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To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of James Connolly, Shaun Harkin (author of the James Connolly Reader) guest edits Rebel for a day. Below Shaun takes a look at the politics of this great socialist. James Connolly was an exemplary working class rebel. He had grown up in
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Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, a leading women’s equality campaigner and founder of both the Irish Women Workers’ Union and the Irish Women’s Franchise League, described Connolly as the “soundest and most thorough-going feminist of all the Irish Labour men.” Connolly welcomed the Irish women’s rebellion and thought
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The eruption of World War 1 was a cataclysmic event. Ruling elites sent millions of their citizens to certain death on the battlefields of Europe. Connolly opposed the entire war from the outset and opposed support for the British war effort in Ireland. Instead of support for imperialist slaughter he
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Connolly joined the trade union movement in Edinburgh in the late 1880’s. He was an active trade unionist in Scotland, Ireland and the United States and believed unions were the most effective means of challenging poverty and building working class solidarity. Not just that however, Connolly advocated a form
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Connolly was from his earliest days of political activism an advocate of complete independence for Ireland from the British Empire. He became a Marxist on his return from service in the British Army in Ireland. His understanding of the relationship between Irish self-determination and the struggle for socialism built