LENIN AND TROTSKY ON IRELAND

BRIAN Behan’s remarks on the Dublin lockout of 1913 and the Easter rebellion of 1916 should stimulate fresh study and discussion of the history of the labour and national movements in Ireland in this century. It may be helpful to recall the comments of two great Marxists on the Easter rebellion soon after its occurrence.

Lenin wrote about it in the autumn of 1916 in his article

‘The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up’. The experience of the world war had already disproved, he declared, the view that the national struggle of small oppressed peoples against imperialism had exhausted its significance. Karl Radek had dealt with Easter under the title ‘A PlayedOut Song’, saying that the rebellion was just an affair of the urban petty-bourgeoisie which had found no response among the masses (the peasantry had been ‘appeased by reforms’) and was without significance for the social revolution.

. Against Radek, Lenin made two points. First, ‘a section of the workers’ had taken part in the rebellion. Second, only to see the confused and backward ‘petty-bourgeois’ ideas of the rebels was to miss the main thing... The social revolution could come about only as a great complex process involving all kinds of outbreaks by backward elements, both petty-bourgeois and proletarian, imbued with all sorts of prejudices. ‘Only those who imagine that in one place an army will line up and say “we are for socialism”, and in another place an army will stand up and say “we are for imperialism” and this will be the social revolution, only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic opinion—could vilify the Irish Rebellion by calling it a “putsch”.’ Objectively such movements, whatever the ‘reactionary fantasies’ entertained by participants in them, attacked and weakened capital. The struggles of the oppressed nations ‘help the real power against imperialism to come on the scene, namely, the socialist proletariat.’

Ireland’s importance is twofold Trotsky’s comment was made in an article entitled ‘The Events in Dublin’ published in the newspaper of Russian revolutionaries in Paris, Nashe Slovo (July 4, 1916). The occasion was the sentence of death passed on Sir Roger Casement.

While paying tribute to Casement’s personal courage, Trotsky pointed to his isolated position in the Easter movement, as a_ bourgeois. nationalist looking for support to imperialist Germany. In the main the Irish bourgeoisie had stood. aside from the revolt, which was a movement of workers and ‘intellectuals. The peasantry also had failed to respond. “The historical basis for national revolution has passed away even in backward Ireland.’

Ireland’s importance for British ‘imperialism was twofold; -‘Gladstone had obliged the landlords to make big concessions to the peasants in order. that Ireland might be held more securely,. strategic interests taking precedence over the direct economic interests of a section of the British ruling class. The. agrarian reforms of. 1881-1903 (land purchase acts) had. transformed the Irish peasants into a conservative element no longer interested: in the national struggle. ~ Easter rebellion lives on Confronted with the corrupt and philistine leadership of the British labour movement it was but natural that the militant Trish workers had turned not only to syndicalism but also to nationalism, and had expressed their discontent by rebelling, along with part of the intellectuals, under ‘an out-of-date banner’.

But the Irish workers’ struggle was not ended with the crushing of the Easter rebellion. Moreover, it would ‘find an echo throughout Great Britain. Scots soldiers smashed the barricades in Dublin. But in Scotland itself the coal-miners have rallied around the red flag raised by Maclean and his friends.’ i Part of the Irish peasantry played a much more active part in the national movement as it developed in the period subsequent to 1916 than either Lenin or Trotsky appears to have expected, providing, indeed, the main driving force in the Anglo-Irish War. This revival of the national-revolutionary spirit in the countryside—provoked by the British attempt to enforce conscription—seems to have been due to the graduallyaccumulating effects of the war, in particular to the rise in the price of land. This doomed the hopes held by many landless and ‘uneconomic’ peasants of acquiring or extending farms through land purchase. The stoppage of emigration had greatly increased the pressure on the land. Export of food to England by the rich farmers created an artificial famine from which the poor farmers suffered as well as the town workers.

As is well-known, the Irish bourgeoisie made use of the “upsurge of the small farmers and semi-proletarians of the countryside to extort some political concessions from British imperialism, and then betrayed them, violently crushing those who tried to seize the land of the rich farmers. The central fact of that period 1919-1922 is the weakness and disorientation of the working-class movement after the blood-letting of 1916, which left the rural poor without the leadership they needed.