5. The Easter Rising¶
Core Argument¶
5. The Easter Rising
The Easter Rising of 1916 represented the explosive convergence of national oppression and class struggle in Ireland, a moment when the revolutionary wing of the labour movement sought to transform the war between empires into a war for social emancipation. In the years preceding the First World War, bitter class battles had run parallel to the national struggle against British rule, but the outbreak of imperialist slaughter brought these contradictions to a boiling point. James Connolly, unlike the majority of European labour leaders who capitulated to chauvinism, adopted an instinctively internationalist position that aligned with Lenin’s analysis. He argued for revolutionary action on the principle that “England’s need is Ireland’s opportunity,” mobilising the Irish working class with the Citizen Army as its hardened core, fighting not merely for national independence but for an Irish Workers’ Republic.
The Rising was betrayed by middle-class nationalists from the outset. Eoin MacNeil’s countermanding of the mobilisation order reduced the fighting force to a mere 1,500. Connolly understood the insurrection was doomed militarily, but he aimed to forge a revolutionary tradition that would outlast the defeat. The British execution of the leaders, including Connolly shot strapped to a chair, removed the possibility of the Irish working class leading the anti-imperialist revolution. Lenin supported the Rising while noting that the Irish had risen prematurely, before the European proletarian revolt had matured.
Connolly’s fundamental mistake was his failure to build a revolutionary Marxist cadre party armed with theory. The Irish Labour Party, though rooted in the trade unions and the working class, lacked Marxist grounding. After Connolly’s execution, reformist leaders like William O’Brien renounced Labour’s independent role, handing political initiative to Sinn Féin, an anti-socialist organisation. James Larkin, still in the United States, urged the labour movement to retain its class independence, but without Connolly’s leadership, the workers’ movement drifted. Frank Robbins later lamented the Citizen Army’s failure to play a worthwhile role in the 1918-21 period, but the text argues such leadership could not emerge spontaneously; it must be built in advance, as the Bolshevik Party was. Connolly’s death, like the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, ensured that bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists seized control of the anti-imperialist struggle.