An Analysis of October and Perspectives on the Future in a Text by Lenin

The text we are presenting here (Better Fewer, But Better) was written by Lenin on March 2, 1923 and first appeared in Pravda two days later. Presented as the last article he wrote in his own lifetime, it was intended as a further contribution towards solving the tough challenges faced by the Russian Revolution. According to political gossipers, it represented his “political testament”, together with a bunch of other documents first made public after the 20th CPSU Congress in 1956, with the intention of denouncing Stalinism from a “right-wing” perspective, using arguments that were even worse, more counter-revolutionary and late-bourgeois reactionary than those of Stalin in his lifetime; arguments that were therefore even further from those of Lenin and of all authentic communists past and present.

We have no need to learn the “last words” of our teachers, and still less their “last will and testament” in the sense of passing on private property. The complete Lenin, with all of his gigantic collected works spanning 30 years, the man and the party comrade, always informed by the complete Marx, stands for a coherent reading of social reality in accordance with our monolithic and scientific historical doctrine. It has neither beginning nor end in the continuum of party life. If Lenin’s health had not deteriorated he would have continued to write in this way, or perhaps we should say he would not have been prevented from doing so by the infamous maneuvers within the party.

The choice of this text is therefore partly random, since we could draw on any one of many others by Lenin to point to similar conclusions. This one lays out the situation of Russia in 1923 and assesses the first five years since October. We have already referred to this document in our 1955 work, Economic and Social Structure of Contemporary Russia (“Struttura”), in particular Chapter 101 of Part 2, entitled “A farewell to Lenin” and earlier chapters (1).

The situation was objectively complex and difficult. Post-revolutionary Russia was a society of phases, the opposite of homogeneity, in which layers of social geology lay one upon the other and which, as Lenin taught, extended from partiarchy, to small-scale mercantile agriculture, to private capitalism and right through to State capitalism and the embryonic forms of communist economy: all evolving and in opposition and struggle against each otherl. Politically, we have the dictatorship of the workers’ and peasants’ soviets, led solely by the communist party; but the revolution was far from having been accomplished, the powerful forces of the bourgeois counter-revolution, even though for the moment driven from the field by the weapons of the red army, still offered blunt resistance, both inside and outside Russia, in a network of dethroned classes and the embassies and general staffs of the leading capitalist States, planning and organizing their counterattack.

In a backward country the burden of tradition, which is more feudal than bourgeois, is particularly onerous; tradition seeps “through every fissure” and even the Soviet State’s own structure cannot be made water-tight.

Capitalism was germinating powerfully and spontaneously in Russia, out of historical necessity. And despite the desperate economic conditions of the country, this represented progress, even in our sense, as it created the material premise for an ineluctable transition towards socialism: both economically, since this lays the modern structures and infrastructures without which socialism is impossible, and socially, because the resurgence of an extensive, developed and concentrated industrial class of wage laborers, which is the true foundation, driving force and source of energy for communist power.

Therefore, communists in Russia, if they want to stay in power, must at the same time:

Continue to maintain good relations with the peasantry, as they have simultaneously triggered and won the revolution in the countryside and fought courageously in the revolutionary army; Soviet power and the only communist and working class party is based on the alliance with them; the peasantry, of whom by far the greatest part are small or very small producers as a result of the revolution and the dispossession of the great landowners, constitute a petty bourgeoisie with a mentality that is as conservative as may be imagined; yet they are essential to feed the cities and the army. It is therefore necessary to accede to, and foster the development of capitalism, which implies the re-establishment of internal free trade; there is not yet an industrial complex that can be controlled by the Soviet State and that could supply the peasants with its own products (machinery, fertilizers and so on) in exchange for grain. It is still not goods that are required but commodities, regardless of where, how and by whom they are produced, that can be exchanged for money. We must push this reborn capitalism towards the most modern forms of automation and large-scale industry all the way to State capitalism; hence the need to resort to loans from abroad, from our implacable enemies in England and France who, as members of the bourgeoisie, cannot help but run wherever they smell good business; we must also seek out the advice of the necessary experts and technicians etc. and pay the going rate. All of this while maintaining the communist power of the working class by means of its party, not with the perspective of “building socialism” in isolated Russia, but in anticipation of the revolution in the West, even if, as we said, “it takes 50 years”. It was a matter of keeping a tight rein, for so long as possible, on the infernal anarchic and subversive forces of revived capitalism, which were exerting pressure on all sides, internally and internationally; we could only rely on the strength of the working class in power, seizing the conquests of the revolution, first of all through State ownership of all the land and the monopoly of foreign trade. There was no path open other than to seek to hold capitalism “under siege” with the power of the communist State.

This was the extremely difficult situation that the party was faced with at the time, which Lenin investigates and deconstructs and for which he tries to identify not “new paths” but the correct Marxist line of action.

The text that we are presenting here is therefore as difficult as the complexity of the situation we were going through. It is always amazing the way that Lenin presents the lofty and severe historical dialectic, with crystalline simplicity and always in an orthodox reading of Marxism. He drills through all the overlapping strata of Russian society: pre-bourgeois, middle-bourgeois, large-bourgeois, a reality that he connects to the situation of global imperialism, for which he advances valid considerations and forecasts: a capitalism in deadly crisis, but always on the rampage against the first ever Communist State. But his thinking, as ever, is focused on another phase, that of our worldwide revolution.

For the purpose of strengthening the Soviet State, “in pitiful conditions”, Lenin therefore proposed reforming the People’s Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection with a view consolidating it and its greater authority and prestige within the State’s organs and within the Party. There should be, in his words, a high-level institute of technicians, of educated and expert workers, that draws its members both from the Party and from the State; that imposes itself thanks to the general respect for which it has proved worthy.

Not that Lenin ignores the latent, ineluctable, explosion of the conflict of interests between the two revolutionary classes, the workers and the peasantry, but he sees the possibility of containing it, or of putting it off “for some decades”, in a “civil” and “cultural” development, which in Marxist language means acquiring technical knowledge already typical of bourgeois societies and the capitalist ability to employ them practically on a large scale. So: let’s reopen factories, at least the pre-war ones, let’s bring electricity to the farms of the boundless country, together with tools, seeds, fertilizers and agronomists; with incentives from the State, these farms will be encouraged to regroup in cooperatives, where the low productivity of agricultural labor will be raised, freeing former peasants, who will be welcomed into new factories as wage laborers.

Thus, while this is certainly not yet an instrument of communist planning “of things”: simply an ”inspection”, for the moment principally against corruption and waste, to “hold out”. This is so, even if we want to catch a glimpse of something in that direction, something extra that is post-corporate and purely “technical”; something also joyful, as our struggle for communism always is, or even jocular, as Lenin comes to write. This of course has nothing to do with the Stalinist “plans”, which reduced this dialectic to the mere accumulation of capital, not to then be able to overthrow its power in capitalist States and to break up social relations based on wage labor and commodity exchange.

The opportunity to proceed in the direction of communism was an international and not a merely Russian issue; a condition for this was that the communist party should stay in power and stay communist. We know that on the contrary, in the space of a few years, the politics of the Russian party changed direction by 180 degrees to dedicate itself to “building socialism” in Russia alone, having become a party devoted to the accumulation of national capital as an end in itself. The alliance of workers and peasants was therefore turned on its head, with the interests of “kolkhozized” peasants prevailing socially over those of the workers and politically against any socialist and internationalist perspectives. The “Soviet” State became a facade, just like the “democratic” States of the West, to hide the dictatorship of national and international capital.

In the last part, which we publish in full, Lenin goes on to lay out the future prospects for the international revolution, against the backdrop of a deep crisis among the capitalisms of Europe, especially in Germany, and the growing clash of interests between the United States and Japan, which already led him to predict the next war.

But he regarded the setting in motion of the populous countries of the Orient as a massively progressive factor. Here we had full confirmation of how powerful revolutionary processes matured and how they broke out. Here too, however, the lack of a faithful, wise and coherent Marxist communist leadership of the insurgent masses of workers and peasants prevented, over the course of a few years, the exceptional and inevitable phenomenon of the Russian October from being favorably repeated in China.

The historic cycle of the double revolutions, as Marx and Lenin had already predicted in our communist doctrine, according to which the global working class achieved its first victory in October, maintaining it for a few years, and had glimpsed the next in the Orient – this cycle has been fulfilled with the universal assertion of national bourgeoisies over the old regimes and the old classes. One hundred years later and ahead of the future revolution of the working class and its only party, the great lessons of October remain chiseled, not yet in the minds of the proletariat, but in the hard granite of the impersonal historical experience of the class party, anticipators of the future. Along with Lenin, we list these as:

1. October set the definitive seal on authentic left-wing Marxism as the only adequate scientific reading of history, the basis of the program for the emancipation of the working class and its consequent social action;

2. The need for the Party to stand at the head of the proletariat for its constitution as a class and as a ruling class, in the phases of the preparation and seizure of political power, is confirmed;

3. The necessary historical course of the assumption of power and the installation of a revolutionary State, exclusively directed by the Communist Party, is reaffirmed;

4. The need for an entire phase of State dictatorship of the proletariat for the repression of counter-revolutionary attempts by the dispossessed, but not yet dispersed classes.

5. For the demolition of democracy in theory to the practical dismantling of its institutions.

6. The condemnation of the imperialist war on both sides, defeatism; the repudiation of all military alliances and putting an end to imperialist war with the revolutionary war.

We, today’s small party, claim to orient ourselves and continue to move on the lines marked out by this great and permanent magnetic field of social forces, in the certainty that the truths of October, after the fallacies and inconsistencies of false disciples and opponents over a century, will return to impose themselves on the scene of the revolutionary struggle between classes.

Footnote:

(1) This work is available also in French, "Structure économique et sociale de la Russie d’aujourd’hui" and in Spanish "Estructura economica y social de la Rusia actual".

Better Fewer, but Better

In the matter of improving our State apparatus, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection should not, in my opinion, either strive after quantity or hurry. We have so far been able to devote so little thought and attention to the efficiency of our State apparatus that it would now be quite legitimate if we took special care to secure its thorough organization, and concentrated in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection a staff of workers really abreast of the times, i.e., not inferior to the best West-European standards. For a socialist republic this condition is, of course, too modest. But our experience of the first five years has fairly crammed our heads with mistrust and skepticism. These qualities assert themselves involuntarily when, for example, we hear people dilating at too great length and too flippantly on "proletarian" culture. For a start, we should be satisfied with real bourgeois culture; for a start we should be glad to dispense with the crude types of pre-bourgeois culture, i.e., bureaucratic culture or serf culture, etc. In matters of culture, haste and sweeping measures are most harmful. Many of our young writers and Communists should get this well into their heads.

Thus, in the matter of our State apparatus we should now draw the conclusion from our past experience that it would be better to proceed more slowly.

Our State apparatus is so deplorable, not to say wretched, that we must first think very carefully how to combat its defects, bearing in mind that these defects are rooted in the past, which, although it has been overthrown, has not yet been overcome, has not yet reached the stage of a culture, that has receded into the distant past. I say culture deliberately, because in these matters we can only regard as achieved what has become part and parcel of our culture, of our social life, our habits. We might say that the good in our social system has not been properly studied, understood, and taken to heart; it has been hastily grasped at; it has not been verified or tested, corroborated by experience, and not made durable, etc. Of course, it could not be otherwise in a revolutionary epoch, when development proceeded at such break-neck speed that in a matter of five years we passed from tsarism to the Soviet system.

It is time we did something about it. We must show sound scepticism for too rapid progress, for boastfulness, etc. We must give thought to testing the steps forward we proclaim every hour, take every minute and then prove every second that they are flimsy, superficial and misunderstood. The most harmful thing here would be haste. The most harmful thing would be to rely on the assumption that we know at least something, or that we have any considerable number of elements necessary for the building of a really new State apparatus, one really worthy to be called socialist, Soviet, etc.

No, we are ridiculously deficient of such an apparatus, and even of the elements of it, and we must remember that we should not stint time on building it, and that it will take many, many years.

What elements have we for building this apparatus? Only two. First, the workers who are absorbed in the struggle of socialism. These elements are not sufficient educated. They would like to build a better apparatus for us, but they do not know how. They cannot build one. They have not yet developed the culture required for this; and it is culture that is required. Nothing will be achieved in this by doing things in a rush, by assault, by vim or vigor, or in general, by any of the best human qualities. Secondly, we have elements of knowledge, education and training, but they are ridiculously inadequate compared with all other countries.

Here we must not forget that we are too prone to compensate (or imagine that we can compensate) our lack of knowledge by zeal, haste, etc.

In order to renovate our State apparatus we must at all costs set out, first, to learn, secondly, to learn, and thirdly, to learn, and then see to it that learning shall not remain a dead letter, or a fashionable catch-phrase (and we should admit in all frankness that this happens very often with us), that learning shall really become part of our very being, that it shall actually and fully become a constituent element of our social life. In short, we must not make the demands that were made by bourgeois Western Europe, but demands that are fit and proper for a country which has set out to develop into a socialist country.

The conclusion to be drawn from the above are the following: we must make the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection a really exemplary institution, an instrument to improve our State apparatus.

In order that it may attain the desired high level, we must follow the rule: "Measure your cloth seven times before you cut".

For this purpose, we must utilise the very best of what there is in our social system, and utilise it with the greatest caution, thoughtfulness and knowledge, to build up the new People’s Commissariat.

For this purpose, the best elements that we have in our social system – such as, first, the advanced workers, and, second, the really enlightened elements for whom we can vouch that they will not take the word for the deed, and will not utter a single word that goes against their conscience – should not shrink from admitting any difficulty and should not shrink from any struggle in order to achieve the object they have seriously set themselves.

We have been bustling for five years trying to improve our State apparatus, but it has been mere bustle, which has proved useless in these five years, of even futile, or even harmful. This bustle created the impression that we were doing something, but in effect it was only clogging up our institutions and our brains.

It is high time things were changed.

We must follow the rule: Better fewer, but better. We must follow the rule: Better get good human material in two or even three years than work in haste without hope of getting any at all.

I know that it will be hard to keep to this rule and apply it under our conditions. I know that the opposite rule will force its way through a thousand loopholes. I know that enormous resistance will have to be put up, that devilish persistence will be required, that in the first few years at least work in this field will be hellishly hard. Nevertheless, I am convinced that only by such effort shall we be able to achieve our aim; and that only by achieving this aim shall we create a republic that is really worthy of the name of Soviet, socialist, and so on, and so forth.

Many readers probably thought that the figures I quoted by way of illustration in my first article [How We Should Reorganise the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection] were too small. I am sure that many calculations may be made to prove that they are. But I think that we must put one thing above all such and other calculations, i.e., our desire to obtain really exemplary quality.

I think that the time has at last come when we must work in real earnest to improve our State apparatus and in this there can scarcely be anything more harmful than haste. That is why I would sound a strong warning against inflating the figures. In my opinion, we should, on the contrary, be especially sparing with figures in this matter. Let us say frankly that the People’ s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection does not at present enjoy the slightest authority. Everybody knows that no other institutions are worse organized than those of our Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, and that under present conditions nothing can be expected from this People’s Commissariat. We must have this firmly fixed in our minds if we really want to create within a few years an institution that will, first, be an exemplary institution, secondly, win everybody’s absolute confidence, and, thirdly, prove to all and sundry that we have really justified the work of such a highly placed institution as the Central Control Commission. In my opinion, we must immediately and irrevocably reject all general figures for the size of office staffs. We must select employees for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection with particular care and only on the basis of the strictest test. Indeed, what is the use of establishing a People’s Commissariat which carries on anyhow, which does not enjoy the slightest confidence, and whose word carries scarcely any weight? I think that our main object in launching the work of reconstruction that we now have in mind is to avoid all this.

The workers whom we are enlisting as members of the Central Control Commission must be irreproachable Communists, and I think that a great deal has yet to be done to teach them the methods and objects of their work. Furthermore, there must be a definite number of secretaries to assist in this work, who must be put to a triple test before they are appointed to their posts. Lastly, the officials whom in exceptional cases we shall accept directly as employees of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection must conform to the following requirements:

First, they must be recommended by several Communists.

Second, they must pass a test for knowledge of our State apparatus.

Third, they must pass a test in the fundamentals of the theory of our State apparatus, in the fundamentals of management, office routine, etc.

Fourth, they must work in such close harmony with the members of the Central Control Commission and with their own secretariat that we could vouch for the work of the whole apparatus.

I know that these requirements are extraordinarily strict, and I am very much afraid that the majority of the "practical" workers in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection will say that these requirements are impracticable, or will scoff at them. But I ask any of the present chiefs of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, or anyone associated with that body, whether they can honestly tell me the practical purpose of a People’s Commissariat like the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection? I think this question will help them recover their sense of proportion. Either it is not worth while having another of the numerous reorganisations that we have had of this hopeless affair, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, or we must really set to work, by slow, difficult and unusual methods, and by testing these methods over and over again, to create something really exemplary, something that will win the respect of all and sundry for its merits, and not only because of its rank and title.

If we do not arm ourselves with patience, if we do not devote several years to this task, we had better not tackle it at all.

In my opinion we ought to select a minimum number of the higher labour research institutes, etc., which we have baked so hastily, see whether they are organised properly, and allow them to continue working, but only in a way that conforms to the high standards of modern science and gives us all its benefits. If we do that it will not be utopian to hope that within a few years we shall have an institution that will be able to perform its functions, to work systematically and steadily on improving our State apparatus, an institution backed by the trust of the working class, of the Russian Communist Party, and the whole population of our Republic.

The spade-work for this could begin at once. If the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection accepted the present plan of reogranisation, it could not take the preparatory steps and work methodically until the task is completed, without haste, and not hesitating to alter what has already been done.

Any half-hearted solution would be extremely harmful in this matter. A measure for the size of the staff of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection based on any other consideration would, in fact, be based on the old bureaucratic considerations, on old prejudices, on what has already been condemned, universally ridiculed, etc.

In substance, the matter is as follows:

Either we prove now that we have really learned something about State organisation (we ought to have learned something in five years), or we prove that we are not sufficiently mature for it. If the latter is the case, we had better not tackle the task.

I think that with the available human material it will not be immodest to assume that we have learned enough to be able to systematically rebuild at least one People’s Commissariat. True, this one People’s Commissariat will have to be the model for our entire State apparatus.

We ought to at once announce a contest in the compilation of two or more textbooks on the organization of labor in general, and on management in particular. We can take as a basis the book already published by Yermansky, although it should be said in parentheses that he obviously sympathizes with Menshevism and is unfit to compile textbooks for the Soviet system.

We can also take as a basis the recent book by Kerzhentsev, and some of the other partial textbooks available may be useful too.

We ought to send several qualified and conscientious people to Germany, or to Britain, to collect literature and to study this question. I mention Britain in case it is found impossible to send people to the U.S.A. or Canada.

We ought to appoint a commission to draw up the preliminary program of examinations for prospective employees of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection; ditto for candidates to the Central Control Commission.

These and similar measures will not, of course, cause any difficulties for the People’s Commissar or the collegium of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, or for the Presidium of the Central Control Commission.

Simultaneously, a preparatory commission should be appointed to select candidates for membership of the Central Control Commission. I hope that we shall now be able to find more than enough candidates for this post among the experienced workers in all departments, as well as among the students of our Soviet higher schools. It would hardly be right to exclude one or another category beforehand. Probably preference will have to be given to a mixed composition for this institution, which should combine many qualities, and dissimilar merits. Consequently, the tasks of drawing up the list of candidates will entail a considerable amount of work. For example, it would be least desirable for the staff of the new People’s Commissariat to consist of people of one type, only of officials, say, or for it to exclude people of the propagandist type, or people whose principal quality is sociability or the ability to penetrate into circles that are not altogether customary for officials in this field, etc.

I think I shall be able to express my idea best if I compare my plan with that of academic institutions. Under the guidance of their Presidium, the members of the Central Control Commission should systematically examine all the paper and documents of the Political Bureau. Moreover, they should divide their time correctly between various jobs in investigating the routine in our institutions, form the very small and privately-owned offices to the highest State institutions. And lastly, their functions should include the study of theory, i.e., the theory of organisation of the work they intend to devote themselves to, and practical work under the guidance of other comrades or of teachers in the higher institutes for the organisation of labour.

I do not think, however, that they will be able to confine themselves to this sort of academic work. In addition, they will have to prepare themselves for working which I would not hesitate to call training to catch, I will not say rouges, but something like that, and working out special ruses to screen their movements, their approach, etc.

If such proposals were made in West-European government institutions they would rouse frightful resentment, a feeling of moral indignation, etc.; but I trust that we have not become so bureaucratic as to be capable of that. NEP has not yet succeeded in gaining such respect as to cause any of us to be shocked at the idea somebody may be caught. Our Soviet Republic is of such recent construction, and there are such heaps of the old lumber still lying around that it would hardly occur to anyone to be shocked at the idea that we should delve into them by means of ruses, by means of investigations sometimes directed to rather remote sources or in a roundabout way. And even if it did occur to anyone to be shocked by this, we may be sure that such a person would make himself a laughing-stock.

Let us hope that our new Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection will abandon what the French call pruderie, which we may call ridiculous primness, or ridiculous swank, and which plays entirely into the hands of our Soviet and Party bureaucracy. Let it be said in parentheses that we have bureaucrats in our Party offices as well as in Soviet offices.

When I said above that we must study and study hard in institutes for the higher organisation of labour, etc., I did not by any means imply "studying" in the schoolroom way, nor did I confine myself to the idea of studying only in the schoolroom way. I hope that not a single genuine revolutionary will suspect me of refusing, in this case, to understand "studies" to include resorting to some semi-humourous trick, cunning device, piece of trickery or something of that sort. I know that in the staid and earnest States of Western European such an idea would horrify people and that not a single decent official would even entertain it. I hope, however, that we have not yet become as bureaucratic as all that and that in our midst the discussion of this idea will give rise to nothing more than amusement.

Indeed, why not combine pleasure with utility? Why not resort to some humourous or semi-humorous trick to expose something ridiculous, something harmful, something semi-ridiculous, semi-harmful, etc.?

It seems to me that our Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection will gain a great deal if it undertakes to examine these ideas, and that the list of cases in which our Central Control Commission and its colleagues in the Workers and Peasants’ Inspection achieved a few of their most brilliant victories will be enriched by not a few exploits of our future Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection and Central Control Commission members in places not quite mentionable in prim and staid textbooks.

How can a Party institution be amalgamated with a Soviet institution? Is there not something improper in this suggestion?

I do not ask these questions on my own behalf, but on behalf of those I hinted at above when I said that we have bureaucrats in our Party institutions as well as in the Soviet institutions.

But why, indeed, should we not amalgamate the two if this is in the interests of our work? Do we not all see that such an amalgamation has been very beneficial in the case of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, where it was brought about at the very beginning? Does not the Political Bureau discuss from the Party point of view many questions, both minor and important, concerning the "moves" we should make in reply to the "moves" of foreign powers in order to forestall their, say, cunning, if we are not to use a less respectable term? Is not this flexible amalgamation of a Soviet institution with a Party institution a source of great strength in our politics? I think that what has proved its usefulness, what has been definitely adopted in our foreign politics and has become so customary that it no longer calls forth any doubt in this field, will be at least as appropriate (in fact, I think it will be much more appropriate) for our State apparatus as a whole. The functions of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection cover our State apparatus as a whole, and its activities should affect all and every State institution without exception: local, central, commercial, purely administrative, educational, archival, theatrical, etc. – in short, all without any exception.

Why then should not an institution, whose activities have such wide scope, and which moreover requires such extraordinary flexibility of forms, be permitted to adopt this peculiar amalgamation of a Party control institution with a Soviet control institution?

I see no obstacles to this. What is more, I think that such an amalgamation is the only guarantee of success in our work. I think that all doubts on this score arise in the dustiest corners of our government offices, and that they deserve to be treated with nothing but ridicule.

Another doubt: is it expedient to combine educational activities with official activities? I think that it is not only expedient, but necessary. Generally speaking, in spite of our revolutionary attitude towards the West-European form of State, we have allowed ourselves to become infected with a number of its most harmful and ridiculous prejudices; to some extent we have been deliberately infected with them by our dear bureaucrats, who counted on being able again and again to fish in the muddy waters of these prejudices. And they did fish in these muddy waters to so great an extent that only the blind among us failed to see how extensively this fishing was practiced.

In all spheres of social, economic and political relationships we are "frightfully" revolutionary. But as regards precedence, the observance of the forms and rites of office management, our "revolutionariness" often gives way to the mustiest routine. On more than one occasion, we have witnessed the very interesting phenomenon of a great leap forward in social life being accompanied by amazing timidity whenever the slightest changes are proposed.

This is natural, for the boldest steps forward were taken in a field which was long reserved for theoretical study, which was promoted mainly, and even almost exclusively, in theory. The Russian, when away from work, found solace from bleak bureaucratic realities in unusually bold theoretical constructions, and that is why in our country these unusually bold theoretical constructions assumed an unusually lopsided character. Theoretical audacity in general constructions went hand in hand with amazing timidity as regards certain very minor reforms in office routine. Some great universal agrarian revolution was worked out with an audacity unexampled in any other country, and at the same time the imagination failed when it came to working out a tenth-rate reform in office routine; the imagination, or patience, was lacking to apply to this reform the general propositions that produced such brilliant results when applied to general problems.

That is why in our present life reckless audacity goes hand in hand, to an astonishing degree, with timidity of thought even when it comes to very minor changes.

I think that this has happened in all really great revolutions, for really great revolutions grow out of the contradictions between the old, between what is directed towards developing the old, and the very abstract striving for the new, which must be so new as not to contain the tiniest particle of the old.

And the more abrupt the revolution, the longer will many of these contradictions last.

The general feature of our present life is the following: we have destroyed capitalist industry and have done our best to raze to the ground the medieval institutions and landed proprietorship, and thus created a small and very small peasantry, which is following the lead of the proletariat because it believes in the results of its revolutionary work. It is not easy for us, however, to keep going until the socialist revolution is victorious in more developed countries merely with the aid of this confidence, because economic necessity, especially under NEP, keeps the productivity of labor of the small and very small peasants at an extremely low level. Moreover, the international situation, too, threw Russia back and, by and large, reduced the labor productivity of the people to a level considerably below pre-war. The West-European capitalist powers, partly deliberately and partly unconsciously, did everything they could to throw us back, to utilise the elements of the Civil War in Russia in order to spread as much ruin in the country as possible. It was precisely this way out of the imperialist war that seemed to have many advantages. They argued somewhat as follows: "If we fail to overthrow the revolutionary system in Russia, we shall, at all events, hinder its progress towards socialism". And from their point of view they could argue in no other way. In the end, their problem was half-solved. They failed to overthrow the new system created by the revolution, but they did prevent it from at once taking the step forward that would have justified the forecasts of the socialists, that would have enabled the latter to develop the productive forces with enormous speed, to develop all the potentialities which, taken together, would have produced socialism; socialists would thus have proved to all and sundry that socialism contains within itself gigantic forces and that mankind had now entered in to a new stage of development of extraordinarily brilliant prospects.

The system of international relationships which has now taken shape is one in which a European State, Germany, is enslaved by the victor countries. Furthermore, owing to their victory, a number of States, the oldest States in the West, are in a position to make some insignificant concessions to their oppressed classes – concessions which, insignificant though they are, nevertheless heard the revolutionary movement in those countries and create some semblance of "class truce".

At the same time, as a result of the last imperialist war, a number of countries of the East, India, China, etc, have been completely jolted out of the rut. Their development has definitely shifted to general European capitalist lines. The general European ferment has begun to affect them, and it is now clear to the whole world that they have been drawn into a process of development that must lead to a crisis in the whole of world capitalism.

Thus, at the present time we are confronted with the question – shall we be able to hold on with our small and very small peasant production, and in our present state of ruin, until the West-European capitalist countries consummate their development towards socialism? But they are consummating it not as we formerly expected. They are not consummating it through the gradual "maturing" of socialism, but through the exploitation of some countries by others, through the exploitation of the first of the countries vanquished in the imperialist war combined with the exploitation of the whole of the East. On the other hand, precisely as a result of the first imperialist war, the East has been definitely drawn into the revolutionary movement, has been definitely drawn into the general maelstrom of the world revolutionary movement.

What tactics does this situation prescribe for our country? Obviously the following. We must display extreme caution so as to preserve our workers’ government and to retain our small and very small peasantry under its leadership and authority. We have the advantage that the whole world is now passing to a movement that must give rise to a world socialist revolution. But we are labouring under the disadvantage that the imperialists have succeeded in splitting the world into two camps; and this split is made more complicated by the fact that it is extremely difficult for Germany, which is really a land of advanced, cultured, capitalist development, to rise to her feet. All the capitalist powers of what is called the West are pecking at her and preventing her from rising. On the other hand, the entire East, with its hundred of millions of exploited working people, reduced to the last degree of human suffering, has been forced into a position where its physical and material strength cannot possibly be compared with the physical, material and military strength of any of the much smaller West-European States.

Can we save ourselves from the impending conflict with these imperialist countries? May we hope that the internal antagonisms and conflicts between the thriving imperialist countries of the East will give us a second respite as they did the first time, when the campaign of the West-European counter-revolution in support of the Russian counter-revolution broke down owing to the antagonisms in the camp of the counter-revolutionaries of the West and the East, in the camp of th Eastern and Western exploiters, in the camp of Japan and the U.S.A.?

I think the reply to this question should be that the issue depends upon too many factors, and that the outcome of the struggle as a whole can be forecast only because in the long run capitalism itself is educating and training the vast majority of the population of the globe for the struggle.

In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.

But what interests us is not the inevitability of this complete victory of socialism, but the tactics which we, the Russian Communist Party, we the Russian Soviet Government, should pursue to prevent the West-European counter-revolutionary States form crushing us. To ensure our existence until the next military conflict between the counter-revolutionary imperialist West and the revolutionary and nationalist East, between the most civilised countries of the world and the Orientally backward countries which, however, compromise the majority, this majority must become civilised. We, too, lack enough civilisation to enable us to pass straight on to socialism, although we do have the political requisites for it. We should adopt the following tactics, or pursue the following policy, to save ourselves.

We must strive to build up a State in which the workers retain leadership of the peasants, in which they retain the confidence of the peasants, and by exercising the greatest economy remove every trace of extravagance from our social relations.

We must reduce our State apparatus to the utmost degree of economy. We must banish from it all traces of extravagance, of which so much has been left over from tsarist Russia, form its bureaucratic capitalist State machine.

Will not this be a reign of peasant limitations?

No. If we see to it that the working class retains its leadership over the peasantry, we shall be able, by exercising the greatest possible thrift in the economic life of our State, to use every saving we make to develop our large-scale machine industry, to develop electrification, the hydraulic extraction of peat, to complete the Volkhov Power Project, etc.

In this, and in this alone, lies our hope. Only when we have done this shall we, speaking figuratively, be able to change horses, to change from the peasant, muzhik horse of poverty, from the horse of an economy designed for a ruined peasant country, to the horse which the proletariat is seeking and must seek – the horse of large-scale machine industry, of electrification, of the Volkhov Power Station, etc.

That is how I link up in my mind the general plan of our work, of our policy, of our tactics, of our strategy, with the functions of the reorganized Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection. This is what, in my opinion, justifies the exceptional care, the exceptional attention that we must devote to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection in raising it to an exceptionally high level, in giving it a leadership with Central Committee rights, etc., etc.

And this justification is that only by thoroughly purging our government machine, by reducing it to the utmost everything that is not absolutely essential in it, shall we be certain of being able to keep going. Moreover, we shall be able to keep going not on the level of a small-peasant country, not on the level of universal limitation, but on a level steadily advancing to large-scale machine industry.

These are the lofty tasks that I dream of for our Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection. That is why I am planning for it the amalgamation of the most authoritative Party body with an "ordinary" People’s Commissariat.

The Working Class and Irish Nationalism

In 2013 in Dublin the centenary celebrations of the famous Lock-out took place. To mark the occasion there were plays, historical re-enactments, issues of commemorative postage stamps, art exhibitions, lectures, and a mass of publications. And many of the celebrations would receive the hesitant endorsement of official and government bodies, because the 1913-14 Lock-out, much to the chagrin of the Irish bourgeoisie, cannot be ignored: it has become inextricably bound up with the ‘national mythos’ of Ireland.

But the aim of those socialists who adopted the counsels of Marxism, even during the independence struggle, was not just an independent Ireland, but an Ireland run by the working class in the interests of the working class. Thus there was a wide gulf between their aims and those of the bourgeois nationalists who would eventually triumph. For the bourgeois nationalists, labour needed to repudiate socialism and resume its rightful place as the humble servant of the nation. This was the programme of Sinn Fein, such that its leader and future Irish president, Arthur Griffiths, revealingly stated during the Lock Out that he wanted to see every last one of the workers bayoneted.

However the continued and unavoidable presence of socialist leaders such as Connolly and Larkin in the pantheon of Irish nationalism means that today the bourgeoisie still has to try and conceal the goals that the proletarian party was pursuing during the independence struggle: that of a communist Ireland.

In Marx’s time, Ireland was to England what Poland was to Russia, and we could add what Algeria was to France. Ireland and Poland had this in common: that their enslavement was the basis of the two great pillars of European reaction: landlordism in England and the Holy Alliance on the continent.

The story of British rule is one of pillage and infamy. In Ireland British imperialism was only ever maintained as a state of permanent siege, to prevent the social revolution and the expropriation of the landlord. For the overwhelming majority of the Irish people the independence of Ireland was a matter of life or death. But more than that, the immense wealth that the English bourgeoisie extracted from Ireland allowed it to corrupt a section of the English proletariat, resulting in the latter supporting the imperialism and chauvinism of its own bourgeoisie. Thus the English proletariat propped up the English bourgeoisie, just as the latter supported the English aristocracy. In this situation there was no possibility of unity between the English workers and Irish workers, who meanwhile made up a large part of the industrial proletariat in England. Thus for Marx the independence of Ireland, or at least its exit from the Union and a greater autonomy within a federal State, would constitute the sine qua non of any social revolution in England.

The settlement of the Irish national question in 1921, after the War of Independence, with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, was far from conclusive and the differences between the Pro and Anti-Treaty factions would lead to a two year Civil War. Indeed some might say the national question was only resolved in 1937, when De Valera’s party, representing the old Anti-Treaty faction, constituted a Republic in all but name; or in 1938, when the ’economic war’ caused by Ireland’s non-payment of the £3,000,000 annual debt due to the English Government under the terms of the pre-treaty agrarian reforms, came to an end, and England abandoned certain naval and military rights it had obtained under the Treaty in specified Irish ports.

But the six counties in the North remained under the control of a Protestant elite, whose interests were best served by remaining a part of the United Kingdom. The continued oppression by this elite of the Catholic population, treated like an underclass, which was severely disadvantaged in regards to access to land, jobs and housing, continued to fuel an ongoing Irish irredentism up to the present day. To Catholics in the North, unity with their co-religionists in the South continued to present itself as a tempting solution to their predicament.

And thus the embers of nationalism continued to smoulder, finally bursting into flame during the years of the ‘Troubles’, at their most intense between 1970 and the late 1990s.

After countless deaths in what would become a long and brutal sectarian war, the Catholic population of the North would eventually win a number of concessions. Bourgeois Catholics and nationalists would finally be admitted as full partners in government and as participants its democratic rituals, with the aim, of course, of protecting its economic interests. But this would necessarily entail them having to perpetuate and reinforce their stranglehold over the working class; the source of the bourgeoisie’s profits, of whatever religious persuasion. Catholic proletarians would find that the conditions of equality obtained by their Catholic bosses would give them, their employees, few advantages and that they still had a world to win.

As Protestant triumphalism and overt Irish Catholic nationalism slowly reduced over the years, so the ancient sources of bad will between the two historic communities of the coloniser and the colonised receded further into the background, and what there was would come to be expressed more and more by means of chummy banter in debates in the Stormont Parliament. What sectarian ‘militancy’ now remains, regarding the routes of parades and how and when the Union Jack may be displayed and so on, are coming to appear increasingly anachronistic; although we can be pretty certain that the bourgeoisie will continue to stoke the fires of sectarianism in order to “divide and rule” the working class.

In Ulster, whether it eventually becomes united with the South, remains part of the United Kingdom, or establishes itself as a separate political entity, the task of communists is the same as elsewhere: to build an international party, the conscious expression of the global working class. Between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the national movement moved into its culminating phase, the early Marxists in Ireland could already see this, and were making every effort to bridge the sectarian divide and unify the strategy of the workers’ parties in Ireland and on the British mainland.

In recommencing our study of the Irish Question, our point of departure, and sound basis, will be a number of quotations from the extensive writings of Marx and Engel, as mentioned in previous Party studies.

In the chapters that follow we will go on to document in more detail the bitter clashes which took place between the different parties and classes in Ireland and English imperialism, ranging from the final decades of the 19th century to the First World War and on to the achievement of an independent State by the Irish bourgeoisie. In particular we will describe the rising wave of workers’ struggle in Ireland which culminated in the Dublin Lockout of 1913, the greatest and most radical strike that had ever taken place on the island, and a key episode in the unfolding international battle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

1. Marxism and the Irish Question

Report presented at the party general meeting in Genoa, May 2014

1) Natural conditions and ancient history of Ireland

The first writing we examined was the draft History of Ireland (1) which Engels worked on from the end of 1869 to the middle of 1870, but of which he only completed the first chapter on “Natural Conditions”, which discussed the island’s physical characteristics, and part of the second, on “Old Ireland”, which covered the early history up to the defeat of Viking invaders at the battle of Clontarf in 1014. A few significant extracts from that work appear below.

Natural Conditions

“Between Ireland and the rest of Europe another island lies transversally, three times the size, which we for brevity’s sake usually refer to as England; it completely encloses Ireland from the north, east and south-east, only leaving it a clear view in the direction of Spain, Western France and America.

“The channel between the two islands, 50-70 English miles wide at the narrowest points in the south, 13 miles wide at one place in the north and 22 miles at another, enabled the Irish Scots in the north to emigrate to the neighbouring island and found the Kingdom of Scotland even before the 5th century. In the south it was too wide for the boats of the Irish and the Britons and even posed a serious obstacle to the Romans’ flat-bottomed coasting vessels. But when the Frisians, Angles and Saxons, and after them the Scandinavians, ventured out on to the high sea, out of sight of land, in their keeled vessels, this channel was no longer an obstacle. Ireland became the object of raids by the Scandinavians and easy prey for the English. As soon as the Normans had formed a strong, uniform government in England, the influence of the larger neighbouring Island made itself felt – in those days this meant a war of conquest (…)

“Once the whole of the larger island was finally united in a single State, it was then bound to attempt the complete assimilation of Ireland, too.

“If this assimilation had been successful, its whole course would have become a matter of history. It would be subject to its judgement but could never be reversed. But if after seven hundred years of fighting this assimilation has not succeeded; if instead each new wave of invaders flooding Ireland is assimilated by the Irish; if, even today, the Irish are as far from being English, or West Britons, as they say, as the Poles are from being West Russians after only 100 years of oppression; if the fighting is not yet over and there is no prospect that it can be ended in any other way than by the extermination of the oppressed race – then, all the geographical pretexts in the world are not enough to prove that it is England’s mission to conquer Ireland”.

The Island’s geology

“In order to understand the soil conditions of present-day Ireland, we must go back a long way, right back to the age when the so-called carboniferous system was formed (…)

The entire central plain of Ireland is a result of denudation, so that, the coal-measures and the upper limestone deposits have been washed way (…)”

So it turns out Ireland found itself with little coal, and of an inferior quality. Engels concludes that:

“Ireland’s misfortune is ancient indeed: it commences immediately after the coal-measures were deposited. A country whose coal deposits have been washed away, situated right next to a larger country with plenty of coal, was condemned by nature, as it were, to play the part of a farming land vis-à-vis the future industrial country. This sentence, pronounced millions of years ago, was not carried out until this century. What is more, we shall see later how the English gave nature a helping hand by immediately and violently trampling underfoot almost any sign of burgeoning industry in Ireland”.

Soil and crops

Engels goes on to disprove the myth propagated by the English landowners and bourgeoisie that Ireland was not suited to tillage but only to pasturage, and therefore only to providing England with meat and dairy products while the Irish themselves, without bread, would have to emigrate to make way for the sheep and cattle.

“It is evident that all the authorities are agreed that the soil of Ireland contains all the elements of fertility to an unusual degree, with regard to both its chemical constituents and its physical composition. The extremes – sticky, impenetrable clay, which allows no water through, and loose sand, which does not retain it for an hour – are nowhere to be found. Yet Ireland has another disadvantage. While the mountains are mainly along the coast, the watersheds between the different river basins in the interior of the country are mostly very low-lying. The rivers are not able to drain off all the rainwater into the sea, and this gives rise to extensive peat bogs (…) But each one of these peat bogs contains within itself the material for its own reclamation and cultivation” (…)

“The oldest report on the Irish climate is provided by the Roman Pomponius Mela (De situ orbis) in the first century A. D. It says: “Beyond Britain lies Hibernia (2), almost equal to it in extent but otherwise similar; of a rather long shape, with skies adverse to the ripening seed; but abounding in grass not only luxuriant but also sweet, so that a small part of the day suffices for the cattle to eat their fill, and if they are not removed from the pasture they will go on grazing until they burst”.

“If one looks at the matter impartially and without being misled by the cries of the interested parties, the Irish landowners and the English bourgeoisie, one finds that Ireland, like all other places, has some parts which because of soil and climate are more suited to cattle-rearing, and others to tillage, and still others – the vast majority – which are suited to both. Compared with England, Ireland is more suited to cattle-rearing on the whole; but if England is compared with France, she too is more suited to cattle-rearing. Are we to conclude that the whole of England should be transformed into cattle pastures, and the whole agricultural population be sent into the factory towns or to America – except for a few herdsmen – to make room for cattle, which are to be exported to France in exchange for silk and wine? But that is exactly what the Irish landowners who want to put up their rents and the English bourgeoisie who want to decrease wages demand for Ireland (…)

“And yet the social revolution inherent in this transformation from tillage to cattle-rearing would be far greater in Ireland that in England. In England, where large-scale agriculture prevails and where agricultural labourers have already been replaced by machinery to a large extent, it would mean the transplantation of at most one million; in Ireland, where small and even cottage-farming prevails, it would mean the transplantation of four million: the extermination of the Irish people.

“It can be seen that even the facts of nature become points of national controversy between England and Ireland. It can also be seen, however, how the public opinion of the ruling class in England – and it is only this that is generally known on the Continent – changes with fashion and in its own interests. Today England needs grain quickly and dependably – Ireland is just perfect for wheat-growing. Tomorrow England needs meat – Ireland is only fit for cattle pastures. The existence of five million Irish is in itself a smack in the eye to all the laws of political economy, they have to get out but where to is their worry!”

The Irish peasant class was essentially composed of small farmers who paid a rent, in money or in kind, to the proprietor, who was almost always English. The transformation of a part of the cultivated land into pasture, imposed by the English landed proprietors, led to famines and the death of a large part of the population.

Old Ireland

Recent archaeological discoveries have established that there was no single continuous ethnic population in Ireland during prehistoric times. The thick layers of ash deposited in northern England and northern Ireland resulting from the three catastrophic eruptions of the Hekla volcano in Iceland had a significant effect in terms of severely restricting the growth of vegetation and necessarily prompted migration from these areas. The eruption in 2354BC lasted nine years and more or less coincides with current estimates of the ending of the Neolithic Age and the beginning of the copper/bronze age. The eruption in 1154BC lasted for a decade and roughly coincides with the middle Bronze Age. The movements of people in the region at this time, along with others in northern Europe may have been connected with the invasion of the Sea Peoples in the Mediterranean. The eruption in 950BC coincides with the ending of the Bronze Age. The Celtic conquest in the subsequent Iron Age, linked to new forms of agriculture and animal husbandry, was facilitated by the destruction and disruption wrought by this most recent eruption.

After the Celtic conquest of Gaul, southern Britain and Ireland, there still remained important features inherited from the previous society: women’s rights, an artisan class and the priestly cast of Druids, which did not exist in other Celtic areas. Over the millennia there were several further waves of immigration by various peoples, but when the Irish make their first appearance in history they constitute a homogeneous people with a Celtic culture.

In the course of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the 5th to 7th Century, the Celtic speaking Britons were pushed towards the western and northern regions of the larger island, into Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, and across to Brittany. These areas, facing on to the smaller island, would maintain a certain shared Celtic identity with Ireland, reinforced by trade, tribal wars, invasions and migrations.

Ireland possesses a rich literature, despite the destruction of a large part of it during the devastating wars conducted by England in the 16th and 17th centuries. And under British domination only a small part of these works could be published, and not necessarily the most interesting.

Resuming our quotation from Engels’ History:

“Christianity must have penetrated Ireland quite early, at least the east coast of it. Otherwise the fact that so many Irishmen played an important part in Church-history even long before Patrick cannot be explained” (…)

“The Irish people are called Scots and the land Scotia in all the writings of the early Middle Ages (…) The present Scotland was called Caledonia by foreigners and Alba, Albania by the inhabitants; the transfer of the name Scotia, Scotland, to the northern area of the eastern isle did not occur until the 11th century. The first substantial emigration of Irish Scots to Alba is taken to have been in the middle of the third century; Ammianus Marcellinus already knows them there in the year 360. The emigrants used the shortest sea-route, from Antrim to the peninsula of Kintyre (…) Large numbers of Scots came over again at about the year 500, and they gradually formed a kingdom, independent of both Ireland and the Picts. They finally subdued the Picts in the ninth century under Kenneth MacAlpin and created the State to which the name Scotland, Scotia was transferred, probably first by the Norsemen about 150 years later”.

“Ireland was known throughout Europe as a nursery of learning, so much so that Charlemagne summoned an Irish monk, Albinus, to teach at Pavia, where another Irishman, Dungal, followed him later. The most important of the many Irish scholars, who were famous at that time but are now mostly forgotten, was the ‘Father,’ or as Erdmann calls him, the ‘Carolus Magnus’ [Charles the Great] of philosophy in the Middle Ages – Johannes Scotus Erigena. Hegel says of him, ‘Real philosophy began first with him’ (…) by his translation of the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, he restored the link with the last branch of the old philosophy, the Alexandrian Neoplatonic school. His teaching was very bold for the time. He denied the ‘eternity of damnation’, even for the devil, and brushed close to Pantheism. Contemporary orthodoxy, therefore, did not fail to slander him.

“Ireland was far from being inhabited by a single nation at the end of the eighth century. Supreme royal power over the whole island existed only in appearance, and by no means always at that. The provincial kings, whose number and territories were continually changing, fought amongst themselves, and the smaller territorial princes likewise carried on their private feuds. On the whole, however, these internal wars seem to have been governed by certain customs which held the ravages within certain limits, so that the country did not suffer too much.

“But this was not to last. In 795, a few years after the English had been first raided by the same plundering nation, Norsemen landed on the isle of Rathlin, off the coast of Antrim, and burnt everything down; in 798, they landed near Dublin, and after this they are mentioned nearly every year in the annals as heathens, foreigners, pirates, and never without additional reports of the losccadh (burning down) of one or more places. Their colonies on the Orkneys, Shetlands and Hebrides (Southern Isles, Sudhreyjar in the old Norse sagas) served them as operational bases against Ireland, and against what was later known as Scotland, and against England”.

These invasions continued, with varying degrees of success, until the famous Battle of Clontarf, not far from Dublin, April 23, 1014, where the Vikings suffered a painful defeat by the Irish troops led by Brian Boru. This decisive battle definitively ended the Viking raids.





2) The English Conquest of Ireland

Here, unfortunately, Engel’s History breaks off, but we do have an outline of a speech on the Irish question, referring to the subsequent period, delivered by Marx on December 16, 1867 to the German Workers’ Educational Association in London (3). The question would have been of especial interest to the Germans, the “migrants” of that period.

Before the Protestant Reformation

The English invasion got underway in 1169.

In 1172 Henry II had conquered than a third of the country. A nominal conquest. A gift from Pope Adrian IV, an Englishman. Some 400 years later another Pope (in 1576, in Elizabethan times) Gregory XIII, took back the present from the English (Elizabeth). The capital of the “English Pale” was Dublin. Mixing of English common colonists with Irish, and of Anglo-Norman nobles with Irish chiefs. Otherwise, the war of conquest was conducted (originally) as against Red Indians. No English reinforcements sent to Ireland until 1565 (Elizabeth)”.

The 14th to 15th centuries witnessed a renewal of Irish society: the economy developed, Celtic culture flourished and the old English conquerors ended up intermarrying with the native population and adopting the Celtic language.

The Elizabethan Reconquest

The English monarchy realised that it was losing control of the situation. In the 15th century the Tudors – Henry VIII and Elizabeth – took up the reconquest of Ireland, which concluded with the Flight of the Earls in 1609. The reconquest led to the massive expulsion of peasants in Ulster and Munster and their replacement by British colonists. The situation was therefore especially terrible for the native population, which could no longer own or rent plots of land, or even work on the land held by the colonists. Two passages from Marx:

“Elizabeth. The plan was to exterminate the Irish at least up to the River Shannon, to take their land and settle English colonists in their place, etc. In battles against Elizabeth the still Catholic Anglo-Irish fought the English alongside the natives. The avowed plan of the English: Clearing the island of the natives, and stocking it with loyal Englishmen. They succeeded only to plant a landowning aristocracy. English Protestant ‘adventurers’ (merchants, usurers), who obtained from the English crown the confiscated lands, and ‘gentlemen undertakers’, who were to plant the ceded estates with native English families”.

“In Ireland apart from ‘conversion’, the openly acknowledged objective of the government was to find a pretext for pillage. ‘Reform’, from its inception, had ‘pillage’ engraved on its forehead, but in Ireland it was nothing but pillage from head to toe. In Ireland, Bess (4) allowed massacres to be perpetrated on a grand scale, brigandage and butchery without end. She sent to Ireland the same clergymen whose successors still live there today. The incessantly bloodied sword guaranteed their tithes and the land. In England, she was forced to enact the poor law (in the 43rd year of her reign) but for the looters whose regime she sanctioned ‘England was a place where they could raise armies to send them to fight in Ireland for their interests.’ And it was the permission to loot that attracted these armies” (Marx, The Ethnological Notebooks, 1883).

The First National Insurrection

In 1641 an agrarian crisis led to a famine. In this context a group from the petty nobility tried to take possession of strategic points with a view to liberating Ireland, which led to a general insurrection. With the aim of regaining their land, the Irish peasants attacked the colonists, who were murdered or expelled. The Irish nobility then took control of the movement for national liberation and transformed the peasant uprising into a classic war. It stopped the attacks against the colonists and formed a national government: the “Irish Confederation”. Marx, in a plan for a report on the Irish question, spoke of the “First national revolt of Ireland” and of the “Irish revolution of 1641”.

The civil war brought a favourable situation for the Irish population. To begin with the Confederation tried to obtain the King of England’s recognition of Irish autonomy, then in 1646 it declared its independence and tried to liberate the whole territory. During this time the peasants took back half of the colonised lands. At the same time the constitution of the Confederation declared liberty of conscience and religion across the entire country, which at the time, made it the most advanced constitution in the world.

Cromwell’s Campaign in Ireland

In this second reconquest of Ireland the ignominy and cruelty of Cromwell’s troops knew no bounds. The English ruling class – essentially the big landowners but also the financiers and industrialists – would reveal the extent of its bestiality and ferocity. In 1649 Cromwell disembarked at the head of his troops and organised a massacre. In contrast to Napoleon who, though also an imperialist, exported the French Revolution on the European continent by abolishing feudal privileges and introducing bourgeois legislation, while at the same time developing the nucleus of large-scale industry, Cromwell behaved like a pure imperialist, uniquely defending the interests of the English landowning bourgeoisie, and secondarily those of the industrial bourgeoisie, by ruining all industry in Ireland.

It was true genocide: between a third and a half of the population was massacred. William Petty, the first demographer and statistician, wrote that at least 400,000 people were massacred, but that it could have been more than 600,000, two-thirds of whom were civilians. Before this genocide, the Irish population was estimated to be around 1,500,000 inhabitants.

In a letter to Jenny Longuet of February 24, 1881, Engels describes the reconquest of Ireland and says that it brings to mind an English chauvinist who compares Ireland at the time of Cromwell to the Vendée:

Ireland was Catholic, Protestant England Republican, therefore Ireland-English Vendée. There is however this little difference that the French Revolution intended to give the land to the people, the English Commonwealth intended, in Ireland, to take the land from the people. The whole Protestant reformation, as is well known to most students of history (…) was a vast plan for a confiscation of land. First the land was taken from the Church. Then the Catholics, in countries where Protestantism was in power, were declared rebels and their land confiscated”.

But the tragedy and the agony of the Catholics, that’s to say of the Irish people, did not stop there. Under Cromwell 100,000 women and children between 10 and 14 years old were sold as slaves in the English colonies of America. (See White Cargo by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh).

The subjugation of Ireland reinforced the most reactionary and infamous layer within the English bourgeoisie: the landowners. And Cromwell, far from serving the revolution, on the contrary reinforced reaction in England itself. The English Republic paid the price for this bloody and pitiless subjugation of Ireland. By reinforcing the economic power of English landowners, it provided the basis for the restoration: at its death the House of Lords was re-established, together with the monarchy. In a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann dated 29 August 1869, Marx would write, “As a matter of fact, the English Republic under Cromwell met shipwreck in – Ireland”.

In 1688, the new King of England James II was overthrown. He tried to win back the throne by disembarking in Ireland and seeking the support of the Anglo-Irish nobility. After his defeat by Prince William of Orange – his nephew, who had married his daughter Mary – the English ruling class completed the pauperisation and subjugation of the population and gained total control of the Irish economy.

Further discriminatory measures were applied against the Catholics and all of the land, along with the little industry that remained, was handed over to various English land magnates and adventurers – traders, industrialists and businessmen etc. Moreover, direct commerce between Ireland and foreign countries was completely forbidden, England being the only outlet and the arbiter of prices. The weaving of wool was also forbidden. In a word, Ireland became a full colony, like America, Australia and South Africa but under much worse conditions. This situation of economic submission explains why later on certain bourgeois Protestants in Ulster, although of English origin, would join the fight for Ireland’s independence.

In 1640 the natives and the old English held 60% of the land; in 1660 it was no more than 8-9%.

Ireland During the American and French Revolutions

On the eve of the American Revolution the Catholics, that is the three-quarters of the population who were Irish, were deprived of all rights. The “Irish” parliament, like that of England, consisted of two chambers: the House of Lords, whose members were drawn from the landed aristocracy, all of English origin, and the House of Commons, elected by the Protestants, who were English in origin by the overwhelming majority.

In Eccarius’s record of Karl Marx’s speech to the German Workers’ Educational Society in London on December 16, 1867, referred to above, we read a striking description of the Irish situation at this time:

“Under William III, a class came to power which only wanted to make money, and Irish industry was suppressed in order to force the Irish to sell their raw materials to England at any price. With the help of the Protestant Penal Laws, the new aristocrats received freedom of action under Queen Anne. The Irish Parliament was a means of oppression. Those who were Catholic were not allowed to hold an official post, could not be landowners, were not allowed to make wills, could not claim an inheritance; to be a Catholic bishop was high treason. All these were means for robbing the Irish of their land; yet over 50 per cent of the English descendants in Ulster have remained Catholic. The people were driven into the arms of the Catholic clergy, who thus became powerful. All that the English government succeeded in doing was to plant an aristocracy in Ireland. The towns built by the English have become Irish. That is why there are so many English names among the Fenians”.

The breath of revolution from America, then France, spread to the island. The Catholics, who up to now had been pleading for an attenuation of the Protestant law, again raised their heads and made their voices heard. The Protestants themselves, hitherto considered by the British government to be their gaolers and their bailiffs, demanded more autonomy and above all freedom of trade: the island’s colonial status restricted their trade and above all stifled all industrial development. And this last question was, by its very nature, one of national interest.

The Irish resolved to adopt an agreement forbidding the import and consumption of British manufactured goods. As soon as this measure was publicly put forward, it was universally accepted throughout the country.

Moreover the international situation was favourable to a national emancipation movement: England found itself at war first with America and then with France, and was even threatened by a French military invasion. This situation weakened England and forced it to withdraw its garrisons from Ireland.

The revolutionary movement in Ireland deepened and clarified the class relations at the heart of the communities, pushing out the most conservative and reactionary elements, and leading in 1791 to the creation of the United Irishmen, which brought together both Catholics and Protestants.

“From this moment, the Volunteers movement fused with that of the United Irishmen. The Catholic question transformed into that of the people of Ireland. The question was no longer about giving rights back to the Catholic upper and middle class, but about emancipating Irish peasants, the large majority of whom were Catholics” (Marx, Ireland from the American Revolution to the Union of 1801).

Under these conditions England loosened its grip on Ireland and was forced to make concessions. Here is what Engels had to say about it in a letter to Jenny Longuet (February 24, 1881):

The Abolition of the Penal Laws! Why the greater part of them were repealed, not in 1793 but in 1778, when England was threatened by the rise of the American Republic, and the second repeal, 1793, was when the French Republic arose threatening and England required all the soldiers she could get to fight it!

During this period Irish industry experienced a new growth and the material situation of the population improved. The law regarding Catholics became milder. Once again the renting of land to Catholics was authorised.

The revolutionaries organised in their Convention and in the Party of United Irishmen contemplated dissolving the parliament by force, declaring independence and proclaiming the Republic.

With the aim of supporting the Irish revolutionaries, on December 15, 1796 a French fleet of 45 ships transporting 13,400 men left Brest. However a terrible storm prevented them from landing, causing the failure of the operation. On June 21, 1798 the United Irishmen, without French help, set the insurrection in motion with Dublin as its epicentre. Thousands of men rose up in arms. However, the authorities, alerted by their informers, and who had imposed martial law, decapitated a large part of the organisation shortly afterwards, arresting the main leaders. Lacking coordination and centralisation, the insurrection failed and was soon violently crushed.

With order re-established, the British government took back everything it had been forced to concede and English law, that is to say the law of retaliation, was applied again in full force with the imposition of a state of siege. The parliament was dissolved and union with Great Britain imposed.

In conclusion, we refer to a passage in a letter from Marx to Engels (December 10, 1869):

This period [1779-1800] is of the highest interest, scientifically and dramatically. Firstly, the foul doings of the English in 1588-89 repeated (and perhaps even intensified) in 1788-89. Secondly, it can easily be proved there was a class movement in the Irish movement itself. Thirdly, the infamous policy of Pitt. Fourthly, which will annoy the English gentlemen very much, the proof that Ireland came to grief because, in fact, from a revolutionary standpoint, the Irish were too far advanced for the English Church and King mob, while on the other hand English reaction in England had its roots (as in Cromwell’s time) in the subjugation of Ireland. This period must be described in at least one chapter: a pillory for John Bull!

1801-1846: The age of the small peasant

With the Union imposed, freedom of commerce suppressed, and the eradication of the industry that had developed between 1778 to 1801, Ireland was once again transformed into a purely agrarian nation, consisting mainly of small peasants who had to lease their land from a handful of English landlords, the 8,000 to 9,000 big landowners who possessed all of the farmland.

Marx stated in his speech to the German immigrants:

“During the American War of Independence the reins were loosened a little. Further concessions had to be granted during the French Revolution. Ireland rose so quickly that her people threatened to outstrip the English. The English government drove them to rebellion and achieved the Union by bribery. The Union delivered the death blow to reviving Irish industry. On one occasion Meagher said: all Irish branches of industry have been destroyed, all we have been left is the making of coffins. It became a vital necessity to have land; the big landowners leased their lands to speculators; land passed through four or five lease stages before it reached the peasant, and this made prices disproportionately high. The agrarian population lived on potatoes and water; wheat and meat were sent to England; the rent was eaten up in London, Paris and Florence. In 1836, £7,000,000 was sent abroad to absent landowners. Fertilisers were exported with the produce and rent, and the soil was exhausted. Famine often set in here and there, and owing to the potato blight there was a general famine in 1846. A million people starved to death. The potato blight resulted from the exhaustion of the soil, it was a product of English rule”.

Ireland had been subjugated and transformed into a purely agricultural country for the benefit of both British industry and the landlords, who could exploit the tenants without mercy. In an article entitled England in 1845 and 1885, published in The Commonweal (no.2, March 1st,1885), Engel’s wrote:

“The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalists not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists too whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest; bankers, stock-jobbers, fundholders, etc. Free Trade meant the re-adjustment of the whole home and foreign commercial and financial policy of England in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing capitalists – the class which now represented the nation. And they set about this task with a will. Every obstacle to industrial production was mercilessly removed. The tariff and the whole system of taxation were revolutionised, Everything was made subordinate to one end, but that end of the utmost importance to the manufacturing capitalist: the cheapening of all raw produce, and especially of the means of living of the working class, reduction of the cost of raw material, and the keeping down – if not as yet the bringing down – of wages. England was to become the ‘workshop of the world’; all other countries were to become for England what Ireland already was – markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food. England is the great manufacturing centre of an agricultural world, with an ever increasing number of corn and cotton-growing Irelands, revolving around her, the industrial sun. What a glorious prospect!”

Such is the unvarnished beauty of capitalist development!

Despite everything, the Irish peasants did not allow themselves to be fleeced without putting up resistance,the peasant associations that had been set up organised, when possible, expeditions to kill the landlords and their accomplices. The Irish peasantry, although the most miserable and exploited in Europe, clubbed together to pay teachers to give their children an education.

“These truly national schools did not suit English purposes. To suppress them, the sham national schools [introduced in 1831] were established” (Engels to Jenny Longuet, 24 February 1881).

1846-1870: Extermination by Mass Starvation

The intense exploitation of Ireland by the landlords led to the exhaustion of the soil and favoured the spread of a potato disease, potato blight (Phytophthora infestans). This killer fungus, then still undiagnosed, almost entirely wiped out the local potato crop, then the staple food of the Irish peasantry. It resulted in a terrible famine between 1845 and 1852, the most acute phase of which lasted four years: in 1841 Ireland had 8,175,124 inhabitants; in 1851 a million had emigrated and a million and a half starved to death.

But food there was. In the House of Commons it was reported that during the first three months of the famine, up to February 1846, 3,280 tons of wheat, 35,600 tons of barley and 12,700 tons of oats and oat flour were exported to England. And exports continued at the same pace, enriching the landlords, after this date.

Added to which in 1846 there was the repeal of the Corn Laws, which had assured Ireland her monopoly position on the English market. Once this monopoly was abolished, America could export its grain to England, but the Irish small peasant could not compete with mechanised large-scale American agriculture. The landlords, who saw their rents tumble with the abolition of the Corn Laws, set about expelling the peasants with armed force in order to replace them with sheep, cattle and pigs, for the production of meat. The peasants had the choice of dying of starvation or emigrating to America, if they had the means, or rising up against the British oppressor and exterminating the landlords.

We’ll hand over to Marx who in Capital describes the agricultural transformation that followed (5).

“Ireland, in less than twenty years, lost more than 5/16ths of its people. Its total emigration from May, 1851, to July, 1865, numbered 1,591,487: the emigration during the years 1861‑1865 was more than half-a-million. The number of inhabited houses fell, from 1851‑1861, by 52,990. From 1851‑1861, the number of holdings of 15 to 30 acres increased 61,000, that of holdings over 30 acres, 109,000, whilst the total number of all farms fell 120,000, a fall, therefore, solely due to the suppression of farms under 15 acres – i.e., to their centralisation.

“The decrease of the population was naturally accompanied by a decrease in the mass of products. For our purpose, it suffices to consider the 5 years from 1861-1865 during which over half-a-million emigrated, and the absolute number of people sank by more than a third of a million (…)

“England, a country with fully developed capitalist production, and pre-eminently industrial, would have bled to death with such a drain of population as Ireland has suffered. But Ireland is at present only an agricultural district of England, marked off by a wide channel from the country to which it yields corn, wool, cattle, industrial and military recruits.

“The depopulation of Ireland has thrown much of the land out of cultivation, has greatly diminished the produce of the soil (if the product also diminishes relatively per acre, it must not be forgotten that for a century and a half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without as much as allowing its cultivators the means for making up the constituents of the soil that had been exhausted) and, in spite of the greater area devoted to cattle breeding, has brought about, in some of its branches, an absolute diminution, in others, an advance scarcely worthy of mention, and constantly interrupted by retrogressions. Nevertheless, with the fall in numbers of the population, rents and farmers’ profits rose (…)

“The total capital of Ireland outside agriculture, employed in industry and trade, accumulated during the last two decades slowly, and with great and constantly recurring fluctuations; so much the more rapidly did the concentration of its individual constituents develop. And, however small its absolute increase, in proportion to the dwindling population it had increased largely.

“Here, then, under our own eyes and on a large scale, a process is revealed, than which nothing more excellent could be wished for by orthodox economy for the support of its dogma: that misery springs from absolute surplus population (…)

“The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage. The exodus of the next 20 years, an exodus still constantly increasing, did not, as, e.g., the Thirty Years’ War, decimate, along with the human beings, their means of production. Irish genius discovered an altogether new way of spiriting a poor people thousands of miles away from the scene of its misery. The exiles transplanted to the United States, send home sums of money every year as travelling expenses for those left behind. Every troop that emigrates one year, draws another after it the next. Thus, instead of costing Ireland anything, emigration forms one of the most lucrative branches of its export trade. Finally, it is a systematic process, which does not simply make a passing gap in the population, but sucks out of it every year more people than are replaced by the births, so that the absolute level of the population falls year by year.

“What were the consequences for the Irish labourers left behind and freed from the surplus population? That the relative surplus population is today as great as before 1846; that wages are just as low, that the oppression of the labourers has increased, that misery is forcing the country towards a new crisis. The facts are simple. The revolution in agriculture has kept pace with emigration. The production of relative surplus population has more than kept pace with the absolute depopulation (…)

“The change of arable to pasture land must work yet more acutely in Ireland than in England. In England the cultivation of green crops increases with the breeding of cattle; in Ireland, it decreases. Whilst a large number of acres, that were formerly tilled, lie idle or are turned permanently into grass-land, a great part of the waste land and peat bogs that were unused formerly, become of service for the extension of cattle-breeding. The smaller and medium farmers – I reckon among these all who do not cultivate more than 100 acres – still make up about 8/10ths of the whole number. They are one after the other, and with a degree of force unknown before, crushed by the competition of an agriculture managed by capital, and therefore they continually furnish new recruits to the class of wage labourers. The one great industry of Ireland, linen-manufacture, requires relatively few adult men and only employs altogether, in spite of its expansion since the price of cotton rose in 1861-1866, a comparatively insignificant part of the population. Like all other great modern with an absolute increase in the mass of human beings absorbed by it. The misery of the agricultural population forms the pedestal for gigantic shirt-factories, whose armies of labourers are, for the most part, scattered over the country. Here, we encounter again the system described above of domestic industry, which in underpayment and overwork, possesses its own systematic means for creating supernumerary labourers. Finally, although the depopulation has not such destructive consequences as would result in a country with fully developed capitalistic production, it does not go on without constant reaction upon the home-market. The gap which emigration causes here, limits not only the local demand for labour, but also the incomes of small shopkeepers, artisans, tradespeople generally (…)

“Formerly, the agricultural labourers were but the smallest of the small farmers, and formed for the most part a kind of rear-guard of the medium and large farms on which they found employment. Only since the catastrophe of 1846 have they begun to form a fraction of the class of purely wage labourers, a special class, connected with its wage-masters only by monetary relations (…)

“Lord Dufferin (6) (…) declares (…) that Ireland is still over-populated, and the stream of emigration still flows too lazily. To be perfectly happy, Ireland must get rid of at least one-third of a million of labouring men (…) The proof is easily given. Centralisation has from 1851 to 1861 destroyed principally farms [that are] (…) under 1 and not over 15 acres. These above all must disappear. This gives 307,058 “supernumerary” farmers, and reckoning the families the low average of 4 persons, 1,228,232 persons. On the extravagant supposition that, after the agricultural revolution is complete one-fourth of these are again absorbable, there remain for emigration 921,174 persons. [Farms] (…) of over 15 and not over 100 acres, are, as was known long since in England, too small for capitalistic cultivation of corn, and for sheep-breeding are almost vanishing quantities. On the same supposition as before, therefore, there are further 788,761 persons to emigrate; total, 1,709,532. And as l’appétit vient en mangeant, Rentroll’s eyes will soon discover that Ireland, with 3½ millions, is still always miserable, and miserable because she is overpopulated. Therefore her depopulation must go yet further, that thus she may fulfil her true destiny, that of an English sheep-walk and cattle-pasture.

“Like all good things in this bad world, this profitable method has its drawbacks. With the accumulation of rents in Ireland, the accumulation of the Irish in America keeps pace. The Irishman, banished by sheep and ox, re-appears on the other side of the ocean as a Fenian.”

We add here an excerpt from a letter from Marx to Engels (8 November1867):

“How the English carry on is evidenced by the Agricultural Statistics for the current year, which appeared a few days ago. Furthermore, the form of the eviction. The Irish Viceroy, Lord Abercorn, “cleared” his estate in the last few weeks by forcibly evicting thousands of people. Among them were prosperous tenants, whose improvements and investments were thus confiscated! In no other European country did foreign rule adopt this form of direct expropriation of the stock population. The Russians confiscate solely on political grounds; the Prussians in Western Prussia buy out.”

The agrarian revolution entailed a diminution in the number of small peasants, although the latter remained the majority, and an increase in the number of the largest farms, in particular those over 30 acres and hence the rise of a rural bourgeoisie capable of employing one or two agricultural labourers, as occurred later in Russia with the Kulaks, and at the same time the appearance of an agricultural proletariat.

This terrible situation did not arise without creating a revolutionary ferment within the peasantry, above all those farming small and medium-sized holding, and among the agricultural proletariat. The Fenian movement, which led the struggle against the English coloniser, originated among the Irish emigres to the United States but was profoundly rooted in the great mass of the Irish population, i.e. the peasantry. This movement had to be atheist as the church originally wanted to ban it, although it revised its opinion once it realised it risked losing its influence over the great mass of peasants. In contrast to earlier peasant movements, which took the Irish aristocracy to be its natural guide, Fenianism ignored the authority of the church and the Irish ruling class; it was above all a popular movement.

We reproduce below a lengthy text by Engels which gives a historical summary of the struggles led by the peasantry against its oppressor (7).

“In Ireland there are two trends in the movement. The first, the earlier, is the agrarian trend, which stems from the organised brigandage practised with support of the peasants by the clan chiefs, dispossessed by the English, and also by the big Catholic landowners (in the 17th century these brigands were called Tories, and the Tories of today have inherited their name directly from them). This trend gradually developed into natural resistance of the peasants to the intruding English landlords, organised according to localities and provinces. The names Ribbonmen, Whiteboys, Captain Rock, Captain Moonlight, etc., have changed, but the form of resistance – the shooting not only of hated landlords and agents (rent collectors of the landlords) but also of peasants who take over a farm from which another has been forcibly evicted, boycotting, threatening letters, night raids and intimidation, etc. – all this is as old as the present English landownership in Ireland, that is, dates back to the end of the 17th century at the latest. This form of resistance cannot be suppressed, force is useless against it, and it will disappear only with the causes responsible for it. But, as regards its nature, it is local, isolated, and can never become a general form of political struggle.

“Soon after the establishment of the Union (1800), began the liberal-national opposition of the urban bourgeoisie which, as in every peasant country with dwindling townlets (for example, Denmark), finds its natural leaders in lawyers. These also need the peasants; they therefore had to find a slogan to attract the peasants. Thus O’Connell discovered such a slogan first in the Catholic emancipation, and then in the Repeal of the Union. Because of the infamy of the landowners, this trend has recently had to adopt a new course. While in the social field the Land League pursues more revolutionary aims (which are achievable in Ireland) – the total removal of the intruder landlords – it acts rather tamely in political respects and demands only Home Rule, that is, an Irish local Parliament side by side with the British Parliament and subordinated to it. This too can be achieved by constitutional means. The frightened landlords are already clamouring for the quickest possible redemption of the peasant land (suggested by the Tories themselves) in order to save what can still be saved. On the other hand, Gladstone declares that greater self-gov