In addition to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which led the Easter Rising,
the FLN in Algeria, the ANC in South Africa, the MPLA in Angola and the 26th of
July Movement in Cuba (to name just a few) were all movements led by petty
bourgeois nationalists who (initially, in the Cuban case) aimed at nothing
more than national independence (or the end of white minority rule) and the
establishment of a democratic republic. They were all small insurgent bands in
the beginning. Is Paddy arguing that the working class movement should have
had no side in any of these struggles against national oppression because they
didn't aim at socialism? Lenin disagreed with those who argued like this (Karl
Radek) regarding the Easter Rising. He said the socialist movement should be on
the side of oppressed peoples fighting their colonial overlords regardless of
who was leading them. Taking the side of such movements did not mean endorsing
the politics of their leaders. I agree with Lenin. When an oppressed people
(which the Irish certainly were in 1916) attempt to strike a blow against their
oppressors, the working class should not be neutral. A movement that fights for
the end of class inequality must also champion the equality of nations.
"Better off" remaining under British rule? Colonial domination by definition
involves a denial of the full humanity of subject peoples. They are never
"better off" living under the shadow of this denial, regardless of whether
their economic circumstances are better or worse under an independent
government.
As for the assertion that the rebels of 1916 should never have acted because of
the messy outcome of the war of independence that their rising foreshadowed,
isn't this a bit like saying that John Brown should never have raided Harper's
Ferry, and that we should not honor him today, because we now know that his
plan for a slave rebellion could never have succeeded?
Jim Creegan
The 1916 Easter Rising is not an event that ought to be commerated by the
working class in 2016. The 1916 Rising was undertaken by a small group of petty
bourgeois insurgents. The Irish Citizen Army led by James Connolly capitulated
to the petty bourgeois nationalist politics of the Irish Volunteers led by Tom
Clarke and others. However the ICA was essentially a petty bourgeois
paramilitary organisation. It did not see the need for social revolution and
the estabishment of communism. As a petty bourgeois nationalist movement the
insurgents sought, at most, the establishment of a 32 county Irish Republic
that would serve the interests of small Irish capitalism and its petty
bourgeoisie. Ultimately it would also serve the interests of big capital too.
But what was worse there was no chance of this band of insurgents being
successful in their formal goals. Indeed some, if not many, of its leaders and
organisers were of the opinion that they were not going to succeed in its aims.
In this way they were engaging in a project that was to lead to the
deterioration of the conditions under which Irish workers lived. The War of
Independence that followed partly as a result of the events surrounding the
1916 Easter Rising was to further that deterioration of Irish workers. The
eventual realisation of a 26 county Republic represented the failure of Irish
Republicanism. It also failed to serve the class interests of the Irish working
class North and South of the border. Had Ireland remained part of the United
Kingdom the Irish working class would have been no better off than it is today.
In fact it may, in some ways, have been comparatively better off. The
establishment of a dual state system in Ireland represented merely another form
of maintaining the oppression of the Irish working class. At most some of the
adverse effects of the Second World War may have been avoided by the existence
of the southern state in Ireland. But this may be merely a matter of historical
contingency as opposed to the inherent class nature of the Irish Republic.
In short, the hullabaloo over the commeroration of the 1916 Rising is merely
another device intended to perpetuate the deception of the southern Irish
working class. It forms a part of the overall ideological paradigm under which
southern Irish workers are to be oppressed and divided from much of the working
class in the North.
Take Care
Paddy
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