13. Against Sectarianism! For Class Unity!¶
Core Argument¶
13. Against Sectarianism! For Class Unity!
James Connolly’s central strategic insight—that the unity of Catholic and Protestant workers on class lines is the precondition for any genuine Irish liberation—remains the indispensable compass for socialists today. Sectarianism is not an ancient tribal feud but a weapon of the ruling class, deliberately cultivated to keep the working class divided and weak. The Orange Order has historically been used by the wealthy to bind Protestant workers to a reactionary unionism, while the Catholic Church played a parallel role in the South, opposing national liberation and the labour movement while perpetrating horrific abuses in institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries and the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. Against these forces, Connolly insisted that the struggle against national oppression must never be subordinated to bourgeois or petty-bourgeois leadership; the proletariat must maintain its class independence.
The failure of Irish bourgeois nationalism was sealed by the 1922 partition, a division that cannot be resolved on a capitalist basis. The Provisional IRA’s thirty-year bombing campaign had nothing in common with Connolly’s class-based methods. Socialists do not seek to erect new frontiers but to abolish all borders: the goal is a thirty-two-county Irish Workers’ Republic, linked to a democratic Socialist Federation of Britain, as part of a Socialist United States of Europe. British imperialism is the enemy, but the British working class is a potential ally, not a foe. Socialism in one country is impossible; capitalism is an international system requiring an internationalist response.
The trade unions remain the only non-sectarian mass organisations, though their conservative bureaucracy can only be overcome when tumultuous events force workers to join and transform them from below. Connolly’s ideas remain fundamentally correct, but he failed to build the revolutionary party and leadership necessary to carry them through. The Labour Party in the South has abandoned its founder’s legacy, and the Republican movement’s abandonment of the class-struggle road was a fatal error. The task now falls on a new generation to fertilise the workers’ movement with revolutionary Marxist ideas and pursue socialist revolution across Ireland and Britain. Unity in struggle is possible, as demonstrated by the 2019 Harland and Wolff occupation, where Protestant workers and Irish language activists stood together. The border must be removed—but only as part of a broader assault on every division that capital imposes.