Did The 1916 Easter Rising Serve The Interests Of Workers?

national | history and heritage | opinion/analysis Wednesday November 11, 2015 14:07 by Patrick Hackett

The hullabaloo over the commeroration of the 1916 Rising is merely another device intended to perpetuate the deception of the southern Irish working class. It forms a part of the overall ideological paradigm under which southern Irish workers are to be oppressed and divided from much of the working class in the North.

The 1916 Easter Rising is not an event that ought to be commerated by the working class in 2016. The 1916 Rising was undertaken by a small group of petty bourgeois insurgents. The Irish Citizen Army led by James Connolly capitulated to the petty bourgeois nationalist politics of the Irish Volunteers led by Tom Clarke and others. However the ICA was essentially a petty bourgeois paramilitary organisation. It did not see the need for social revolution and the estabishment of communism. As a petty bourgeois nationalist movement the insurgents sought, at most, the establishment of a 32 county Irish Republic that would serve the interests of small Irish capitalism and its petty bourgeoisie. Ultimately it would also serve the interests of big capital too.

But what was worse there was no chance of this band of insurgents being successful in their formal goals. Indeed some, if not many, of its leaders and organisers were of the opinion that they were not going to succeed in its aims. In this way they were engaging in a project that was to lead to the deterioration of the conditions under which Irish workers lived. The War of Independence that followed partly as a result of the events surrounding the 1916 Easter Rising was to further that deterioration of Irish workers. The eventual realisation of a 26 county Republic represented the failure of Irish Republicanism. It also failed to serve the class interests of the Irish working class North and South of the border. Had Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom the Irish working class would have been no better off than it is today. In fact it may, in some ways, have been comparatively better off. The establishment of a dual state system in Ireland represented merely another form of maintaining the oppression of the Irish working class. At most some of the adverse effects of the Second World War may have been avoided by the existence of the southern state in Ireland. But this may be merely a matter of historical contingency as opposed to the inherent class nature of the Irish Republic.

In short, the hullabaloo over the commeroration of the 1916 Rising is merely another device intended to perpetuate the deception of the southern Irish working class. It forms a part of the overall ideological paradigm under which southern Irish workers are to be oppressed and divided from much of the working class in the North.