4. The Workers’ Movement¶
Core Argument¶
In the years preceding the First World War, British imperialism confronted a revolutionary threat from the organised working class in Ireland and Britain. Under the leadership of James Larkin and James Connolly, revolutionary Marxists, the class question decisively displaced the land question as the central axis of struggle. Connolly argued that national liberation was inseparable from the struggle for socialism, demanding a united front against capitalism under proletarian leadership. To this end, they built the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union as a revolutionary vehicle. The 1913 Dublin lockout saw 20,000 workers locked out for refusing to renounce the union; the British working class responded with enthusiastic solidarity, though their trade union leaders refused to organise the solidarity strikes that were the only path to victory.
The Irish workers’ movement had deeper roots, originating with branches of the First International in 1870, which were suppressed by the Catholic Church. Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party, founded in 1896, launched The Workers’ Republic, the first Marxist paper in Ireland, linking national liberation to a workers’ republic. Crucially, the class struggle cut across sectarian divisions, as demonstrated in Belfast in 1907 when Larkin united Protestant and Catholic workers. Connolly consistently prioritised class interests over Home Rule, urging workers to vote Labour even if it endangered the Home Rule Bill. The Liberal government arrested Larkin while taking no action against Carson’s armed reactionary mobilisation.
Irish bourgeois nationalists, like Arthur Griffith, scorned the internationalism of the labour movement, falsely claiming British workers ruled Ireland. The Catholic Church encouraged sectarianism to divide workers, whipping up a hysterical campaign against Protestant homes hosting starving Dublin children, preferring they starve. Connolly bitterly recorded the defeat and betrayal.
In the pre-war years, the ruling class faced revolutionary developments: strike days lost rose from 1,878,679 to 38,142,101. Under working-class pressure, the Liberals limited the House of Lords’ powers, opening the road to Irish Home Rule. But reactionaries resorted to the ‘Orange card’: Carson armed the Ulster Volunteers, 100,000 strong, to resist Home Rule by force. The Liberal government did nothing about the Curragh mutiny or Belfast pogroms against Catholics. Connolly declared class war, issuing his manifesto ‘To the Linen Slaves of Belfast’.
In 1913, Irish workers organised the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) – the first Red Army in the world – a working-class militia based on the trade unions. Led by Connolly and Captain Jack White, the ICA was conceived as a revolutionary army, organically linked to the proletariat’s mass organisations, funded by union subscriptions, and drilling openly from Liberty Hall.