7. The Russian Revolution and Ireland¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter argues that the Russian Revolution of October 1917 provides the essential theoretical and historical lens through which to understand the trajectory of the Irish revolutionary movement, its failures, and the ultimate betrayal of James Connolly’s legacy. The core narrative thrust is that the Irish bourgeoisie, like its Russian counterpart, proved incapable of completing the national democratic revolution, being tied by a thousand ties to imperialism. In Russia, the working class under the Bolsheviks stepped into this vacuum, carrying out the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution before passing over to socialist construction. The chapter insists that this model—the working class leading the national struggle—was the correct one for Ireland, but that it was sabotaged by a combination of reformism, Stalinism, and theoretical backwardness.
The text traces the attempts to revive Connolly’s Socialist Party after 1917, noting the expulsion of reformists like Cathal O’Shannon and William O’Brien in 1921 as a preliminary step toward affiliation with the Communist International. The newly formed Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) under Roddy Connolly is praised for opposing the Anglo-Irish Treaty and supporting the Republican side in the Civil War, in line with Lenin’s explicit advice. However, the chapter argues that the CPI remained tiny, riven by internal dissension, and fatally infected with ultra-leftism. It failed to penetrate the Labour Party or the Republican movement, and was eventually dissolved by the Comintern at the insistence of James Larkin.
Larkin is subjected to a harsh polemic. While acknowledging his personal courage, the chapter condemns his contempt for theory, his syndicalist tendency to split the trade unions (creating the Workers’ Union of Ireland against Lenin’s advice), and his dictatorial conduct. This is framed as a symptom of “Zinovievism,” a stepping-stone from Leninism to Stalinism. The Stalinist bureaucracy is then identified as the principal villain. The chapter argues that the Comintern’s adoption of the “Third Period” ultra-left line—denouncing all non-Communist parties as fascist—alienated the very Republican rank-and-file who were moving leftward. Worse still, the Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country” and the “two stages” strategy (allying with the “progressive national bourgeoisie” before fighting for socialism) is denounced as a complete break with Leninism and a return to Menshevism.
The chapter draws heavily on the history of the IRA’s internal class divisions, citing the left-wing efforts of Peadar O’Donnell, Frank Ryan, and the Saor Eire organisation. It highlights the Athlone Manifesto of 1931 and the 1934 Republican Congress split, where Roddy Connolly’s proposal for a “Workers’ Republic” slogan was narrowly passed but led to a permanent fracture along class lines. The text uses the Spanish Civil War as a brutal illustration of this cleavage, contrasting the pro-Franco Blueshirts of Eoin O’Duffy with the IRA left wing. The ultimate conclusion is that Stalinism, by substituting bureaucratic conservatism for revolutionary internationalism, reduced the Irish Communist movement to a sterile sect, unable to win the masses, and that the collapse of the USSR now opens the possibility for a genuine revolutionary tendency to re-emerge.