Ireland, 1916¶
Core Argument¶
In this pair of articles from Nashe Slovo in the summer of 1916, Leon Trotsky subjects the Easter Rising in Dublin to a searching Marxist analysis, stripping away both nationalist mythology and social-patriotic cant. The core argument is that the Rising, despite its heroism, was historically doomed because the social basis for a national revolution in Ireland had already dissolved. Trotsky contends that the old agrarian antagonism between pauper-farmers and English landlords—the fuel for previous Irish rebellions—had been neutralised by British imperial policy. Gladstone’s land reforms of 1881-1903, which transferred land to farmers while generously compensating landlords, transformed the Irish peasantry into conservative small property-owners indifferent to the green banner. Meanwhile, the surplus intelligentsia had been absorbed into British urban life, and the nascent Irish commercial bourgeoisie had aligned itself with imperialism against the young proletariat. The result was that the Rising became, in practice, an isolated urban workers’ uprising, joined by revolutionary petty-bourgeois enthusiasts, while the countryside remained passive and the bourgeoisie stood aside.
Trotsky draws heavily on the figure of Sir Roger Casement to illustrate the movement’s contradictions. Casement, a former British colonial bureaucrat turned revolutionary nationalist, had sought German backing for the Rising and, in his 1911 pamphlet, argued that Irish independence would mean “freedom of the seas” and the end of British naval supremacy. Trotsky notes that this formulation is correct only insofar as an independent Ireland could exist solely as a client outpost of a rival imperialist power. Casement’s isolated position within the movement, Trotsky argues, underscores that the Rising was fundamentally a working-class insurrection despite its archaic green banner.
The polemical thrust is directed at two targets. First, Trotsky attacks the Russian Marxist Plekhanov, who had welcomed the Rising’s defeat on the grounds that it was “harmful” to the cause of freedom and that the Irish nation had wisely refused to support “revolutionary madmen.” Trotsky dismisses this as “complete patriotic softening of all the joints,” insisting that the peasants’ passivity stemmed not from internationalist principle but from “obtuse egoism” and indifference to anything beyond their plots. Second, Trotsky savages the French social-patriot Renaudel, who belatedly published an article in Humanité praising Asquith’s “clemency” toward the captured rebels. Trotsky notes the grotesque hypocrisy: Renaudel, who had remained silent during the Rising itself, now posed as a friend of both Britain and Ireland, invoking Corneille and Racine to justify mercy. The comparison with Thiers and Gallifet—the butchers of the Paris Commune—is deliberate and devastating.
The articles conclude with a forward-looking note: the heroic defeat of the Dublin barricades, however archaic its banner, has injected into the Irish proletariat a class resentment against militarism and imperialism that will not subside. Trotsky points to the Scottish soldiers who smashed the barricades and to the Scottish miners rallying around the red flag raised by Maclean, predicting that the workers whom the Hendersons chain to imperialism will one day revenge themselves against the hangman Lloyd George.