IWW members in the 1916 rising in Ireland

Just read O'Casey's ICA text linked to on previous page and you'll see that it supports George Stapleton's claim about O'Casey - he didn't like the Irish National Volunteers, led as they were by the same bosses who locked out the workers in 1913 - but he's not anti-nationalist - he resents the bosses' domination of the nationalist movement but seems to reproach the nationalist Volunteers for not being more co-operative with the ICA.

He approves of the Irish Volunteers who split from the Irish National Volunteers - but who remained nationalist - and began closer co-operation with the ICA. At a Parnell anniversary meeting a clash between National Volunteers on one side and the ICA and Irish Volunteers on the other was narrowly averted. O'Casey comments;

He seems to think Labour must take its rightful place in the future independent nation - and implies that Labour's participation in the national struggle as equal partner is a pre-condition for that. He never makes much explicit statement on this, but from the events he describes without criticism one gets his drift.

The Irish labour movement was anyway strongly tinged with nationalism and religion - the ICA membership card said; "The Land and Sea and Air of Ireland for the People of Ireland. This is the gospel the heavens and earth are proclaiming; and that is the gospel every Irish heart is secretly burning to embrace."-John Mitchel. An ICA recruiting poster proclaimed; "Enlist at once and help us to create THE IRISH CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH. GOD SAVE THE PEOPLE" - and O'Casey quotes Larkin's farewell words to T&G workers as he left for the USA; "Remember your constitution and your oath - Ireland first, last, and all the time. Sobriety, unquestioned obedience, and keenness for drill be your motto."

The following quotes from 1919 are hardly the views of an unambiguous anti-nationalist;

A successfull uprising (which was a distant but real possibility) could have hastened the end of WW1. Britain would be militarily and politically weakened and would probably have had to make peace with Germany. Essentially it could have brought about a stalemate between the European powers. This would not have been a victory for the proletariat in an abstract sence but it sure as hell would have been a victory for the poor (proletarian) bastards who wouldn't have had to continue dying in their millions.

It would probably also have had the effect of hastening the collapse of the British and other empires. The collapse of the European empires would most definitely have been positive from the point of view of the working and peasant classes in Africa, Asia etc.

We need to remember that the working classes are not some abstract but are made up of real human beings. My great grandfather was shot by a German sniper in late 1918. The war ending in 1916 would have definitely been a victory for one working class family in Dublin.

Ret Marut wrote:

I’m posed with a few problems by part of what you have written above – “My impression, from the previous quotes from O'Casey's 'Story of the ICA' of 1919, is that he didn't participate because his nationalism was of a more leftist variety.”

It’s difficult to know what you mean by the term ‘leftist’ here, particularly as applied to that period of history. In addition, was O’Casey’s nationalism ‘more leftist’ than that of Connolly, or ‘less leftist’ than that of Connolly? We can say for certain that O’Casey saw grave dangers in the planned uprising and didn’t support it while Connolly pushed for it.

In fact, were both these figures nought but nationalists? I don’t think so. Do you? (Genuine question). Were they proletarian fighters with illusions, widespread within the workers movement prior to and still lingering at that time, about the role of national independence in Ireland in furthering the workers’ cause? Were these illusions – particularly in the case of Connolly – strengthened by the rabid nationalistic climate of sections of the Irish bourgeoisie and reinforced by his alliance with a factiopn of them? I believe so.

Confusion on the ground about the tasks facing the workers movement at that moment in history – after the outbreak of world war but prior to the widespread struggles of workers which ended it – is one thing. Making a virtue out of that confusion today – by ascribing a proletarian or progressive character to the Easter Rising, or glorifying it decades after the event - is quite another (I’m not suggesting you personally do this).

In her 1906 pamphlet on The National Question, Rosa Luxembourg wrote: “Historical materialism has taught us that the real content of these "eternal" truths, rights, and formulae is determined only by the material social conditions of the environment in a given historical epoch.

The outbreak of World War 1 and the revolutions in Russia and Germany profoundly altered ‘the material social conditions’ of the epoch, ushered in a new epoch in fact. That revolutionaries in Ireland and elsewhere were in general slow to draw the implications of this is undeniable. We don’t have the same excuse today.

Ret Marut writes:

Ret: I’m not sure just where the ICC (or I, for that matter) imply that the absence of the Dublin working class in the rising was a sign of strong internationalism.

In the middle of a war (literally, in many senses) in which workers continued slaughtering each other for the benefit of imperialism, such a mass consciousness in one city in one small country would indeed have been surprising at the time. It didn’t happen. It wasn’t there. Which is good enough reason, one would have thought, not to launch such an offensive against the British state’s forces at this time.

I do believe there existed a healthy class instinct not to get your arse shot off in fruitless adventures, something that O’Casey was keen to emphasise, particularly over the question of uniforms (see the earlier linked ICC article). But indeed that’s not the same thing.

Why apart from this class instinct didn’t the proletariat support or join in this manoeuvre? Was it because of the secrecy with which it was prepared? I don’t think this was the main reason.

Certainly, one major factor, as you rightly say, was the economically enforced conscription of vast swathes of the Irish proletariat into Britain’s armies.

Another reason was the bitterness left by the class battles in Ireland in 1913.

“This was the nearest Irish society to date has come to an open class war between labour and capital. For the first time ever, there was an open split between the proletariat and Irish nationalism. In book 3 of his autobiography Drums under the Windows, O’Casey reminds us that the Irish Volunteers were “streaked with employers who had openly tried to starve the women and children of the workers, followed meekly by scabs and blacklegs from the lower elements among the workers themselves, and many of them saw in this agitation a plumrose path to good jobs, now held in Ireland by the younger sons of the English well-to-do...” (Sean O’Casey and the 1916 Easter Rising, link previously quoted).

Another factor in the absence of the proletariat: “...Connolly never once appealed to the Irish workers to join the Easter Rising, or even to go on strike in sympathy. And when he led the occupation of the General Post Office on Easter Monday, the first thing he did was to turn out the employees there at gunpoint. He knew perfectly well that proletariat of Dublin, still furious about the 1913 events, would have nothing to do with a nationalist upheaval.” (Ibid).

The facts remain: O’Casey opposed the Easter Uprising - “Liberty Hall was no longer the Headquarters of the Irish Labour movement, but the centre of Irish national disaffection”. (From the 1919 article you unearthed, now in the Libcom library, and also quoted in the ICC article) - and the proletariat didn’t support it.

The ICC’s article that so enrages georgestapleton draws heavily on an interpretation of O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy plays. Did O’Casey’s view develop between the writing of History of the Irish Citizens Army (1919) and the first of these plays (in 1926, I think, though I stand to be corrected).

If so, could the Russian Revolution, and particularly the "growing number of strikes, strikers and strike days that Ireland saw between 1917 and the slump which set in at the end of 1920" have had an impact on O’Casey’s subsequent view of the Easter Rising, and indeed on his illusions in Irish nationalism? Strikes that were often accompanied "by well-organised picketing, sympathetic action and even active sabotage, and adopting the iconography of 1917, with red flags and even detachments of 'Red Guards'" which helped to "strike fear into the heart of republicans"; strikes later during which “Workers in Cork and Limerick took over some factories ... and set up 'Soviets', so-called in imitation of the Russian ones.

Could the fact that “these were crushed by local units of the IRA ... and ousted owners were handed back their plants at the points of IRA guns" (Revolutionary Perspectives first series, no.15) have dampened O’Casey’s illusions in Irish nationalism? I don’t know: I’m posing the question.

Did the June 1920 Dail Eireann proclamation against the class struggle, saying that it was "ill chosen for the stirring up of strife among our fellow countrymen,” have had any bearing on the radicalised content of O’Casey’s Dublin Trinity plays? Or the fact that the secretary of the Dail wrote "the mind of the people was being diverted from the struggle for freedom by class war"? (all quotes from ‘Irish republicanism: weapon of capital against the working class’ in World Revolution 231, February 2000 http://en.internationalism.org/wr/231_ira.htm

Or will someone give me an alternative reading of those works by O’Casey?

Ret Marut wrote:

Well, as you say, he did die a Stalinist, but I suspect you’re right nonetheless.
PS: Think I’ll switch to the Robots thread: it’s obviously where I belong and looks more fun.
PPS: Just finished March to the Monteria – now to hunt out the other 5 in the series!

JoeBlack2 wrote:

Cannonisation campaign? Hardly. I’ve already said that “Even on the national question, he (O’Casey’) was not necessarily clearer than those around him.” The ICC article says that the very title Irish Citizens Army is a compromise with and a concession to nationalism.

It’s just O’Casey’s position does appear to change quite a bit, along with the material circumstances, from 1910 to his death: from Protestant background to Irish Nationalist, to labour leader, to critic of aspects of nationalism (particularly through his plays) to end up, with the defeat of the workers’ movement, back in the bourgeois camp as a Stalinist.

No one's yet been able to demonstrate to me how and why the ICC article is so 'fuckin awful' and wrong on so many points.

On your previous post: sorry but I genuinely don’t understand the point you’re trying to make about ‘highpoints.’ I’ll leave you to choose your favourite ‘Irish Republican’ moment, if it’s all the same to you.

Delighted to have amused and amazed georgestapleton, no small achievement given that you profess: "Christ I fucking hate left communists." You have not been charged for this service.
As for the political content - workers' attitudes, then and now - to the 1916 Easter Rising, well no doubt it will crop up again. LOL