What Sort of Republic?

What is it about?

What Sort of Republic? In 1920 the advanced capitalist world seemed on the verge of widespread socialist revolutions. Could Ireland, then engaged in a bloody war of independence against the British empire, join in the process or was the best it could hope for a truncated bourgeois republic? The small communist forces had to decide where they stood. This paper discusses the process by which Ireland's communists came to offer unconditional support to the Irish Republican Army, an organisation they had previously described as ‘potential White Guards’ who could side with social reaction. In the summer of 1920 two Irish delegates attended the second congress of the Communist International, armed with a long theoretical document analysing the prospects for socialist revolution in Ireland. The Irish delegates argued in their paper against any communist alliance with potentially reactionary Irish republicans. Instead of calling for Irish independence they advocated a Federated Workers’ Republic of Britain and Ireland, to be achieved through a united struggle by British and Irish workers led by inter-linked communist parties. Their argument was similar in some ways to Rosa Luxemburg’s opposition to Poland’s demand for independence from the Russian empire. The Irish delegates were clearly intent on devising a strategy that would appeal to pro-British workers in the north of Ireland – the great bulk of the industrial proletariat. However, they viewed this section of the working class through rose-tinted glasses, imagining that their opposition to an Irish bourgeois republic could quickly become the foundation for socialist struggle. In the event, the Irish delegates never presented their original case to the Comintern congress. By the time they were invited to speak, Lenin had delivered his prescriptive Theses on the National and Colonial Question in which he argued forcefully that communists in colonial countries must support their revolutionary nationalist movements. The Irish delegates changed their line accordingly, abandoning all references to a Federated Workers’ Republic along with all critical commentary on the reactionary aspects of the IRA. The Irish communists would go on to offer unconditional support to the republicans, but critics would argue that they ‘bent the stick’ too far in this direction, becoming the IRA’s greatest cheerleaders while paying little attention to the class struggles of Irish workers and poor farmers from which an actual Workers’ Republic might have been fashioned.

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Photo by Soviet Artefacts on Unsplash

Photo by Soviet Artefacts on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The only copy of the original paper prepared by the Irish delegates is in the Comintern archives and didn't surface until the 1990s. However, none of the scholars with access to this material have appreciated its significance in offering a radically different approach to the struggle for socialism in Ireland.

Perspectives