Review: Conor McCabe, ed., The Lost and Early Writings of James Connolly: 1889-1898 (Iskra Books, 2024)
“The election of a Socialist to any public body at present”, declared James Connolly in 1894, “is only valuable, in so far as it is the return of a disturber of the political peace.” Born in an Edinburgh slum in 1868, the child of working-class Irish immigrants, the largely self-educated Connolly would go on to become an instinctive and militant “disturber of the political peace” on both sides of the Atlantic – as a political organiser, trade unionist, anti-imperialist rebel, and campaigning journalist – before his eventual execution by British forces in the wake of Dublin’s 1916 Rising.
A newly published volume of Connolly’s writings sheds light on his views and early political formation, and serves as a stirring reminder of the abiding relevance of this most essential of revolutionaries, in our age of unfettered capitalist barbarism. Until “socialism becomes the creed of the people”, he maintained, “the prince and the pauper, the millionaire and the outcast, must always remain with us, a blot on our civilisation, a reproach to our humanity.” Anti-capitalists have yet to realise the audacious promise of such a challenge. Meticulously researched by Conor McCabe, The Lost and Early Writings of James Connolly: 1889-1898 will prove a resource for those agitators who remain “enthusiastic in the cause of freedom.”
Peter Hudis has drawn attention to the expansive internationalism and prescient anti-colonial commitments that informed the life and work of Rosa Luxemburg. Connolly, too, had an unswerving capacity to situate local grievances (and atrocities) in a global context, alert always to the relentless greed and shameless violence of the British empire as a joint colonial and commercial enterprise. His denunciations of the latter, indeed, were rooted in a deep-seated and unflagging antaognism to capitalism itself, a “system”, he argued, fuelled by “spoliation, fraud, and murder.”
Re-printed here, Connolly’s personal reports of the famine – and epidemic of evictions – that wracked rural Kerry in 1898 are both clear-sighted and vivid, recording “the wild longing look of hunger” in the faces of the local peasantry, who nonetheless “received no help whatever from the government” in Westminster. Such sights hardened his resolve, in his words, “never again to let the sun shine upon the spectacle of Irish men and women dying as dogs would die – of hunger in sight of food.”
Alongside these dispatches, McCabe includes Connolly’s equally incisive dissections of British mis-rule in India. The “Indian Civil Service is entirely manned by Englishmen, whose salaries are the highest in the world for such services”, he wrote in 1897, offering a window onto the racist and exploitative reality of the British Raj, where “the poorest people under the sun are taxed to support the wealthiest (and most insolent) official class.” Although he was obviously a fervent rhetorician, Connolly’s analyses were also historically grounded. In “the great famine of twenty years ago in Southern India”, he wrote, in the same article for the Limerick Leader newspaper, “when it was estimated that no less than six million people had perished of hunger, the salt tax was increased by forty-five per cent.” Over a century before Mike Davis’s landmark historical study, Late Victorian Holocausts, Connolly can be found critiquing and contextualising the same imperial crimes.
One of the delights of McCabe’s annotated anthology is the ample evidence it provides of Connolly’s wide reading and expressive flair. Connolly’s fascinating forays into playwrighting and short fiction are represented; likewise, his speeches and journalism are propelled by quotations from the literary canon. Just as Marx claimed the Romantic poet Percy Shelley as a forerunner of his own politics, so Connolly lauded Walt Whitman as a “confirmed and avowed socialist” – which, by his own account, he was (“a radical of radicals”). Connolly’s repeated references to the work of Whitman, Byron, and Tolstoy, of course, speak not only to a private enthusiasm, but to the celebratory and culturally generative aspect of working-class politics at its most inspired. For Connolly, socialist agitation – that toilsome struggle – was also a matter of human vitality, interconnection, and enlightenment. “Our demands most moderate are”, he famously declared: “we only want the earth.”
In many respects, Connolly’s subversive spirit has remained bright-burning and influential since his death. In England, he has been cited as a personal hero by former RMT union leader Mick Lynch, whose cogent take-downs of that nation’s right-wing commentariat repeatedly went viral on social media in the post-Corbyn years. In Dublin, meanwhile, his memory continues to be kept alive by a new generation of folk musicians, many of whom have first-hand experience of the rabid “landlordism” and profit-driven housing market that now plague Ireland’s capital. (A “fair rent”, Connolly once noted, “is as absurd an expression as an honest burglary.”)
McCabe’s anthology – along with his planned, forthcoming volumes covering Connolly’s varied experiences as a trade unionist and insurgent, from 1898 until his execution by firing squad in 1916 – will no doubt stand as a milestone in the long afterlife of the great agitator. “Freedom as a gift from above is valueless,” Connolly asserted, “but when won by the active rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor it becomes a boon more precious than life itself.” At a time when radical inspiration is hard to find, socialists can only gain from revisiting the words and example of this Irish liberationist, who proved always and everywhere ready to take up the fight.