James Connolly was the only Labour leader in the British state who was explicitly Marxist in his general framework of understanding and who engaged in revolutionary action against the State.  He was killed for his revolutionary attempt by a Coalition Government which included the founder of the Labour Party, Arthur Henderson, who was in the process of bringing various Labour organisations together to operate as a Parliamentary Party.

Henderson had been conducting labour activity under the political aegis of the Liberal Party, which was specifically the party of capitalism.  It was the party of Progress, which meant the development of ever freer capitalism.  It was also the war-party.

Capitalism and War went together in British development.

The Tories were the party of reaction.  They did not drive Capitalism towards complete domination of economic life, with all that entailed in social life.

When Capitalism was set free to follow its own bent, by a powerful Liberal agitation, in the 1832 Reform, the Tories set about imposing curbs on it by means of the Factory Acts.

Fifty years later, in conjunction with a dissident Liberal development in Birmingham, they projected a social welfare reform for the purpose of saving Capitalism from being undermined by its own freedom.

The Liberal policy for ameliorating the stresses of free capitalism was Imperialism.  The English masses were to be fed by cheap food brought in from the Empire.

The Tories, who had merged with the social-reform Liberals under the name of the Unionist Party, considered imposing limits on the expansion of the Empire, and settling the world into five or six major regions which would acknowledge each other as legitimate.  The Liberal Party rejected that policy and won a landslide victory in the 1906 Election.

War was declared on the bogus issue of Belgian independence in 1914.

Ramsay MacDonald of the Independent Labour Party tried to raise an agitation against it.  But working class feeling, under Liberal ideology, was so strongly pro-War that he could only hold protest meetings under protection by the police.

James Connolly described the War as an act of Imperialist dominance by Britain with the immediate object of destroying the German nation in the British capitalist interest.  He published material showing that the German working class was an active element of the German nation, and had acquired a substantially autonomous place for itself in the order of the state, and for that reason Liberal Britain wanted to destroy it because it gave a bad example.

And he organised an Army.  And he took part, along with a bourgeois Army, in an act of Insurrection against the British State in Ireland.

Did Henderson have any spark of class affinity with Connolly when the War Cabinet, of which he was a member, decided to kill him? 

Connolly was killed as a nationalist, whereas Henderson was an internationalist—in other words, an Imperialist.

A few months later the Liberal Party proved that it had been wrong to launch the World War, whose only rational purpose could be the establishment of unquestioned British dominance of the world.  It broke itself in the undertaking.  Lloyd George, who aspired to be a top-down revolutionary, became Prime Minister, ousting Asquith from the leadership with the support of the Tories, but carrying only half of the Liberal Party with him.

There were then two Liberal Parties, meaning in effect that the Liberal Party had destroyed itself under the stress of the Great War it had launched.

Arthur Henderson detached himself from the Liberals, established the Parliamentary Labour Party in their place (with Ramsay MacDonald as Leader), and made it His Majesty’s Opposition by coming second to the Unionists in 1918.  It became the Government-in-waiting through no effort of its own.  It had been under tutelage by the Liberal Party:  and the Liberal Party crumbled around it.

It had not fitted itself for government by party-political struggle.  It was put in that position by the suicide of the Liberal Party, and it did not know what to do when—a few years later–the Liberal residue put it in power as a Minority Government (1924), and many of them came over to it to show it what to do when in power.

The Empire was at its greatest ever extent when Labour became the Official Opposition.  What was its policy, or strategy, for the Empire which it would have to govern?

It could not be anti-Imperialist, in the sense of discarding the Empire, because a situation had come about in which the Empire was integral to British life, and it knew that that was the case.

The ruling circles which had introduced democracy—general adult Parliamentary franchise—did so on the ground that the mass of the people—the democracy, so to speak—had become enthusiastic Imperialists on the understanding that their quality of life depended on a daily supply of cheap goods from the Empire.

But the Empire could not just be let tick over and supply the goods by routine.  Because of the vast territories conquered in the War, and the general disruption of pre-War routines by the War, the Empire had to be governed actively.  And active government needed some purpose to guide it.

The War Coalition led by Lloyd George won the 1918 Election.  It had some ideas of how the world it had won should be governed.  But that Government fell when in 1922 the Turkish nationalists (who had been allied with Germany) rejected the Treaty that had been imposed on them in 1919, and made good their rejection by effective military resistance.

Whitehall called on the Empire to return to War in order to compel the Turks to accept their Treaty.  The Empire did not respond.  The Unionists withdrew from the Coalition.

There was a return to party politics, with no party knowing what to do—least of all the Labour Party.

Labour won the 1929 Election and formed a majority government.  When faced with the great crisis of Capitalism in 1931 it formed a Coalition—a National Government—with the Tories.  The Unionist Party had been calling itself the Conservative Party since the fall of the War Coalition in 1922—perhaps signifying that the process of merging social reform Liberalism and Toryism was complete.

But the new Tory Party was less resourceful than the old one was, and it was no more able to deal with the crisis of capitalism than Labour was.  What happened was that the two parties called off the party conflict at elections, so that it would not play into the economic crisis and drive it to extremes.  [That was the era of national socialist politics on the Continent.]

The Labour element which tried to keep up the party conflict was marginalised.

It seemed to me, when I tried to make sense of the inter-War period, that that was how Fascism was warded off in Britain and a kind of nominal democracy was maintained.  The Party structures were retained while conflict between them was cooled down by hierarchical agreement, and there was National Government which marginalised Party conflict without establishing an authoritative Nationalist Party.

That kind of thing was not possible in the array of new states, set up by Britain on the Continent via the Versailles Conference of 1918-19.  They were fragments of the former Hapsburg Empire, but were discouraged from making alliances on the basis of common ancestry;  and the most important of them had little sense of nationality.

In order to be functional they had to establish for themselves the substance of the status that Britain’s heedless remaking of Europe gave them in form.  They had to establish authority in the State and nationality in the citizen.

This development, whether democratic or authoritarian, involved anti-Semitism.  (Jewish writers at the time explained the rise of active anti-Semitism by the British decision to break up the Hapsburg Empire—in which Jews had a place—and replace it with a series of new states in which the Jews did not have a place.  And that explanation was widely accepted.)

In 1917 Britain accepted the claim of some Jews that Judaism was a nation, and that it had national rights in Palestine.  This applied to Jews wherever they might be, and it set them apart from the nations in which they lived.  And in 1939 the Oxford War Pamphlet on the subject said that in future the Jewish population, being of an alien nationality to its host nations, must be kept below a certain percentage, because otherwise there would be anti-Semitism as a natural consequence.

Europe became fascist between the Wars for sufficient reason.  The nation-states in form set up by Britain had to become nation-states in substance in order to be functional.  Authority and nationality were missing from them at their inception because they had not evolved.  

International Socialism was pressing on them from the Soviet Union.  The Communist International was organised in their midst, but it was unable to take over and establish a Dictatorship of the Proletariat.  However, its influence was such that there was a widespread sense that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat across national boundaries was the next step in normal development.  But what happened was national socialism.

Europe became fascist.  Britain warded off Fascism by informally suspending the conflict of political parties, which is a de facto requirement of democracy, while maintaining it de jure.  (I argued this case in the pamphlet, Union Jackery*.)

Nationalist Ireland maintained a system of party-political democracy from 1932 onwards, once the Treaty imposed on it by Britain in 1922, under threat of war, was cast off.

Madawc Williams seems to question this in a complicated paragraph in the April Labour Affairs:

“It is better to think of the Nazis as an extreme in a general metamorphosis that began before 1914 with the right-wing Republicanism of Imperial Portugal.  Created a new Polish state under Pilsudski, who like Mussolini had been part of the socialist Second International before 1914, and whose mildly anti-semitic system was seen at the time as a variation on the fascist theme.  And it was variously expressed without using the word Fascist in Britain’s National Government, the USA’s New Deal, and de Valera’s Fianna Fáil, which literally means Soldiers of Destiny.  De Valera’s main foes self-identified as Fascists.”

As far as I can figure this out, it says that Fianna Fail was mildly fascist but that his opponents went the whole hog and declared themselves fascist.

I don’t know in what way the New Deal might be regarded as ‘slightly fascist’.  

The case with the National Government is that it stopped party conflict.

But what is it about Fianna Fáil that entitles it to be called slightly fascist?  Is it the word ‘Destiny’ in the translation of the party name?

Fianna Fáil repealed the Treaty Oath, by means of which Britain broke the Sinn Fein party in 1922, dismantled the Republic, and caused a ‘Civil War’ by threatening an Imperial war of conquest.  

The Treatyites then formed themselves into a fascist party and adopted the policy of replacing the Parliamentary system of party-politics with a vocational form of corporate state.  Fianna Fáil did not try to exclude the fascist party from the democracy.  It defeated it consistently within the democracy by means of policies which engaged the populace in purposeful action, probably using the word “destiny” at times.  And the democracy was not less a democracy for allowing a fascist party to operate in it.  Suppression of the fascist party by the State would have ended Democracy as surely as its triumph at the polls.

It is odd that, while Madawc mentions Pilsudski in this paragraph, he makes no mention of James Connolly.  Connolly, like Pilsudski, held that the nation was the social form within which Socialism could be developed, and he specifically mentioned Pilsudski as the Continental socialist with whom he agreed.  What passed itself off as international socialism he regarded as mere imperialism.

Connolly was dead before the great revolutions and counter-revolutions began, but there is little doubt that the strain of socialism he brought to the national insurrection was a component of the national democracy later established by Fianna Fáil.

Brendan Clifford

*  Union Jackery: the pre-history of Fascism in Britain.  ISBN 0 85034 112 X. 84pp.