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Connolly & religion
THANK YOU for a wonderful article on James Connolly
in the last issue of Socialism Today (Issue 100). However, I have one
criticism of it: that it doesn’t touch on one of the major influences in
Connolly’s life.
James Connolly was, like most people in Ireland at
that time, a devout Catholic. I agree with Peter Hadden that after
ninety years it is important for socialists to look at what Connolly
believed in and what he fought for. Therefore I was pleasantly surprised
to see that Peter had chosen Connolly’s pamphlet Labour, Nationality and
Religion to illustrate his beliefs, especially when one is aware that
the pamphlet was produced to answer the arguments of a Catholic priest
against socialism.
Unfortunately Peter, I guess for reasons of space,
doesn’t reproduce the whole quote, taken from the last paragraph of the
pamphlet, but just the first line. The full paragraph reads:
"The day has passed for patching up the capitalist
system; it must go. And in the work of abolishing it the Catholic and
the Protestant, the Catholic and the Jew, the Catholic and the
Freethinker, the Catholic and the Buddhist, the Catholic and the
Mahometan will co-operate together, knowing no rivalry but the rivalry
of endeavour toward an end beneficial to all. For, as we have said
elsewhere, socialism is neither Protestant nor Catholic, Christian nor
Freethinker, Buddhist, Mahometan, nor Jew; it is only Human. We of the
socialist working class realise that as we suffer together we must work
together that we may enjoy together. We reject the firebrand of
capitalist warfare and offer you the olive leaf of brotherhood and
justice to and for all".
This however leaves us with the question of how
Connolly managed to square the circle of being a person of faith while
also being a ‘Marxist, a revolutionary socialist and an
internationalist’. And for that we must turn to an earlier work also
published by the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP), called
Socialism and Religion, where Connolly says of socialism:
"We do not mean that its supporters are necessarily
materialists in the vulgar, and merely anti-theological, sense of the
term, but that they do not base their socialism upon any interpretation
of the language or meaning of scripture, nor upon the real or supposed
intentions of a beneficent Deity. They as a party neither affirm or deny
those things, but leave it to the individual conscience of each member
to determine what beliefs on such questions they shall hold. As a
political party they wisely prefer to take their stand upon the actual
phenomena of social life as they can be observed in operation amongst us
to-day, or as they can be traced in the recorded facts of history".
This may have been the reason that his religious
beliefs where not included in the article – because they were simply his
own. However, as Marxists, in order to understand Connolly’s writings
and his part in Irish history, we need to understand all the major
influences on his life. That why I would encourage comrades of all
faiths or none to read his works. The bulk of them, including both
Labour, Nationality and Religion and Socialism and Religion can be found
on the Marxist Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/index.htm).
Scott Herbert,
Leicester
The article in Socialism Today was an abridged
version of a longer article that will appear on the website of the
Socialist Party in Ireland (www.socialistparty.net)
in the next few months. This will deal with a number of issues that
could not be covered in the Socialism Today article – for reasons of
space – including Connolly and the ideas of syndicalism, religion,
labour unionism, and his attitude to Germany in the first world war.
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