“A beacon-light to the oppressed of every land”: James Connolly and the work of the working-class intellectual

Abstract

This article seeks to defend James Connolly from attacks on both the Left and Right, particularly the charge that his legacy is nationalist delusion and fanaticism. The article argues that Connolly’s politics and his engagement with Irish cultural politics demonstrate his commitment to human equality as both a right, but also a principle of human intelligence. The article addresses Connolly’s status as a working-class intellectual with reference to how he challenges conventional hierarchies between the philosophers of Marxism and the proletarians who are the object of those deliberations. The article argues that from Connolly’s thought and activism an anti-colonial Marxism emerges which might help explain the neo-imperialist world we find ourselves in today and provide a critique lacking in the collapsed teleological versions of orthodox Marxism. The relations between his Marxism and nationalism are explored, as are his play Under Which Flag? his poetry and songs.

Keywords:

• James Connolly
• Marxism
• nationalism
• postcolonialism
• subaltern studies
• Irish cultural politics
• working-class intellectuals
• Jacques Rancière

Notes

1. Bruton’s speech can be found: http://www.reform.org/site/2014/09/18/reform-group-seminar_18-sep-2014/ Sections are also reported in the Irish Times 18 September 2014 as “Scotland shows 1916 Rising was a Mistake”: www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/scotland-shows-1916-rising-a-mistake-says-john-bruton-1.1932540

2. Kearney, “Myth and Terror”.

3. Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 119.

4. For a development of this argument see Kelly and Kelly, “James Connolly’s Stations”.

5. O’Casey (writing as PS Ó Cathasaigh), The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, 52.

6. Allen, The Politics of James Connolly, 159.

7. Ó Ceallaigh Ritschel, “James Connolly’s Under Which Flag, 1916,” 66.

8. Newsinger, “James Connolly and the Easter Rising,” 160.

9. Ibid., 159.

10. Bell, Pioneering Days, 47.

11. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 21.

12. Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 19.

13. Ibid., 8.

14. Newsinger, “James Connolly and the Easter Rising,” 171–172.

15. Connolly, “Notes from the Front: The Ties that Bind”.

16. Ibid.

17. O’Casey, Autobiographies, 646. See Moran “Conflicting Counter-Hegemonies: The Dramaturgy of James Connolly and Seán O’Casey”.

18. O’Casey, Letters, 438.

19. Ó Ceallaigh Ritschel, “James Connolly’s Under Which Flag, 1916,” 66.

20. Ibid., 68.

21. Ibid., 66.

22. Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 14.

23. Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, 76.

24. Thompson, “Indigenous Theory: James Connolly and the Theatre of Decolonization,” 20.

25. Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, 134.

26. Thompson, “Indigenous Theory,” 13.

27. Emmet, “Speech from the Dock,” 938.

28. Rancière, Names of History, 88.

29. Connolly, Under Which Flag? 129.

30. Connolly, “The Irish Flag”.

31. Ibid.

32. Connolly, “Our Duty in this Crisis”.

33. Connolly, “Socialism and Nationalism”.

34. Connolly, Socialism Made Easy, 136–137.

35. Connolly, Songs of Freedom, 14.

36. Quoted in McDonald and Holland, INLA: Deadly Divisions, 34.

37. Sands, Writings from Prison, 179–180.

38. Ibid., 228.

39. Ibid., 230.

40. Connolly, “Socialism and Nationalism”.

41. Connolly, “The Coming Generation”.

42. Rancière Emancipated Spectator, 13.

43. Lenin, “The Irish Rebellion of 1916,” 259.

44. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, 307.

45. Connolly, “A War for Civilization”.

46. Connolly, “Socialism and Nationalism”.