, repelling nobody and scaring nobody - by the sage rule: ‘live and let live'....."

If in general a revolutionary Marxist party can only be built on the basis of science, in Ireland there were and are extra reasons why defence of materialism was and is a vital practical question. Here religion became entwined over the centuries with the social divisions and struggles to a degree unique in Western Europe. Here the religious divisions of the divided Irish bourgeoisie bit deep. In Ireland religious bigotry, Protestant and Catholic, with its division of the workers into supporters of Orange and Green, has been one of the most reliable props of bourgeois interests. Its elimination in common working-class struggle is a pre-requisite for any serious revolutionary class politics.

And in Connolly's time, was there anywhere else in Europe where religion was so pervasive -and so malignant and divisive - as in Ireland?

For the labour movement, militant secularism was probably the only way that the Irish workers could have been united, if they could at all short of an agreed political programme on "The Constitutional Question". For what it's worth, I doubt very much that they could.

[1] It also explains one of the mysteries of Connolly. He is reported as saying that the British would never bombard Dublin, because a capitalist government would never destroy capitalist property. On any level this was simply silly. It is impossible that he believed this nonsense. Connolly knew history. He knew what had happened in the Paris Commune of 1871. He knew that the bourgeoisie would do what they thought necessary to keep control. I traced it back to a pamphlet published in 1917 by someone I'd never heard of. But in his 1924 biography of Connolly, Desmond Ryan said it too. Desmond Ryan was in the Dublin General Post Office in 1916 as Patrick Pearse's secretary. The son of a man driven out of Ireland by priestly disapproval, W P Ryan, who was sometimes de facto editor of George Lansbury's Herald, I think Desmond Ryan joined the British Communist Party and stayed at least until the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939. Despite that, Ryan was a man to be believed. It is still impossible that Connolly believed his claim that the British would never bombard; but he may well have said it to jolly certain people along.