Again, A Year Or Two With Ernest-“Papa: Hemingway In Cuba” (2015)-A Film Review

Again, A Year Or Two With Ernest-“Papa: Hemingway In Cuba” (2015)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

[I will not bore the reader with yet again a detailed rationale for my recent taking myself “out to pasture,” retiring with the caveat that if I found something that interested me in the film world I reserved the right to comment via a timely review. Not as my erstwhile fellow film critic, Sandy Salmon, whom I cajoled into taking over the day to day chores at this site while he too waited to fade into the sunset of retirement, stated in his review of this same film when “the spirit moved me” which he falsely accused me of stealing from the Quakers who hardly had a copyright on the expression if Sandy would have known if he had been out in the real world over the past fifty years. Shockingly in taking over the job Sandy has needed the support of an associate, Alden Riley, to do the heavy legwork (like actually watching the films to be reviewed, grabbing summaries from Wikipedia maybe stealing some lines from reviews on Amazon, writing the first draft so I am not sure exactly what Sandy’s role is in all this). Up until the end I has done all that myself.

But I will let that pass as well since today I feel I need to say a few words about why I am doing a review of a film Sandy with a big assist from Alden who had to read from scratch some of Hemingway’s short stories which apparently neither he nor Sandy had read or more probably in Sandy’s case had not read in fifty years, already put in the can, Papa: Hemingway In Cuba, a semi-biopic of the old man who had so much influence on our generation of guys who liked to write, who liked that smooth clean sparse language while pushing on the story line without a lot of embellishment. For one of the few times in recent memory Sandy, once he found out the film was slated for review, and I watched the presentation together (Alden watched it later when he was assigned the heavy legwork). That is where the current tempest in a teapot got its start.       

As Sandy stated in his review he and I had gravitated toward Hemingway in our respective high school days and never left that admiration behind. Although we both agreed that the story presented on film while gripping in parts had been overwrought about the emotional traumas Hemingway was going through as he aged, aged not gracefully ending upon the other end of a self-imposed shotgun blast we argued over who would do the review. Frankly I invoked my “seniority,” my emeritus status since the mere subject matter of the film, what did Sandy call it, what do the poor besieged Quakers call it, oh yeah, got me in a “the spirit moves me” mood.

The long and short of it was that Sandy went to the site administrator, Pete Markin, to complain that that “old geezer” was stepping on his toes. Pete brought us into his “office” which did not help much since the scene got a little ugly. I reminded Sandy, Sandy, bigtime film critic for the American Film Gazette back in the day that I had to tell him who Orson Welles was, who had produced Citizen Kane, what it was about and where it stood in the pantheon of world classic films when he had first started out in the business. Had to remind Sandy too that he was the one who wrote that glowing review about Planet of the Apes and how it was a sure bet to win, get this, the Oscar for Best Picture that year (and I think for Best Actor too and it was not Charlton Heston who he was touting). The film critic fraternity laughed about that one for years at our annual gatherings.  From there only got worse until I let sleeping dogs lie and told Pete too let Sandy have his damn review.          

Then the review came out and I could not believe that we had watched the same film. Couldn’t understand why Sandy did not take on Hemingway’s alcoholism, his taunting of his fourth, count them fourth wife, Mary and the severity of his writer’s block in the  decisive period just a couple of years before he took his own life. Worse, worse of all Sandy only paid perfunctory mention to one of the great stories of the time, the Fidel Castro led guerilla war fight against the hated Batista regime in Cuba the results which still reverberates to this day. He totally failed to mention the scene where Papa and his young writer friend and acolyte (Ed in the movie) had doggedly come to grips as witnesses to a battle in the city between those two forces just like Papa had in the old days in Spain. I complained to Pete and he, pulling his hair out yet again, agreed that I could give “my take” on the film. See Pete knew, or I will assume that he knew, who was the guy to have done this review in the first place. Sam Lowell]      

Papa: Hemingway in Cuba, starring Giovanni Ribisi, Joely Richardson, Adrian Sparks, filmed in Cuba, 2015     

I have to agree with the esteemed regular film critic in this space that there was no question young men, and I have to agree with him on this as well maybe women too but Ernest Hemingway by subject matter and by reputation seemed to be the quintessential man’s man writer for good or evil, of the generation before mine and of my own generation who had a taste for the literary life saw him (along with Scott Fitzgerald on his good days, his The Great Gatsby good days) as the paragon of solid sparse writing that drew us in. Writing up a storm about the futility of World War I, the post-war alienation of the Jazz Age which his friend and fellow exile Scotty Fitzgerald practically invented, bullfighting in the hot afternoon in some drunken corrida, the glorious struggle in Spain where there appeared to be time enough to make the earth shake not just with mortars but with love and a million other short stories some of which made their way into film (and reviews by me, and, okay, okay Sandy).     

Funny as a kid I first gravitated toward Hemingway via the movies although I didn’t actually know that until later when I happened to read one of his short stories The Killers which had been made into a movie (actually two one in 1946 but the one I am thinking of is the version done in 1962 with Lee Marvin and, ah, Ronald Reagan who later parlayed that role in the film as a connected gangster into the presidency of the United States or something like that. When I viewed that film one Saturday afternoon at the old Strand Theater in my growing up hometown I felt I knew the story line and lo and behold in the credits they noted that the thing was based on Papa’s short story of the same name. Talk about cinematic license though (and in that 1946 version as well since the story is only a few pages long and is only a “teaser” about a guy who took a couple of slugs without grumbling when a couple of hit men came a calling and the story unfolds from that slight hint of a start).    

Like Sandy as a kid anything to do with Hemingway was like catnip and while I usually did my reading during the daytime on many a late night I devoured whatever I could get my hands on at the local branch of the town library. So when Sandy and I saw this film under review together, Papa: Hemingway In Cuba, we almost came to blows about who would review the thing. [See the introduction above for the gory details. Pete Markin] That emotional response on our parts despite the fact that both of us agreed that the film itself seemed kind of maudlin and less than informative as a slice of life semi-biopic.      

Naturally since the film is not an actual full biopic about either Hemingway or the young writer, Denn Bart Petticlerc, whose memoir the film is based on the producers used plenty of cinematic license in translating that story to the screen (just as any self-respecting writer would use a great deal of literary license to the same effect). What was interesting and might have been of interest to me knowing what happened in the film Ed, the name for Denn in the film, was that he and Papa met after Ed had sent Papa a “love letter” and he responded by inviting him to Cuba for a little off-hand fishing (one of about twenty “manly” pursuits like boxing which writers like Norman Mailer in the generation after his felt compelled to follow as a mantra for their own writing prowess, bullfighting, safari hunting, deep sea fishing, amateur gun-fighting and seemingly every other on the edge activity except bocce which he never did master for some reason.  Hemingway was into “action” in an age when men had to such pursuits to internally prove their manhood rather than like in my generation the more rationale reason to impress the girls. We always on a no dough, no girl Friday or Saturday night hanging around with nothing better to do used to speculate that all that manly-proving frenzy meant he might have been as we used to say “light on his feet.” I never heard anything that way and I am sure I would have in some be misbegotten doctoral thesis if there was any substance to the charge.) Damn I wish I had had the moxie, the balls to send the old man a “love letter” and maybe I would have had the opportunity to learn how to fish (and skinny dip).       

In any case the mentor-surrogate son relationship that developed was something very different once a young writer (Ed Myers in the film played by Giovanni Ribisi) caught the attention of Ernest Hemingway (played by Adrian Spark who looked the very image of Papa when I looked at some old photographs). Hell Ed would fly back and forth to Miami at the drop of a hat on Papa’s summons if for no other reason than to go skinny-dipping in Papa’s pool or to sit drinking pina colas while Hemingway sucked up the real booze and got nasty at his fourth wife Mary. (That four marriage should have been the tip-off, take it from a guy with three unsuccessful marriages under his belt and has finally given up that chase, that Papa was not an easy guy to live with any more than I was).            

Of course Hemingway seemingly spent half of his life in some kind of exile Paris, Africa, Idaho,  or out of America anyway and Cuba was his home along with his fourth wife, the well-known foreign correspondent Mary Welsh, played by Joely Richardson, for a good portion of the last twenty or so years of his life. Funny 1958, 1959 in Cuba was like some kind of fateful muse in the period when Papa and Ed were friendly which also happened to be a time when the Cuban Revolution, Castro’s guerilla fighters, were coming down from the hills to confront Batista and his forces in the cities. It might be worth checking out what Batista’s agents thought of Hemingway rolling around the gin mills of the island having made it clear that he had been in Spain when the deal went down there in the 1930s. In a compelling scene Papa and Ed are “doing the do,” doing what any journalist worth his or her salt would do and go out get the story especially as the Castro forces were coming out of the hills so you knew at that point the regime’s days were short, extremely short so you had best get the story of history in the making or forget it.

As already noted this film suffered from some overwrought emotional scenes of Hemingway in decline, in a love-hate relationship with Mary which seemed cruelty itself on both their parts at time. The real shocker for any writer, even Sandy took note of the fact in passing and then blew it off, though was Hemingway’s frustration that he could no longer write, had “writer’s block” the dreaded words that every writer, pro or amateur, wakes up in the midnight hour sweating about. Where the whole ball of wax comes down is when Ed was sending in copious copy to his newspaper and Papa was standing around his typewriter, the word processor of the day, almost paralyzed with a drink of rye whisky to buck him up. Damn. Papa had the shakes that way too. Sandy did have it right maybe Papa had lost it at the end but go read A Farewell To Arms, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom The Bells Toll, and The Old Man and The Sea if you want to know what it was like when Papa had the words, when he wrote those sparse clean words for keeps. For the young you heard it here first.

A View From The Left- Remember Timothy Caughman- Fascist Murder in Manhattan

Workers Vanguard No. 1109	7 April 2017

Remember Timothy Caughman

Fascist Murder in Manhattan

On March 20, white-supremacist James Jackson stabbed 66-year-old Timothy Caughman in the chest and back with a 26-inch sword. Caughman was able to stumble into a police station but died of his wounds at Bellevue Hospital. Jackson had come to New York City from Baltimore three days earlier with the express intent of killing black men, and chose the city to get maximum media coverage. When he turned himself in a day after the killing, he boasted of being a member of a white-supremacist group. The authorities are protecting the fascists by refusing to release the name of the group or any information about it.

Caughman was collecting recyclables a few blocks from Times Square when he was murdered. A longtime resident of the area with many friends, he loved Motown music, collected autographs and had been a coordinator of a basketball youth league. Caughman himself had noted the recent rise of fascist groups and posted a link to an article about it on his Twitter account following the November elections. The fascist killer struck Caughman down in cold blood to send a message of terror to all black people. Many black and minority New Yorkers have expressed the fear: it could have been me.

Donald Trump’s campaign emboldened the fascists, who have become even more brazen since his victory—though he himself is not one. He came to power through the regular mechanisms of American bourgeois democracy, not the mobilization of fascist gangs. In the first three months of this year, there have been 35 attacks on mosques. Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated. In December, Giants football player Nikita Whitlock’s New Jersey home was trashed and KKK threats were scrawled on its walls. In February in Manhattan, fascists brutally attacked two graduate students outside a Lower East Side bar after seeing that one of them had an anti-fascist sticker on his phone.

Boasting of his hatred of black men, Jackson said he was motivated especially by hatred of interracial couples. He told a Daily News reporter that he wants America to be like the 1950s again. This is the era Trump evokes with his slogan “Make America Great Again”: the era of official segregation in the South, before black people had won formal civil rights, when Communists had to keep their heads down, women stayed home with the kids and everyone knew “their place.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo called Caughman’s murder “an attack on all New Yorkers,” while Mayor Bill de Blasio said it was an assault on “our diversity.” Who are they kidding? Timothy Caughman was murdered for being a black man in racist capitalist America. De Blasio’s talk of “diversity” was intended to mask the reality that New York is a race- and class-divided city in a society based on exploitation and inequality. Timothy Caughman lived in a single-room-occupancy hotel; de Blasio’s best buddies are the real estate developers who destroy working-class neighborhoods to build high-rises for the rich, while the mayor makes speeches about “affordable housing.” It was his racist cops who choked Eric Garner to death and gunned down Akai Gurley in the stairwell of an apartment building.

Like the fascist Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black worshippers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston two years ago, Jackson is being treated in the media as a lone deranged individual. In fact, racist murder is the program of the fascists. A military veteran of the U.S. imperialist war in Afghanistan, Jackson bragged that his military training helped him plan to kill black men.

Fascists are paramilitary action gangs whose purpose is the destruction of the workers movement and racial genocide. In the U.S., that means they have black people, above all, in their sights. Homegrown American fascism, the KKK, was born out of the defeat of the slaveowning Southern ruling class in the Civil War. The fascists represent a deadly threat to the rights and lives of black people, immigrants, gays and all those they target. They must be crushed in the egg by mobilizing the power of the multiracial working class to smash them.

Fascists like Dylann Roof and James Jackson are auxiliaries to the far more powerful murder apparatus of the capitalist state—the cops, prisons and the military. It is the cops who are the main source of racist violence against New York City’s black and Latino communities. Remember Eric Garner, Deborah Danner, Ramarley Graham, Akai Gurley! When the cops gun down black men and women, they are doing their job, which is to defend this racist system against the working class and those seen as sources of unrest.

A workers movement worthy of the name would organize forceful actions of solidarity with the black population against police brutality and fascist atrocities. But the labor “leadership” in this country is committed to the capitalist order, which itself breeds the fascists, and has hitched its wagon to the Democratic Party, no less the class enemy of working people and the oppressed than the Republicans. To mobilize the unions and oppressed in opposition to the fascists is elementary self-defense, but it requires a political struggle against the Democrats. When the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have been involved in mobilizing anti-fascist actions in the past, we have always had to go up against the Democratic Party, which preaches that the fascists should be ignored and that the forces of racist state repression will “protect” us.

There have already been many demonstrations of hostility to Trump and his racist agenda. But the Democratic Party is clearly the animating force behind this “resistance.” When demonstrators say that Trump “is not my president,” we say that for us neither was Obama, the Deporter-in-Chief, nor, for that matter, Bill Clinton, the father of black mass incarceration. Opposing all representatives of the capitalist class, we seek to build a revolutionary multiracial workers party that fights for a workers government.

It took a bloody Civil War, the Second American Revolution, to smash the chains of black chattel slavery. Two hundred thousand black troops, guns in hand, played a decisive role in crushing the Confederacy. But the promise of black freedom was betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie, which allied with the Southern propertied classes against the aspirations of the black freedmen. It will take a third American Revolution—a proletarian socialist revolution that breaks the chains of capitalist wage slavery—to finish the Civil War. The only path to black liberation is through uprooting the basis of black oppression—the whole capitalist system of exploitation and racial oppression. For black liberation through socialist revolution!

Train Smoke And Dreams-The Film Adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ “The Girl On The Train”-(2016)

Train Smoke And Dreams-The Film Adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ “The Girl On The Train”-(2016)   

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Girl On The Train, starring Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, directed by Tate Taylor, from the thriller novel by Paula Hawkins, 2016

A tale of three women, three smart up and coming but troubled women, suburban women, suburban New York City women and that makes a difference, is an interesting way to introduce this cinematic thriller, Girl On The Train, adapted for the screen from the best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins. Especially since their lives, the lives of Rachael, Anna and Megan to give them names right at the start, are intertwined one way or another by the same man, Tom, a man who as one of the minor characters in the film stated rather succinctly if crudely could not “keep his dick in his pants.” That statement, made on the suburban commuter train from New York City, the train a symbolic metaphor for lots of what goes down along the way, toward the end of the film goes a long way to explaining why this well-done and suspenseful thriller ends the way it does.       

Here’s the scoop. Woman number one, Rachel, played by Emily Blunt, smart, artistic but emotionally fragile and unsure of herself, had as a result of her spiraling alcoholism brought on by her failure to bear a child (and by the nefarious manipulations of philandering Tom) been unceremoniously dumped by her philandering husband for another woman, woman number two, Anna, who had borne him a child.  Rachel was a dreamer, a romantic, had some almost child-like idea of what a leafy suburban perfect marriage might look like despite her alcoholic haze which during her binges had left her with big blank spaces in her memory, left her with blackouts. It is in trying to retrace the steps of her life that will finally aid her-and get her and others into a hell of a lot of trouble.

The romantic dreamer about some ideal marriage part for Rachel came when she passed her old neighborhood on the train she took every day supposedly going to and from work (she had been fired for her over-the-top alcoholic behavior so the trips back and forth to New York City were trips to nowhere). A few houses from where she had lived she spied a couple who look like they were the consummate expression of everything she still longed for-including reuniting with her husband.

Enter woman number three, Megan, played by Haley Bennett, young, neurotic and sexually promiscuous, who was the woman Rachel had seen from the train. Megan rather than the ideal suburban wife was seeing a psychiatrist about her problems (while trying to seduce him). And about the secret guilt she had felt ever since she had neglected her out-of-wedlock baby when she was a teenager. Megan had worked for Tom and Anna, who had her own set of emotional problems around having the child and having a philandering husband, as a nanny to complete the scene (a job that it turned out Tom had insisted she take).

Here is where things got dicey. Megan one night went missing, and would be found after some time dead in the woods along the nearby Hudson River, an obvious homicide. Rachel, in one of her less lucid and less sober moments witnessed a scene from one end of a tunnel where Megan, who had disillusioned Rachel from the train by apparently taking another lover, and somebody had been seen together the night she disappeared. The rest of the film unwinds around Rachel’s increased clarity and confidence in herself about what had happened that night, who had killed Megan and why. Naturally there is plenty of misdirection as in any good thriller. Rachel herself had come under suspicion due to her erratic and at times near hysterical behavior. As had, naturally given the statistics on such matters, Megan’s overbearing and overwrought husband (with a little help from trying to be helpful Rachel). Hell, even the shrink, Megan’s shrink, based on Rachel’s faulty foggy memory, was under a cloud for a time. But as the film winds down and the possible candidates with the motive to do the foul deed dwindle Rachel’s sense of what happened that night and who might have committed the foul deed improved.

Although this film (and the book it is based on) is predicated on solving the murder mystery which sets up the plot I was struck by how much these three very different women had been thrown together by an odd fate and reacted to things in very similar ways. The acting by the trio, particularly Emily Blunt whose very complicated role drove the action but also drove the psychological aspects of the film, was excellent as the three women went through their respective paces. As for whodunit check it out for yourself if you have not already read the book. A way better than average thriller.             

A View From The Left-The 1916 Irish Rebellion and the British Workers Movement

Workers Vanguard No. 1098	21 October 2016

A View From The Left-The 1916 Irish Rebellion and the British Workers Movement

The following article, reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 235 (Summer 2016), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, is based on a presentation by comrade Eibhlin McDonald at a 23 April public meeting in London.

One hundred years ago tomorrow, the Easter Rising broke out in Dublin. The armed insurrection against British rule was organised by some 1,000-1,500 militant nationalists, the Volunteers, together with the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). The leadership included James Connolly, a revolutionary socialist. Yet this was a nationalist uprising for an independent Ireland, despite the participation of Connolly and his ICA, a workers militia that had been formed during the Dublin Lockout of 1913, when the city’s employers tried to smash the trade unions.

It began when the rebels seized a number of positions across Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic from the General Post Office. But the majority of the Volunteers were demobilised by the nationalist leaders on the eve of the Rising, leaving the Dublin rebels isolated. Moreover, the arms and ammunition from Germany that were expected by the insurgents did not arrive. A few days before the Rising, Roger Casement, who had been in Germany trying to organise support for an Irish insurrection, was arrested after landing in Ireland on a German submarine.

The British ruling class responded with ferocity to this armed uprising, especially as it came in the midst of World War I, when all of the subject peoples in the British Empire—which in 1916 included India and much of Africa—were expected to be loyal, indeed to fight and die for the “Mother country.”

With overwhelming military force, the British shelled Dublin, destroying much of the city centre. The rebels were forced to surrender after five days. At first, the Rising did not have much popular support, but there was mass public outrage when the leaders were court-martialled and sentenced to death. Fourteen were shot, including Connolly who was executed tied to a chair because he had been wounded in battle and was unable to stand.

The British imperialists launched wave after wave of repression in the years to follow. But even in defeat, the Easter Rising marked the beginning of the end of British rule in Ireland. They were forced to grant independence in 1921-22, but these masters of divide-and-rule engineered the partition of Ireland by inflaming tensions between Protestants and Catholics. The partition was the result of a defeat of the working class in struggle and was accompanied by bloody pogroms against Catholics, as we shall see.

We Marxists honour the Easter Rising as a just struggle for independence of Ireland from British colonial rule. But we are politically opposed to the programme and ideology of nationalism, which lines up the working class behind its “own” capitalist rulers. Unlike nationalists, we’re certainly not advocates of the doomed but heroic “blood sacrifice.” But once the Rising happened, revolutionaries were duty bound to defend it, in contrast to those on the left who regard the capitalist state as inviolable and disavow any attempt to overthrow it.

Karl Marx on Ireland

For British revolutionaries, the question of Ireland, Britain’s oldest colony, has long been a test of their commitment to the overthrow of their “own” capitalist ruling class. Karl Marx insisted: “It is in the direct and absolute interests of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland.... The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland” (Letter to Engels, 10 December 1869). The crucial importance of internationalist unity between workers in Ireland and Britain becomes obvious from studying the history of working-class struggles. Any revolutionary perspective requires resolute opposition to the politics of the Labour leaders—the left as well as the right wing—as we shall see.

Following on from Marx, Lenin formulated a general policy on the attitude of the revolutionary party to national oppression in the epoch of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism that developed towards the end of the 19th century. With the advent of imperialism, Lenin stressed, the division of nations into oppressor and oppressed was accentuated. Correspondingly, the tasks of revolutionaries in each country are different: the proletariat of the oppressor nation, as Lenin put it, “must demand freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by ‘their own’ nation. Otherwise the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words.” He insisted that British socialists who do not demand freedom to separate for the colonies and for Ireland “act as chauvinists and lackeys of bloodstained and filthy imperialist monarchies and the imperialist bourgeoisie” (“The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” 1916). Socialists of the oppressed nations, on the other hand, must fight for the fullest unity of the workers of the oppressed nation with those of the oppressor nation.

The attitude of socialists in Britain towards the Easter Rising flowed from their attitude to World War I. The outbreak of the first interimperialist war saw the collapse of the Second International into mutually hostile camps as most parties supported their “own” capitalist rulers. On 4 August 1914, the parliamentary fraction of the German Social Democratic Party, the largest section of the international, voted in favour of war credits. The British Labour Party and trade union leaders, for their part, supported Britain and declared an end to working-class struggle for the duration of the war. The Bolsheviks insisted that revolutionaries must stand for the defeat, above all, of their own bourgeois state. For Lenin, the task of socialists was to seek to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, that is, into proletarian revolution. Further, Lenin saw that the Second International had been destroyed, and that a new revolutionary international must be built through a complete break with the opportunists and social chauvinists.

For Lenin, the attitude of revolutionaries to the Easter Rising was a measure of their commitment to the right of self-determination, and to proletarian internationalism. He argued against other revolutionaries, including Trotsky, who trenchantly opposed the social chauvinists but were dismissive of the Rising. Trotsky claimed that the Irish peasantry, whose struggle for land had been the motor force for previous national revolts, had been pacified by land reform, and thus he argued that the “historical basis for a national revolution has disappeared even in backward Ireland” (“Lessons of the Events in Dublin,” Nashe Slovo, 4 July 1916).

Lenin countered that revolutionaries must take advantage of every outbreak of struggle against imperialism. A national revolt in Europe could be the spark for broader revolutionary struggle, Lenin argued. Indeed, “a blow delivered against the power of the English imperialist bourgeoisie by a rebellion in Ireland is a hundred times more significant politically than a blow of equal force delivered in Asia or in Africa.” “It is the misfortune of the Irish,” Lenin wrote, “that they rose prematurely before the European revolt of the proletariat had had time to mature” (“The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up,” 1916).

The Labour Party had passed umpteen “anti-war” resolutions—right up to a few days before the war broke out. For example, on 1 August 1914, prominent British Labour Party leaders signed a resolution calling for demonstrations against war and proclaiming: “Down with class rule” and “Down with war.” Among its signatories was one Arthur Henderson.

Three days later, Henderson signed a document issued by the trade union leaders, calling for support to Britain against Germany, on the grounds that Britain’s imperialist rival was “seeking to become the dominant power in Europe, with the Kaiser the dictator over all.” The Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) declared an end to working-class struggle for the duration of the war. In May 1915 Arthur Henderson, then leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, became a member of the wartime coalition government. He was a member of the cabinet when the 1916 Easter Rising broke out.

Henderson was accused of having led the cheering in Parliament when news of the executions of the leaders of the Rising was received. Henderson denied it, but said he would not “violate Ministerial confidences” in order to reveal what he had said about the executions. It hardly matters whether he cheered or not. He was in the cabinet that ordered the repression in Ireland.

The Dublin Lockout of 1913

Another Labour MP [Member of Parliament] and leader of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), J.H. Thomas, has been aptly described as a “fervid imperialist” in relation to Ireland. Thomas’s hostility to James Connolly was already evident during the Dublin Lockout of 1913. The capitalists of Dublin came together and locked out their workers in opposition to the efforts of [union leader] Jim Larkin and Connolly to unionise the workforce. Larkin, aided by Connolly, led the workers of Dublin in some five months of bitter class war, in a seminal battle for the trade union movement in Ireland and in Britain.

At a time when the trade unions consisted overwhelmingly of skilled craft workers, Larkin and Connolly worked wonders on both sides of the Irish Sea by organising the unskilled workers into the unions. In Belfast, this meant recruiting Catholic workers as well as Protestants, and also women textile workers into the unions. In Britain, drawing the huge layer of unskilled workers into the unions injected tremendous vitality into the trade union movement and contributed to a wave of class struggle known as the Great Unrest during the period 1910-1914.

During the Lockout, Connolly and Larkin appealed for support from the British trade unions. The working class had tremendous sympathy with the Dublin workers. But the solidarity that was sorely needed was sabotaged by the TUC and Labour leaders, including the left-talking dockers’ leader, Ben Tillett. The British dockers and railway workers were key to defeating the Dublin bosses: had they blockaded goods destined for Dublin by boat and train they would have shut down the city. At one stage, two train drivers in South Wales, who were members of ASLEF rail union, were sacked for refusing to carry goods destined for Dublin. Some 30,000 railway workers went on strike in their support. NUR leader Thomas was instrumental in smashing the strike, getting his members back to work and actually ordering them to replace the two victimised ASLEF members, whom he described as “a disgrace” to trade unionism. Jim Larkin caustically described Thomas as “a double-eyed traitor to his class.”

It comes as no surprise then that Thomas condemned the Easter Rising and declared that “there was no Labour leader in this country who did not deplore the recent rebellion in Ireland.” Labour “left” MP George Lansbury published the most popular anti-war newspaper in England. But as a pacifist, Lansbury condemned the Easter Rising, saying: “No lover of peace can do anything but deplore the outbreak in Dublin” (quoted in Geoffrey Bell, Hesitant Comrades, 2016).

As I mentioned, the executions of the leaders of the Rising caused outrage in Ireland. Even among those in Britain who condemned the Rising, some thought the executions were a step too far. But Will Thorne, a London Labour MP, demanded in Parliament to know when Roger Casement would be tried, pointing out that he was “the forerunner of this movement,” i.e., of the rebels who led the Rising (quoted in Hesitant Comrades). Casement was a courageous figure: from an Irish Protestant background, he grew up believing the Empire was bringing progress to Africa. But he was disgusted by the atrocities perpetrated on the native peoples at the behest of the imperialists in the Belgian Congo (and in the Putumayo region of Peru) and became an opponent of British imperialist rule, including in his native Ireland.

At the time of his arrest for attempting to secure German military aid for the Easter Rising, Casement had much popular sympathy. Faced with growing demands for clemency in his case, the British authorities released excerpts from what they claimed were Casement’s diaries indicating he was homosexual. The British kept the diaries secret for decades after his death, giving rise to much doubt about their authenticity. When Casement was charged with high treason, and the public were being fed lurid allegations of his homosexuality, many of his liberal friends, including the novelist Joseph Conrad, shamefully refused to petition for clemency. He was hanged in London’s Pentonville prison in August 1916.

On the Question of Obtaining German Arms

From the point of view of the working class, obtaining military support, including from an imperialist power, is not a problem in and of itself—if it is for a just war. It would have been a different matter had the Irish nationalists placed their forces under the command of the German military, which they did not. However, nationalists frequently do place themselves under the military command of an imperialist power, becoming their proxies in unjust wars. For example, today in Syria and Iraq, the Kurdish nationalists are the “boots on the ground” for the U.S. imperialists. We have no side in Syria’s squalid civil war between the Assad military and the rebel forces dominated by different Islamists. But we do have a side against the U.S. and other imperialist powers. And while we are implacable opponents of everything ISIS stands for, we take a military side with ISIS when it aims its fire against the imperialist armed forces and their proxies in the region, including the Kurdish nationalist forces.

The British Left and the Easter Rising

Among the opponents of the war and of social chauvinism in the British Labour movement, a prominent voice was that of Sylvia Pankhurst, at the time a leader in the struggle for women’s suffrage. Pankhurst said there is only “one reply to the Irish Rebellion and that is the demand that Ireland should be allowed to govern itself.” Pankhurst had few illusions in parliamentary reform—the struggle for votes for women met with violent resistance from the British state and suffrage was grudgingly granted only after the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Pankhurst, to her credit, had clearly taken the side of the working class by supporting Larkin and Connolly in the Dublin Lockout. She broke from her bourgeois-feminist family and went on to become a socialist and later, briefly, a communist.

The British Socialist Party had been formed in 1912 as a fusion of H.M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation with other socialists. The BSP underwent a split during the war, at its Easter 1916 conference, when the left wing took over and adopted an anti-war position. The split led to the departure of Hyndman, an anti-Jewish bigot and all-round social chauvinist. The BSP’s newspaper, the Call (4 May 1916), described the Easter Rising as “this latest phase of the war for liberation” and had no hesitation “in fixing full responsibility for the antecedents of the affair on the shoulders of successive British governments.”

Perhaps the most surprising response to the Easter Rising and the executions came from the Socialist Labour Party (SLP). The SLP, based primarily in Scotland, had been formed on the model of the party of the same name in the U.S. founded by Daniel DeLeon. Connolly was a former leader of the Scottish party. At the time of the Easter Rising, the SLP in Scotland was facing severe state repression for its role in organising militant strikes in strategic munitions industries in Glasgow, in the midst of war. The SLP’s main leaders—including Arthur MacManus, John Muir, Thomas Clark—had been arrested. John Maclean, who was a leader of the Clyde Workers Committee (CWC) but not a member of the SLP, was also arrested and imprisoned.

However, state repression alone doesn’t explain why the SLP’s monthly newspaper, the Socialist, said next to nothing on the Easter Rising, or on the execution of Connolly, their former comrade. Moreover it didn’t carry an obituary for Connolly until three years after his death, and during that time the paper carried very little coverage of Ireland. While the SLP led valiant strikes and the party press opposed the war, they maintained a strict separation between their political line on the war and their trade union activity. In an extreme example, when John Muir was in court for his role in organising the munitions strikes, he cravenly swore that the strike was purely over economic issues and that he was for the war and war production. This shameful performance contrasts with John Maclean who used his trial as an opportunity to indict the capitalist system and the war.

Muir should have been expelled for dragging the SLP’s record on the war through the mud, but the SLP kept him in their ranks. Had they fought for their anti-war line in the CWC, it would have split the leadership. Undoubtedly, had the SLP defended the Easter Rising and opposed Connolly’s execution, it would also have required combating anti-Catholic prejudices among Protestant workers in Glasgow, which had its own version of the Catholic-Protestant division that was prevalent in Belfast. Even such momentous trade union struggle as that which was waged on the Clyde [river in Glasgow] during World War I could not, in and of itself, overcome the divisions that existed, and thus could not arrive at the level of consciousness needed to overthrow the capitalist ruling class through socialist revolution. That requires a different kind of party.

Among the avowedly revolutionary parties of the time, Lenin’s party was unique. By 1912 the Bolsheviks had carried out a complete break with the opportunists in Russia. As early as 1902, in his pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, Lenin insisted that the revolutionary should aspire not to be “the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects” in order to “clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.” Above all, Lenin insisted on the party’s responsibility to bring the working class to revolutionary consciousness. The principles and programme that Lenin hammered out for the Bolsheviks, which he then generalised following the collapse of the Second International into social chauvinism in 1914, were central to the forging of the party into the instrument that would lead the proletariat to victory in the 1917 October Revolution.

From the Easter Rising to Partition

The years after Connolly’s execution saw a resurgence of anti-British sentiment in Ireland, led by Sinn Fein. There was also a renewed wave of working-class struggles that continued through the war of independence of 1919-21. In the South, for example, as well as the Limerick Soviet, in which striking workers took over and ran the city, there were land seizures and workers protests. In 1919, Belfast saw a tremendous strike throughout the city. The majority of the strikers were Protestant, and the head of the strike committee, Charles MacKay, was a socialist of Catholic origin. The strike provided an opening for the sectarian divide to be transcended and could have given a tremendous impetus to the struggle for an Irish workers republic. But the Protestant bosses in Belfast played on Protestant fears that they would become an oppressed minority in an independent Ireland ruled by the Sinn Fein nationalists. Meanwhile the British Lord Lieutenant in Dublin released some of the Sinn Fein leaders who had been imprisoned, calculating that their Irish nationalism would incite Protestant workers’ hostility towards their Catholic counterparts and undermine proletarian unity.

Not long after the defeat of the Belfast strikes, in the summer of 1920 a wave of bloody attacks swept through the shipyards and spread to other workplaces, targeting mainly Catholics. Some 10,000 Catholic men and 1,000 Catholic women were driven out of their jobs. Many Catholic homes and shops were burned in “five weeks of ruthless persecution by boycott, fire, plunder and assault” in a wave of terror that was compared to the pogroms against Jews in tsarist Russia (quoted in Hesitant Comrades). Several hundred of the expelled workers were members of the carpenters union.

At the same time, 1920 was also the year of the “Hands Off Russia” campaign, in which workers in Britain mobilised in the thousands and forced the British government to stop shipments of arms to capitalist armies fighting against Soviet Russia. Among others, the carpenters union had also passed “Hands Off Ireland” motions. In Belfast, carpenters union members went on strike when a group of Protestant shipyard workers produced revolvers declaring they would drive out every Sinn Feiner—meaning every Catholic, every trade union militant and socialist—from their jobs. Only 600 out of 2,000 obeyed the strike call. But the Loyalist scabs were expelled from the union. The carpenters union leaders appealed for other unions to prevent goods and raw materials from going into Belfast, arguing that the trade union movement had a role to play in ending the sectarian strife—by standing up for its own principles.

The anti-Catholic pogroms in Belfast paved the way for Partition, a major defeat for the perspective of a workers republic. In opposition to Irish independence, the British backed the Ulster Loyalists and engineered the setting up of the Orange statelet in the North, a police state which institutionalised discrimination against the Catholic minority. Independence in the South led to the creation of a repressive Catholic state, which was rooted in the oppression of women. The poisonous legacy of Partition was to create an oppressed Catholic minority in the North, interpenetrated with a distinct Protestant community, which in turn harbours legitimate fears that they would become an oppressed minority in a Catholic-dominated united Ireland.

The only just resolution to these national antagonisms lies in the overthrow of capitalism on both islands. Our perspective is for an Irish workers republic within a voluntary federation of workers republics in these Isles. It is important to know that the situation that emerged from Partition was not the only possible outcome. Above all it was a result of defeats and betrayals of workers in struggle. And it is rich in lessons for the many struggles that we will face in the course of building a revolutionary party.

The Lodz Ghetto In World War II-Henryk Ross' Photographs At Boston's Museum Of Fine Arts-Never Forget, Never Forgive

The Lodz Ghetto In World War II-Henryk Ross' Photographs At Boston's Museum Of Fine Arts-Never Forget, Never Forgive 

Artists' Corner- Matisse At The Museum Of Fine Arts In Boston

Artists' Corner- Matisse At The Museum Of Fine Arts In Boston

A Mea Culpa… Of Sorts-Down With The Trump Government!- Build The Resistance-Support The General Strike On May Day

A Mea Culpa… Of Sorts-Down With The Trump Government!- Build The Resistance-Support The General Strike On May Day      

A while back, last year, during the American presidential election campaign of 2016 at a point where the two major contenders, now President Donald Trump and now failed contender Hillary Clinton had been nominated by their respective organizations, I was under constant and hard-core pressure from personal friends and political associates to let up on my opposition of support to the candidate of either of the major parties. I had planned, and had made my stance clear early on to one and all, that I planned to cast a protest vote for Green Party candidate once socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign went down in disgraceful flames (disgraceful because of the horrible way he was treated by the Democratic Party establishment which went out of its way, way out of its way, to favor weak-kneed leading candidate Clinton). On November 8^th I did just that here in Massachusetts whose Electoral College votes were overwhelming won by Mrs. Clinton. 

The gist of my opposition to the two major party candidates was that I could discern no qualitative difference between war-hawk Clinton and war-hawk Trump, the issues around war and peace being the central reason that I have steadfastly opposed both major parties since my military service during the Vietnam War. A war whose long duration like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were started by one party’s president (Johnson in the case of Vietnam and avidly pursued by another before the fall of Saigon, Nixon/Ford). While I was not, and have not been, agnostic on my differences on other social and personal liberty issues that war and peace issue has always anchored my politic perspectives since the old days. And those personal friends and political associates have known that as well. Yet as the general election campaign progressed, if that is the right word for the down and dirty slug-fest between both candidates which nobody could rightly accept as reasonable political discourse, they continued their drumbeat. Something in that hard sell twisted me to become more adamant in my opposition-in my seeing that there was as the late great American novelist Gore Vidal no stranger to mainstream politics only “one ruling party in America with two branches-Democratic and Republican.”

I wrote a number of blogs and other commentaries as a result all along this line which not only included my opposition to the two parties but my fervent desire to get on with the real business of people with my brand of politics-organize against the endless wars and home and abroad. Here is a sample of my thinking at the time:

“Now several years ago, maybe late 2007, early 2008 when one Barack Obama made his presence felt on the American national political stage and sought to slay the dragon, to slay what we would come to find out was the dragon lady but who just then was in the first blush of her endless drive to win the Oval Office I noted that the Hillary-Obama race for the Democratic Party nomination looked like a breath of fresh air and although I would not have voted for either for love nor money I decided to try to chronicle the beginning storms of the campaign that year. (In the interest of full disclosure I voted for Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party that year a natural choice as a black and woman with a political past which she need not be ashamed of and who had at least a passing acquaintance with the truth-a big plus that year after all the bullshit was cleared away)   

“Early on though somewhere around the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary (which Hillary had won late by a hair and kept her campaign alive) in 2008 I gave up the enterprise as so much blather and as so much hot air and realized that the “promise” of 2007 had turned to ashes as neither candidate could give the approximate location of the truth in a time when all hell was breaking loose in the economy and working people, the working poor were being beaten down mercilessly by what would be called the Great Recession of 2008. And as we witness in 2016 working people, hard-working working people of all ethnic, racial and gender identifications have been taking it on the chin lo these many years. Taken it on the chin so they have in some cases fervently listened as one Dump the Trump (sorry I could not resist that slam, not the worst thing that will ever happen to that ill-bred bastard) lulls them to sleep with his balderdash, with his contempt for those who have so fervently supported him despite any good sense. We will find no truth coming from anywhere in that precinct. Worse this year milady Hillary has lost all her slight girlish charms from 2008 and is frothing at the mouth in anticipation of next week’s coronation as war-monger-in-chief.      

“Here is the hard truth, the truth neither billionaire Donald nor Wall Street Hillary have a clue about. For working people, for the hard-working people of this country who have been put up against the wall and blindfolded for a while now there is no salvation this side of capitalism, this side of that  defunct system that has had its day and had long ago lost any progressive content that it had in its golden age. “Speak the truth no matter how bitter” and that is the bitter truth as we will, once again learn over the next dreary four years. Yeah, Leon Trotsky, one of his books the place where I first read the truth of that “bitter” phrase, would have said it himself if he was not beyond the pale. You heard it here-think about it okay.”    

I was almost as surprised as everybody else come the morning of November 9^th to find one Donald “Dump The Trump” (no apology for that now) had been an upset winner of the 2016 American election. Although maybe not as surprised as most as I kept hearing a small drumbeat from working class guys and gals too whom I would meet in my work, or somebody would tell me about that there something underground in the political world, something down at the base was happening for Trump. Hell I even heard stuff when I played golf with guys on public golf courses (not Donald’s private ones) in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire that Trump was their guy for jobs, for keeping black and Latinos down, keeping the fucking immigrants out and making America an armed fortress. 

Then as the transition began its awful cycle on the turnover Trump daily almost shocked me, and everybody else like me, with his choices for who would aid him in his government. This is where the “mea culpa” of the title of this piece comes in. I now am ready to concede that there is some qualitative difference between a Trump government and what Hillary’s would have looked like- if only because she would leave us alone. I still stand by my vote of “no confidence” and am still glad, very glad, that I cast my protest vote for Jill Stein but we are in a mess for the next four years no question. Practically speaking though I was down in Washington on January 20^th to express my opposition, no, my resistance to the Trump government on day one.

Down with the Trump government!-Build The Resistance   

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- An Encore -James Connolly-Irish Citizens Army- A Critical Appreciation Of Easter, 1916

Click on title to link to "Workers Hammer" (International Communist League/Great Britain newspaper) critical appreciation of James Connolly, a hero of the Irish rebellion of Easter , 1916.

"James Connolly"

The man was all shot through that came to day into the Barrack Square

And a soldier I, I am not proud to say that we killed him there

They brought him from the prison hospital and to see him in that chair

I swear his smile would, would far more quickly call a man to prayer

Maybe, maybe I don't understand this thing that makes these rebels die

Yet all men love freedom and the spring clear in the sky

I wouldn't do this deed again for all that I hold by

As I gazed down my rifle at his breast but then, then a soldier I.

They say he was different, kindly too apart from all the rest.

A lover of the poor-his wounds ill dressed.

He faced us like a man who knew a greater pain

Than blows or bullets ere the world began: died he in vain

Ready, Present, and him just smiling, Christ I felt my rifle shake

His wounds all open and around his chair a pool of blood

And I swear his lips said, "fire" before my rifle shot that cursed lead

And I, I was picked to kill a man like that, James Connolly



A great crowd had gathered outside of Kilmainham

Their heads all uncovered, they knelt to the ground.

For inside that grim prison

Lay a great Irish soldier

His life for his country about to lay down.

He went to his death like a true son of Ireland

The firing party he bravely did face

Then the order rang out: Present arms and fire

James Connolly fell into a ready-made grave

The black flag was hoisted, the cruel deed was over

Gone was the man who loved Ireland so well

There was many a sad heart in Dublin that morning

When they murdered James Connolly-. the Irish rebel



"James Connolly"

Marchin' down O'Connell Street with the Starry Plough on high
There goes the Citizen Army with their fists raised in the sky
Leading them is a mighty man with a mad rage in his eye
"My name is James Connolly - I didn't come here to die

But to fight for the rights of the working man
And the small farmer too
Protect the proletariat from the bosses and their screws
So hold on to your rifles, boys, and don't give up your dream
Of a Republic for the workin' class, economic liberty"

Then Jem yelled out "Oh Citizens, this system is a curse
An English boss is a monster, an Irish one even worse
They'll never lock us out again and here's the reason why
My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die....."

And now we're in the GPO with the bullets whizzin' by
With Pearse and Sean McDermott biddin' each other goodbye
Up steps our citizen leader and roars out to the sky
"My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die...

Oh Lily, I don't want to die, we've got so much to live for
And I know we're all goin' out to get slaughtered, but I just can't take any more
Just the sight of one more child screamin' from hunger in a Dublin slum
Or his mother slavin' 14 hours a day for the scum
Who exploit her and take her youth and throw it on a factory floor
Oh Lily, I just can't take any more

They've locked us out, they've banned our unions, they even treat their animals better than us
No! It's far better to die like a man on your feet than to live forever like some slave on your knees, Lilly

But don't let them wrap any green flag around me
And for God's sake, don't let them bury me in some field full of harps and shamrocks
And whatever you do, don't let them make a martyr out of me
No! Rather raise the Starry Plough on high, sing a song of freedom
Here's to you, Lily, the rights of man and international revolution"

We fought them to a standstill while the flames lit up the sky
'Til a bullet pierced our leader and we gave up the fight
They shot him in Kilmainham jail but they'll never stop his cry
My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die...."

***In Honor Of James Connelly On The 100th Anniversary Of The Easter Uprising-Commandant- Irish Citizens Army- A Critical Appreciation Of Easter, 1916

***In Honor Of James Connelly On The 100^th Anniversary Of The Easter Uprising-Commandant- Irish Citizens Army- A Critical Appreciation Of Easter, 1916

***In Honor Of James Connelly On The 100^th Anniversary Of The Easter Uprising-Commandant- Irish Citizens Army- A Critical Appreciation Of Easter, 1916

A word on the Easter Uprising.

In the old Irish working-class neighborhoods where I grew up the aborted Easter Uprising of 1916 was spoken of in mythical hushed reverent tones as the key symbol of the modern Irish liberation struggle from bloody England. The event itself provoked such memories of heroic “boyos”  (and “girlos” not acknowledged) fighting to the end against great odds that a careful analysis of what could, and could not be, learned from the mistakes made at the time entered my head. That was then though in the glare of boyhood infatuations. Now is the time for a more sober assessment. 

The easy part of analyzing the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916 is first and foremost the knowledge, in retrospect, that it was not widely supported by people in Ireland, especially by the “shawlies” in Dublin and the cities who received their sons’ military pay from the Imperial British Army for service in the bloody trenches of Europe which sustained them throughout the war. That factor and the relative ease with which the uprising had been militarily defeated by the British forces send in main force to crush it lead easily to the conclusion that the adventure was doomed to failure. Still easier is to criticize the timing and the strategy and tactics of the planned action and of the various actors, particularly in the leadership’s underestimating the British Empire’s frenzy to crush any opposition to its main task of victory in World War I. (Although, I think that frenzy on Mother England’s part would be a point in the uprising’s favor under the theory that England’s [or fill in the blank of your favorite later national liberation struggle] woes were Ireland’s [or fill in the blank ditto on the your favorite oppressed peoples struggle] opportunities.

The hard part is to draw any positive lessons of that national liberation struggle experience for the future. If nothing else remember this though, and unfortunately the Irish national liberation fighters (and other national liberation fighters later, including later Irish revolutionaries) failed to take this into account in their military calculations, the British (or fill in the blank) were savagely committed to defeating the uprising including burning that colonial country to the ground if need be in order to maintain control. In the final analysis, it was not part of their metropolitan homeland, so the hell with it. Needless to say, cowardly British Labor’s position was almost a carbon copy of His Imperial Majesty’s. Labor Party leader Arthur Henderson could barely contain himself when informed that James Connolly had been executed. That should, even today, make every British militant blush with shame. Unfortunately, the demand for British militants and others today is the same as then if somewhat attenuated- All British Troops Out of Ireland.

In various readings on national liberation struggles I have come across a theory that the Easter Uprising was the first socialist revolution in Europe, predating the Bolshevik Revolution by over a year. Unfortunately, there is little truth to that idea. Of the Uprising’s leaders only James Connolly was devoted to the socialist cause. Moreover, while the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army were prototypical models for urban- led national liberation forces such organizations, as we have witnessed in later history, are not inherently socialistic. The dominant mood among the leadership was in favor of political independence and/or fighting for a return to a separate traditional Irish cultural hegemony. (“Let poets rule the land”).

As outlined in the famous Proclamation of the Republic posted on the General Post Office in Dublin, Easter Monday, 1916 the goal of the leadership appeared to be something on the order of a society like those fought for in the European Revolutions of 1848, a left bourgeois republic. A formation on the order of the Paris Commune of 1871 where the working class momentarily took power or the Soviet Commune of 1917 which lasted for a longer period did not figure in the political calculations at that time. As noted above, James Connolly clearly was skeptical of his erstwhile comrades on the subject of the nature of the future state and apparently was prepared for an ensuing class struggle following the establishment of a republic.

That does not mean that revolutionary socialists could not support such an uprising. On the contrary, Lenin, who was an admirer of Connolly for his anti-war stance in World War I, and Trotsky stoutly defended the uprising against those who derided the Easter rising for involving bourgeois elements. Participation by bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements is in the nature of a national liberation struggle. The key, which must be learned by militants today, is who leads the national liberation struggle and on what program. As both Lenin and Trotsky made clear later in their own experiences in Russia revolutionary socialists have to lead other disaffected elements of society to overthrow the existing order. There is no other way in a heterogeneous class-divided society. Moreover, in Ireland, the anti-imperialist nature of the action against British imperialism during wartime on the socialist principle that the defeat of your own imperialist overlord in war as a way to open the road to the class struggle merited support on that basis alone. Chocky Ar La.

"James Connolly"

The man was all shot through that came to day into the Barrack Square

And a soldier I, I am not proud to say that we killed him there

They brought him from the prison hospital and to see him in that chair

I swear his smile would, would far more quickly call a man to prayer

Maybe, maybe I don't understand this thing that makes these rebels die

Yet all men love freedom and the spring clear in the sky

I wouldn't do this deed again for all that I hold by

As I gazed down my rifle at his breast but then, then a soldier I.

They say he was different, kindly too apart from all the rest.

A lover of the poor-his wounds ill dressed.

He faced us like a man who knew a greater pain

Than blows or bullets ere the world began: died he in vain

Ready, Present, and him just smiling, Christ I felt my rifle shake

His wounds all open and around his chair a pool of blood

And I swear his lips said, "fire" before my rifle shot that cursed lead

And I, I was picked to kill a man like that, James Connolly

A great crowd had gathered outside of Kilmainham

Their heads all uncovered, they knelt to the ground.

For inside that grim prison

Lay a great Irish soldier

His life for his country about to lay down.

He went to his death like a true son of Ireland

The firing party he bravely did face

Then the order rang out: Present arms and fire

James Connolly fell into a ready-made grave

The black flag was hoisted, the cruel deed was over

Gone was the man who loved Ireland so well

There was many a sad heart in Dublin that morning

When they murdered James Connolly-. the Irish rebel

"James Connolly"

Marchin' down O'Connell Street with the Starry Plough on high

There goes the Citizen Army with their fists raised in the sky

Leading them is a mighty man with a mad rage in his eye

"My name is James Connolly - I didn't come here to die

But to fight for the rights of the working man

And the small farmer too

Protect the proletariat from the bosses and their screws

So hold on to your rifles, boys, and don't give up your dream

Of a Republic for the workin' class, economic liberty"

Then Jem yelled out "Oh Citizens, this system is a curse

An English boss is a monster, an Irish one even worse

They'll never lock us out again and here's the reason why

My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die....."

And now we're in the GPO with the bullets whizzin' by

With Pearse and Sean McDermott biddin' each other goodbye

Up steps our citizen leader and roars out to the sky

"My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die...

Oh Lily, I don't want to die, we've got so much to live for

And I know we're all goin' out to get slaughtered, but I just can't take any more

Just the sight of one more child screamin' from hunger in a Dublin slum

Or his mother slavin' 14 hours a day for the scum

Who exploit her and take her youth and throw it on a factory floor

Oh Lily, I just can't take any more

They've locked us out, they've banned our unions, they even treat their animals better than us

No! It's far better to die like a man on your feet than to live forever like some slave on your knees, Lilly

But don't let them wrap any green flag around me

And for God's sake, don't let them bury me in some field full of harps and shamrocks

And whatever you do, don't let them make a martyr out of me

No! Rather raise the Starry Plough on high, sing a song of freedom

Here's to you, Lily, the rights of man and international revolution"

We fought them to a standstill while the flames lit up the sky

'Til a bullet pierced our leader and we gave up the fight

They shot him in Kilmainham jail but they'll never stop his cry

My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die...."