Marv Gandall wrote:
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.?
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I'm familiar with Lenin's article. It was written as a reply to an article by Karl Radek, who, despite other tensions with Rosa, held a Luxemburgist position on the national question, and hence denounced the rising as a petty bourgeois putsch, irrelevant to the struggle for socialism.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of Lenin, apart from leading the October Revolution, was to put the Communist movement squarely on the side of the other great revolutionary wave of the twentieth century--the anti-colonial struggle. But it doesn't necessarily follow from the fact that Lenin, unlike Radek, took a clear side on the Easter Rising, that he found nothing wrong with Connolly's virtual liquidation of his own forces into the Irish Volunteers, headed by the IRB. The Comintern always insisted on the absolute political independence of Communist Parties vis-à-vis bourgeois nationalists in colonial countries. In other words, it is completely possible to be on the side of nationalist forces in any military confrontation with colonialists, while remaining independent and critical of them politically. Connolly did not attempt in this situation to maintain the political independence of the working class. I take Lenin's remarks only to mean that he took the side of the rebels militarily, and not as an endorsement of Connolly's political tactics, which he doesn't go into.
Jim Creegan
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