> On Mar 29, 2016, at 3:10 PM, James Creegan <turbulo at aol.com> wrote:
>
> The Rising is usually celebrated on Easter Sunday/Monday, but, since this is the centennial, some are commemorating it on the actual calendar date on which it began, which is April 24.
>
> I think the Jacobin piece is a pretty good historical summary, but gives somewhat short shrift to what was at the time, and has been ever since, the most controversial aspect of Easter Week for socialists: Connolly's decision to join the Rising on essentially the nationalist terms of the IRB, as opposed to his own socialist republican program.
Some Marxists denounced the rising as a putsch and others more charitably suggested that the rising was premature and based on a misestimation of the balance of forces. I believe Lenin hewed to this latter view, but strongly criticized those who saw it as a putsch. More to your point, while he may have thought the timing of the rising was ill-considered, Lenin didn’t have an issue with Connolly’s alliance with the IRB or with the program expressed in the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, to which I alluded in my post. In connection with the event, Lenin wrote:
“The centuries-old Irish national movement, having passed through various stages and combinations of class interest, manifested itself…in street fighting conducted by a section of the urban petty bourgeoisie and a section of the workers after a long period of mass agitation, demonstrations, suppression of newspapers, etc. Whoever calls such a rebellion a “putsch” is either a hardened reactionary, or a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon. To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.-to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution.”
“The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/x01.htm
> I don't know if I'd call Jimmy's Hall a masterpiece, and I certainly wouldn't call my Weekly Worker review definitive, but here it is, for what it's worth:
>
>
> http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1069/the-red-and-the-green/
Good review, and I don’t find fault with your critical comment in the context of your overall positive assessment of the film and the rest of Loach’s work:
“And, while by no means descending to crude propaganda, his movies do suffer from some of the character typing and didacticism that much socially and politically themed art is hard pressed to avoid.
"Yet Loach’s films seldom fail to engage. The director’s artistic limitations are usually compensated for by the high drama of the tales he chooses to relate. They are the stories of ordinary people, fictional or historical, resisting the ruling classes, individually or collectively. If not for Loach, such stories would remain untold; he stands out as one of the few continuators of the radical independent cinema of the 60s and 70s in the intervening decades of commercial mediocrity. The left and the working class will always value the body of work he leaves behind.”
> Marv Gandall wrote:
>
> I?ve just finished watching Ken Loach?s latest masterpiece, Jimmy?s Hall, on Netflix and this excellent Jacobin article marking the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising in Ireland makes an excellent companion piece. The article places the rising in its historical context - the forces which shaped it and the consequences which flowed from it.
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