Thomas Muir Event

Arrangements now confirmed for the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement's Thomas Muir Talk, to be held at 2 pm, Saturday, September 5th, in the car park, third left just off Huntershill Road, (which is first left off Auchinairn Road coming from the west) in Glasgow.

The event is being held in a shed there, with a stall. George Watson, owner of the thomas Muir Cafe, will give a talk on Thomas Muir and the walk round the Huntershill House, which the Council are determined to destroy. This will be followed by some songs, accompanied with guitar, including some original Thomas Muir songs.

Thomas Muir of Huntershill

Thomas Muir of Huntershill

From Democratic Green Socialist by-monthly online magazine

My name is Thomas Muir, as a lawyer I was trained
Remember Thomas Muir of Huntershill
But you’ve branded me an outlaw, for sedition I’m arraigned
Remember Thomas Muir of Huntershill
But I never preached sedition in any shape or form
And against the constitution I have never raised a storm
It’s the scoundrels who’ve corrupted it that I want to reform
Remember Thomas Muir of Huntershill

(Words Dick Gaughan)

When the Westminster Parliament resumes sitting in October of this year, one of the first pieces of business likely to be undertaken by the Government will be the lodging of the writ for the Glasgow North East By-election.

The by-election is unlike any other in that it has been caused by the resignation of a Speaker of the House of Commons for the first time since 1695. The House, rocked to its core by the expenses scandal, turned on Speaker Michael Martin, the Glasgow North East representative and demanded he pay the ultimate price for his handling of an affair that has seen public confidence in our political representatives reach a new low.

It is extremely unlikely that there will be a high turnout. The constituency includes areas of Glasgow, such as Springburn that are amongst the poorest of any city in Western Europe. Prior to boundary reorganisation, Springburn regularly had the lowest voter turnout in the UK. Thousands have turned their backs on a political process that seems to offer nothing to them and their families.

It is therefore an irony that within a parliamentary constituency likely to register as low a turnout as any in this country, lies the home of a man who sacrificed everything to try and ensure that the ordinary people were entitled to the vote and the chance to play a part in a process that during his lifetime was the sole preserve of the wealthy and powerful.

Within the Bishopbriggs part of the constituency, on the old post road between Glasgow and Edinburgh, lies Huntershill House, the family home of the radical Scottish advocate and reformer Thomas Muir.

The story of Thomas Muir of Huntershill reads like a cross between a political thriller, a courtroom drama and a boys own adventure. Were it to be presented to a group of Hollywood script writers it would likely be rejected as being unbelievable. Yet the incredible tale of this giant of the Scottish reform movement, a revolutionary hero in America, appointed Minister of The Scottish Republic by the French Revolutionary Government, inspirer of Robert Burns, friend of Thomas Paine and the leading figure of the Scottish Political Martyrs is known to fewer than a relative handful of people in his native land.

I first stumbled across the story of Muir quite by accident. After just missing a bus back to the Borders I found myself with time to kill on Edinburgh’s Waterloo Place. I entered the Old Calton Burial Ground to look around the various tombs, gravestones and monuments. A faded notice on the gates informs visitors that included within the walls of the cemetery opened in 1718 can be found memorials to the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume and the first statue of Abraham Lincoln outside of America commemorating the Scots soldiers who fought in the Civil War.

Yet, it is another monument that dominates the graveyard and stands visible above the famous spires and buildings of Scotland’s capital city. Standing over 100ft tall, the grey-black sandstone obelisk in the centre of the burial ground grabbed my attention. Inscribed on one side was the following;

“I have devoted myself to the cause of The People. It is a good cause - it shall ultimately prevail - it shall finally triumph.

Speech of Thomas Muir in the Court of Judiciary on 30 August 1793.”

As a socialist I was immediately intrigued as to who was the author of this inspirational and profound statement.

Below Muir’s statement was another;

“I know that what has been done these two days will be Re-Judged.

Speech of William Skirving in the Court of Judiciary on 7 January 1794”

The obelisk, known as the Martyr’s Monument, had another, final inscription.

“To The Memory Of Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, Maurice Margarot and Joseph Gerrald. Erected by the Friends of Parliamentary Reform in England and Scotland, 1844.”

I set out to find out more about the men that had inspired so magnificent a monument that unusually seemed to celebrate a cause of the people rather than a wealthy or powerful individual.

I uncovered a story that moves Muir between disruption and controversy at Glasgow University, a sparkling career in the Faculty of Advocates and courtrooms of Edinburgh, from conventions of the Friends of The People in Scotland to membership of The United Irishmen, prison hulks in the Thames, motions of support for him in the Westminster Parliament, transportation to Australia, rescue, shipwreck, arrival in Cuba, injury, incredible escapes and finally death in revolutionary France.

My article merely scratches the surface of a remarkable time and does not pretend to be anything other than an introduction to one of Scotland’s most remarkable men.

Thomas Muir’s Early Years

Yes, I spoke to Paisley weavers and addressed the city’s youth
For neither age nor class should be a barrier to the truth
M’lord, you may chastise them with your vitriolic tongue
You say that books are dangerous to those I moved among
But the future of our land is with the workers and the young

(Dick Gaughan)

The story of Muir begins exactly 244 years ago from the date of this article on 24th August 1765 when Margaret Muir (nee Smith) gave birth to a son in Glasgow. Thomas’s father James Muir was an orthodox Presbyterian who had achieved success as a hop merchant with premises in the city’s High Street.

An educated man, Muir’s father was credited with writing a pamphlet entitled, “England’s Foreign Trade.” His business acumen meant he was able to move the family from a small flat above the city centre business to a substantial property, built by Glasgow merchant James Martin, called Huntershill House in Bishopbriggs.

Thomas, described in contemporary accounts as, “a pious child of modest, reserved nature’ began his schooling at the age of five when his father employed a private tutor. By the time he was ten he was a student at Glasgow University and initially, with his parent’s encouragement, studied divinity. However, Muir’s life changed irrevocably when he attended the lectures of the Republican Whig Professor of Civil Law, John Miller.

Miller had established a reputation that attracted students from across the world to his classes. A former pupil of Adam Smith and David Hume, he influenced the 17 year old Muir to such an extent that he dropped his aspirations to serve the church and instead embarked upon studies in Law and Government.

Politics in Scotland at the time Muir was attending Miller’s classes was dominated by one man, Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville (1742 – 1811). Nicknamed “Harry the Ninth” and often referred to as the uncrowned King of Scotland, Dundas was a defacto dictator whose contacts in the legal profession and in politics put him in a position of unparalleled power and influence. His half brother Robert was Lord President of the Court of Session and his nephew, (also Robert) was Lord Advocate of Scotland. A Tory MP, Dundas was a favourite of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. He endeared himself to his Tory colleagues by successfully blocking attempts to finally abolish the slave trade whilst serving as Secretary of State for the Home Department.

Professor Miller was determined to use his influence help counter Dundas and his Tory placemen and set out to produce a generation of young Whig lawyers who would enter the conservative Faculty of Advocates. Thomas Muir was set to be one of these young lawyers.

Muir became a confident and driven young man and was soon involved in his first battle with the establishment in 1785 when he and ten others were accused of organising a petition in defence of University Professor John Anderson who was in dispute with the Faculty of Glasgow University.

Anderson was another influential and radical lecturer who caused controversy by advocating teaching what he called “anti-toga” classes in which he took the unprecedented decision to allow the ordinary citizens of the city to attend rather than just the elite. Anderson went on to establish the Andersonian Institute (later to become Strathclyde University.)

Muir and the others rallied to the Anderson’s cause after he was suspended following a dispute over the Professor’s claim that University funds were being abused.

Disciplinary action was taken against Muir and the others which resulted in their expulsion from the University. This harsh punishment meant that most of his contemporaries never qualified as lawyers. Thanks to his father and a series of influential friends, Muir was able to resume and complete his studies in Edinburgh and in 1787 was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates.

Muir quickly gained a reputation as a formidable advocate and raised eyebrows by offering his services gratis for those unable to afford the exorbitant fees charged by other lawyers. His status was further enhanced when he successfully represented the congregation the Church of Scotland in the Parish of Cadder against the rich local landowners and coal barons who were attempting to influence the selection of a new minister.

It was events in France however that were determine Muir’s fate.

The French Revolution and Scottish Friends of the People

Muir and other Whigs had been involved in advocating Burgh and Parliamentary reform. At the time, only a literal handful of wealthy landowners were entitled to vote in Parliamentary elections. Their cause was boosted by events in France in 1789 when the French people rose up against the monarchy and established a Republic based on the principles of “liberte, egalite and fraternite.”

The ideas of the revolution spread quickly in Edinburgh and beyond throughout 1789 and led to an explosion in newspapers, magazines, periodicals, debating clubs and societies discussing the great issues thrown up by the earth shattering events across the Channel.

To Dundas and others in the political establishment however, the French revolution represented a threat to their carefully constructed system of patronage and privilege and were determined to suppress any movement sympathetic to the French revolutionary cause.

Even within the Whig establishment, differences began to emerge between younger radicals such as Muir and more conservative aristocratic elements worried that the “sans culottes” of Britain might rise up and threaten their position in society.

When Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman, author and political theorist wrote his famous “Reflections on the French Revolution”, a document written in response caused panic in the British establishment. “The Rights of Man”, written by Thomas Paine, an Englishman who had fought on the side of American revolutionaries, was immediately banned for being seditious. In it Paine stated:

“The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”

Attempts by the government to suppress its distribution proved futile and thousands of copies were read across the country by a population clamouring for change and new ideas.

From 1789 onwards, Corresponding societies were established in most of the major cities in Britain. In 1792 in Scotland it was agreed to merge most of these disparate groups into one Scottish formation to be named The Friends of the People.

Thomas Muir, along with a farmer from Fife called William Skirving were fundamental to the process of establishing the Friends of the People and the organisation was formed in Edinburgh in July 1792.

The summer of 1792 saw the Government in permanent fear of revolution and popular uprisings. The month prior to the establishment of the Friends of the People had seen the date of the Kings birthday celebrated by an Edinburgh mob which for 3 days rioted and burnt effigies of Dundas and his nephew. Soldiers were heard to cry “Damn the King” and revolutionary slogans were daubed on the walls of the capital.

For the first time a fresh voice was clamouring to be heard in Scottish society. The new and burgeoning class of workers and artisans was no longer satisfied with sympathetic aristocrats with a conscience campaigning for reforms on their behalf. They would no longer be ignored.

Government agents and spies were everywhere and one reported;

“All the lower ranks, particularly the operative manufacturers with a considerable number of their employers, are poisoned with an enthusiastic rage for ideal liberty that will not be crushed by coercive measures.”

It was against this background that in December 1792 the Friends of the People gathered for their first convention in Edinburgh. From across Scotland, 160 delegates (some of them government spies) from 35 corresponding or debating societies met to discuss their cause. Lawyers, doctors, generals (including the MP for Inverness) and soldiers mixed with artisans and weavers. The nobility was represented by Lord Daer.

Muir, who had brought himself to the establishment’s attention once again by representing one of the King’s birthday rioters, had arranged with the other leaders for the convention to swear the French tennis court oath to “live free or die!” This act alone would be enough to draw unwanted attention from the paranoid government.

Yet Muir would have realised that the convention represented a broad constituency of views and opinions rather than a pure and revolutionary sect. Whilst the workers and artisans clamoured for change, the nobility and generals urged caution and restraint. In a delightfully contradictory move, the convention agreed on the one hand that the franchise should be extended to all males over the age of 21 whilst on the other agreeing to assist civil powers in any suppression of riots! (Those of us who have been involved in broad campaigns will no doubt have come across similar paradoxes!)

Muir however represented the more radical wing of the movement. He was convinced not just of the need for parliamentary reform but also in the cause of Scottish independence from England. He drew further attention to himself by reading to the convention an address of support from The United Irishmen with who he had been in regular correspondence. (He had also circulated copies of the address to delegates prior to the meeting.) He was vigorously opposed in presenting this address by Unionists within the gathering including the influential Lord Daer and Col. William Dalrymple. Muir insisted however and added;

“We do not, we cannot, consider ourselves as mowed and melted down into another country. Have we not distinct Courts, Judges, Juries, Laws, etc.?”

It was for this act, as much as anything else that the establishment singled out Muir as the major threat and became determined to put an end to the political career of the young lawyer. The Lord Advocate Robert Dundas swore in relation to Thomas Muir that he would “lay by the heels on a charge of High Treason.”

Thus, on January 2nd 1793 Muir found himself under arrest on the extremely serious charge of sedition. Brought in front of a sheriff and interrogated at length, Muir refused to answer any questions. It came as a surprise, (especially to him) that he found himself free on bail until his trial date in April and he wasted no time in building support for his cause. He travelled to London to meet members of the English reform societies and found them to be in a state of panic over the French Governments decision to execute their King. Muir knew that the delicate coalition he and others had built up advocating reform could be torn asunder by the act of regicide. He felt that sympathetic influential men would abandon the cause if the execution took place and so Muir decided to travel to Paris and plead restraint to the French Government.

Fate would have it otherwise, however, as he did not arrive in the French capital until the eve of Louis XVI date with the guillotine, and was too late to have an effect. He was however feted by influential members of the Revolutionary Government, met Thomas Paine and the Scottish Doctor William Maxwell, future friend of the poet Robert Burns. The monarchies of Europe were now determined to militarily defeat the French and feelings back home in Scotland became more polarised as war loomed. Knowing full well that Muir was on the continent, Lord Advocate Robert Dundas announced that Muir’s trial would be brought forward from April to February 11th.

When Muir was informed he immediately despatched notice that he would return as soon as passport difficulties would allow. (Due to the problems of the state of war that existed between Britain and France.) The legal establishment ignored his appeals on February 25th, Robert McQueen, Lord Braxfield declared Muir a fugitive from justice. Muir ignored appeals from friends and family to stay in France and announced his intention to return and defend himself against the charges. In his absence, the Faculty of Advocates, led by the arch Tory Henry Erskine took the disgraceful opportunity to expel Muir.
Lord Braxfield

It was June before Muir was able to find a ship, (an American vessel named “The Hope of Boston”) that would take him to Belfast. In a move that sealed his fate further he travelled south to Dublin where he met with and was sworn in as an honorary member of The United Irishmen. He left Belfast on his 28th birthday to make the short crossing to his native land and was arrested almost immediately upon his arrival when a customs officer in Portpatrick recognised him. He was taken in chains to Edinburgh and it is said that as the coach passed through Gatehouse on Fleet the spectacle was witnessed by fellow radical Robert Burns who set to work composing “Scot’s Wha Hae” repeating the tennis court oath of “let us do or die.” Although the poem is ostensibly about William Wallace, Burns is paying tribute to Muir and his final draft was finished on the day Muir’s trial began.

The Trial of Thomas Muir

M’lord, you found me guilty before the trial began
Remember ...Thomas Muir
And the jury that you’ve picked are Tory placemen to a man
Remember ...Thomas Muir

Yet here I stand for judgement unafraid what may befall
Though your spies were in my parish Kirk and in my father’s hall
Not one of them can testify I ever broke a law
Remember ...Thomas Muir

(Dick Gaughan)

The trial took place before the notorious Robert McQueen, Lord Braxfield (1722 – 1799). Born in Lanark, Braxfield quickly gained a reputation as a fearsome judge. Braxfield provided the model for Lord Weir in Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished novel “Weir of Hermiston.”

He is said to have commented to one defendant;

“Ye’re a vera clever chiel, man, but ye wad be nane the waur o' a hanging.”

McQueen was a friend of Robert and Henry Dundas who passionately believed that only those who owned property were entitled to vote in an election. He said;

“A government in every country should be just like a corporation, and in this country it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has the right to be represented. As for the rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation on them? What security for payment of their taxes? They may pack up all the property on their backs and leave the country in the twinkling on an eye. But landed property cannot be removed.”

A new charge was brought into being to charge Muir, that of “Unconscious sedition”!

Charges made against Thomas Muir in August 1793.

(1) That he attended meetings at Kirk-in-Tilloch and Milton, of a society for reform, in which he had delivered speeches in which he seditiously endeavoured to represent the government as oppressive and tyrannical.
(2) That he exhorted three people residing in Cadder, to buy and read Paine's Rights of Man.
(3) That he circulated the work of Thomas Paine, A Declaration of Rights, to the friends of reform in Paisley.

The trial was to be the first of a series of high profile “show” trials with Muir as the number one target. The jury was rigged with Tory placemen and spies and informers gave uncorroborated evidence. Even Lord Cockburn commented Muir’s trial was “one of the cases the memory whereof never perisheth, history cannot let its injustice alone.”

One of the placemen on the jury, Captain John Inglis of Auchedinny, suffered an attack of conscience and asked to be removed saying;

“Being in his Majesty’s service he did not wish to be on the jury as he thought it unfair in a case of this nature to try Muir by servants of the crown.”

McQueen intervened and insisted Inglis serve.

Muir stated;

“Shall these men be my jurymen who have not merely accused me but likewise judged and condemned me without knowing me in my vindication?”

Muir defended himself brilliantly and eloquently. His final speech to the jury on August 30th 1793 was for a number of years taught to schoolchildren in America as a classic speech in defence of freedom. In it he said;

“What has been my crime? Not the lending to a relation of mine a copy of Mr Paine's work; not the giving away a few copies of an innocent and constitutional publication; but for having dared to be a strenuous and active advocate for an equal representation of the people, in the House of the people.”

“Gentlemen of the jury, this is perhaps the last time I shall address my country. I have explored the tenor of my past life. Nothing shall tear me from the record of my former days.

Gentlemen, from my infancy to this moment I have devoted myself to the cause of the people. It is a good cause – it shall ultimately prevail – it shall finally triumph.

Gentlemen, the time will come when men must stand or fall by their actions – when all human pageantry shall cease – when the hearts of all will be laid open….

I am careless and indifferent to my fate. I can look danger and I can look death in the face, for I am shielded by the consciousness of my own rectitude. I may be condemned to languish in the recess of a dungeon – I may be doomed to ascend the scaffold. Nothing can deprive me of the past – nothing can destroy my inward peace of mind, arising from the remembrance of having discharged my duty.”

Despite his eloquence Muir knew that he was doomed. At one stage in the trial Muir argued that he was advocating the teachings of Christ. Braxfield leaned to the rigged jury and is reputed to have said;

“muckle guid it did him, he was hingit tae!”

He went onto say;

“The British constitution is the best that ever was since the creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it better. Yet Mr. Muir has gone among the ignorant country people and told them Parliamentary Reform was absolutely necessary for preserving their liberty.”

Shamefully but predictably Muir was found guilty and sentenced to 14 years transportation to the penal colony at Botany Bay in Australia. For many of the poor souls who received this fate transportation was equivalent to the death sentence as months at sea, exposed to sickness and disease meant that large numbers of convicts never lived to see their new surroundings in “Van Diemen’s Land.”

Muir was joined on a prison ship at Leith by fellow reformer Thomas Fyshe Palmer (1747 – 1802). Palmer was a Unitarian minister who had faced trial in Perth for the printing and distribution of Address to the People concerning parliamentary reform, written by George Mealmaker

If it had been the government’s intention to smash the reform movement in Scotland immediately then they were mistaken as Muir’s trial and his superb performance had led to opposition to the government stiffening. The Government decided that Muir should be moved from Scotland to avoid becoming a rallying point for dissent and was sent to a prison hulk at Woolwich on the Thames. Forced to work on a chain gang by day, Muir deportation was delayed when the ship hired to transport him was found to be rotten. As he waited, he was joined by fellow radicals William Skirving and Maurice Margarot who had also been victims of the show trials in Scotland.

In May 1794, aboard the ship “Surprise” and despite the intervention of amongst others the playwright and MP Richard Sheridan who moved a parliamentary motion to show leniency, the Scottish radicals set sail for Botany Bay.

Robert Burns, forced to publish his radical poetry under aliases wrote in the poem “To Messers Muir, Palmer, Skirving and Margarot”;

“Friends of the Slighted people – ye whose wrongs

From wounded FREEDOM many a tear shall draw

As once she mourn’d when mocked by venal tounges

Her SYDNEY fell beneath the form of law

Even on board “Surprise” Muir could not escape those who wished to discredit him more and he was accussed of helping to organise a mutiny on board. The attempt at framing Muir was so bungled however that he was able to successfully defend himself at a subsequent trial when he arrived at Port Jackson.

Meanwhile back home in Scotland the governments attempts to smash the reformers was beginning to succeed. Most of the leaders of the Friends of the People were now in jail or awaiting transportation. The war with France has led to an increase in crackdowns on any individual or group expressing revolutionary sympathies.

In an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia that followed, Burns wrote;

The shrinking Bard adown an alley sculks

And dreads a meeting worse then Woolwich hulks

Tho’ there his heresies in Church and State

Might well award him Muir and Palmer fate…

Despite establishment claims that Britain has a democratic tradition stretching back centuries, the years following the trials of what were now being referred to as “The Scottish Martyrs” led to an unprecedented increase in repression of reformers and crackdowns on freedom of speech. The ongoing war against the French led to the government introducing conscription to the army which met with popular opposition. In Tranent in East Lothian in 1797, the army crushed a protest organised by miners and their families against conscription by indiscriminately killing 11 men and wounding 12 others. The dragoons, by now described as “hysterical” went on to rape and pillage their way through the collier’s homes. A generation passed without a public meeting being held anywhere in Scotland as Dundas tightened his grip. It wasn’t until the working class rebellions of 1819 – 20 that organised radicalism raised its head again.

Muir in Australia and a Boys Own Adventure

With quiet words and dignity Muir led his own defence
He appeared completely blameless to those with common sense
When he had finished speaking the courtroom rang with cheers
Lord Braxfield said, “This outburst just confirms our greatest fears”
And he sentenced Thomas Muir to be transported 14 years

(Dick Gaughan)

For a less remarkable man the story might have ended with Muir serving his time in Botany Bay. Certainly his first months in the colony passed uneventfully and he was spared the worst excesses of life in Australia following fundraising from supportive Whigs that allowed him to purchase a small farm and live mainly unmolested by prison authorities.

However, it is at this point that Muir’s story becomes less of a story about politics and reform and more a barely believable swashbuckling tale of adventure.

In the seventh year of his presidency and under pressure from Scots Americans, George Washington ordered that the USS Otter be sent to rescue Muir and invite him back to practise law at the American bar.

On February 5th 1795 the Otter arrived at Port Jackson and Muir was located and set sail for freedom and a new life in America. Fate however, not for the first time, would intervene again in Muir’s life. After 4 months at sea the Otter struck rocks in Nootka Sound and only Muir and two others miraculously survived.

Muir went on to have more barely explicable adventures included being captured by natives, incarceration in Mexico, being shipped to Havana, spending three months in a dungeon for trying to flee Cuba and eventually arranging transport on a ship to Spain.

As his ship, the Ninfa approached the entrance to Cadiz harbour it came under attack by a British Man O War HMS Invincible. In the exchange of fire that followed a brief chase, the Ninfa was severely damaged. Muir was struck by a piece of shrapnel that smashed into his face removing one eye and seriously damaging the other. As the British boarded the ship yet another incredible twist in the story of Thomas Muir occurred.

Following interrogation of the crew, the British captain found out about Muir’s presence on board. He instructed a search amongst the dead and injured and it was reported that the body of the Scot’s radical had been found.

In his report to the admiralty on April 28th 1796 the captain wrote;

“Among the sufferers on the Spanish side is Mr Thomas Muir who made so wonderful an escape from Botany Bay to Havana. He was one of five killed on board the Nymph by the last shot fired by us. The officer at whose side he fell is at my hand and says he behaved with courage to the last.”

Yet, that was not the case. By incredible coincidence, the surgeon serving on board HMS Invincible had attended school with Muir. He found his childhood friend badly injured but removed his identity papers and placed him with the Spanish injured sent to Cadiz. It was the first and last time a servant of the British Crown behaved in a dignified manner towards Thomas Muir.

He was not expected to survive, but miraculously, survive he did! Following a diplomatic wrangle the Spanish Government eventually agreed his transfer to France and in early November, whilst wracked with pain and exhaustion, he arrived to a hero’s welcome in Bordeaux. He was proclaimed a “Martyr of Liberty” and a “Hero of the French Republic”. The great and the good flocked to see the famous Scotsman who had suffered so much in the name of liberty. A final portrait shows him with a patch covering his horrific injury from the sea battle off of Cadiz.

Muir’s Final Days

Muir travelled through France and on the 4th February 1798 he arrived in the French capital where he was proclaimed Minister of The Scottish Republic by the French Revolutionary Government and was lauded by an admiring public. He immediately set to work establishing links with exiled Scots radicals and republicans and struck up a friendship with Thomas Paine. He was aware that agents of the Pitt government were monitoring his every move and meeting and requested to be sent outside of Paris where he could be sure of less intrusion. He was offered quarters in Chantilly in November 1798 and it was here, he met with his radical friends.

On the 26th January 1799, Thomas Muir died from his wounds and related conditions. An obituary appeared in the government newspaper Le Moniteur.

Although its highest profile champion was gone, the campaign for parliamentary reform did not die with him. In 1832, when the Reform Act extending the franchise was voted through at Westminster, Muir’s portrait was publically illuminated in Glasgow whilst the Edinburgh Trades Council draped an empty chair with black in memory of the Scots lawyer who took on the establishment.

The monument in the Old Calton Burial ground was unveiled by reformist politicians in 1844 and was dedicated to Muir and his fellow Scottish Martyrs, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, Maurice Margarot and Joseph Gerrald.

Gradually over the years however, Muir has faded from public consciousness. A coffee shop and a display in the Library in Bishopbriggs join a local High School and the neglected obelisk in Edinburgh as the only overt reminders of the great man. Establishment historians keen to point out Britain’s democratic credentials and its “great” parliamentary traditions tend not to highlight Muir or his cause. It has been left to modern day radicals, socialists and republicans to keep Muir’s memory alive.

In a final twist to the story of Muir, his great nemesis Henry Dundas became the last British politician to be impeached in 1806 when he was accused of financial irregularities whilst serving as First Lord of the Admiralty. Although cleared of the charges, (he had friends in high places remember) his political career never recovered although the Dundas family continued to exert influence over Scottish political life for years to come.

Lord Braxfield continued to send shivers down the spine of those unfortunate enough to find themselves face to face with him in the dock until his death in 1799. (The same year as Muir.) In the Scotland on Sunday newspaper on 1st January 2006 he was included in a list of “Scotland’s all time Baddies – Scotland Depraved!”

Over 200 years after Muir’s death and the impeachment of Dundas, Muir’s home town of Bishopbriggs will become the centre of a by-election campaign caused by the greed and corruption of modern day politicians. Were he alive today what would Muir think of the fact that a small, self serving political elite continues to enrich itself whilst the majority of ordinary people look on with loathing and distrust?

I’ll leave the final words to Scottish folk musician Dick Gaughan;

Gerrard, Palmer, Skirving, Thomas Muir and Margarot
These are names that every Scottish man and woman ought to know
When you’re called for jury service, when your name is drawn by lot
When you vote in an election when you freely voice your thought
Don’t take these things for granted, for dearly were they bought

Graeme McIver

éirígí protest against 'Armed Forces Day' (video)

Fianna na h-Alba

Today let us look at the organisation Fianna na h-Alba the website says the following below:

After the disappointing YSI turnout at Bannockburn we have decided we are going to take Fianna na h-Alba seriously. It is now our intention to restore Fianna na h-Alba not only to Glasgow but to the whole of Scotland.

We do not wish the Fianna to be a political party or organisation, but involved solely in the national question and to develop the youth of Scotland as an intellectual and physically strong organised body of resistance to English rule.

Membership is open to all race, creed and religion, however only persons of the highest character will be accepted. The concept of social justice will predominate throughout all ranks.

This organization is non-sectarian.

Signed,
Fianna na h-Alba
June 2009

Frequently Asked Questions

Are you terrorists?
No. We are simply a network of Republican youth. We are simply advocating defence of our country and when there are peaceful means that do not mean full submission to a foreign government, our members our encouraged to take them. We are non sectarian.

What does your name mean?
Fianna na h-Alba can be translated as warriors of Scotland. A Fiann is a warrior, or a member of Fianna na h-Alba. The name was used by a paramilitary organisation in Glasgow in the 1920s, and later by a Gaelic boy Scout organization that was also based in Glasgow.

What political party are you aligned to?
Any that support Scottish independence, particularily those that support a Scottish Republic eg. the SSP and SSFG. We also support various other organisations against racism and sectarianism for example Anti-Facsist Action, and Republican movements in other countries like Mec Vannain and Mebyon Kernow. More in our links section under Celtic solidarity.

I don't live in Scotland. Can I join?
Yes! You can either join either on your own or make your own Sluagh with nearby expats.

I'm not Scottish ... I'm Manx and they don't have much in the way of Republican youth movements. Can I join, even if it's just to go camping?
Go on then.

Do you have a uniform?
Not at the moment. This will be debated at the Ard-Fheis, and will be based on either army camouflage and/or Fianna Éireann uniforms.

When's this Ard-Fheisy thing?
Near Glasgow, in August. We hope.

What's your relationship to Fianna na hÉireann?
We are trying to contact both factions but they are being evasive like wee leprechauns holding their gold. We also really want to thank them for stealing their ideas, logos and statements.
Update: The 32csm Fianna have disbanded. No contact from RSF Fianna but they are still active, just search 'Bodenstown 2009' on Youtube.

What with those Comhlan thingies?
Comhlan = Company. At the moment there are three companies in Scotland:
Comhlan A / A Company covers Glasgow, Edinburgh and the 'Lowlands'.
Comhlan B / B Company covers the East Highlands including Aberdeen and Dundee.
Comhlan C / C Company coveres the West Highlands, Argyll, the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland.

Comhlan D / D Company is for expatriate Scots and the Gallóglaigh (name for members from Ireland and other 'Celtic nations')

Where's that funny flag from?
The funny flag as you call it is the flag of the Fianna. The sunburst represents freedom and the points represent the Fianna code, which will be revised and uploaded at a later date. There is another version used by expatriate Scots, this one is black to represent the mourning of Fianns forced to leave their homeland, but the red represents the blood that bonds them to Scotland and the way following the Fianna code can break the sadness of being away. A wee bit soppy if you ask me but a flag's a flag. Some people tend to think it also represents anarcho-communism.

What's your opinion on the Gaelic?
'S an canan na h-Alba a th'ann na Gaidhilig, feumaidh sinn cum ar canan beo. By the time you're finished with us that will no longer be mumbo-jumbo.

Do you actually have any plans for this year, or are you just another pseudo Scottish-Republican group that hangs around cyberspace threatening poor English grannies living in Scotland?
Our plans include: Recruiting new members to build all four companies up to strength; Holding a democratic Ard-Fheis to make the opinions of our members accountable; Creating opportunites for sport and fitness; Supporting the Gaelic language; Action against racism and sectarianism in Scotland; Building links with similar movements in other Celtic countries.

GET YOUR VOICE HEARD - JOIN THE FIANNA TODAY!!!

Green socialists on James Connolly

Green socialists on James Connolly

Last month was the anniversary of the death of James Connolly. In this article John Wight examines the life and times of this great socialist figure.

May 12th each year marks the anniversary of the death of James Connolly.

Executed in Dublin by the British after taking up arms in the 1916 Easter Rising to not only liberate Ireland from 800 years of uninterrupted occupation, but more importantly to stir the Irish working class from its slumber and inspire it to rise from its knees, Connolly died a martyr to the cause of self determination and social and economic justice.

The story of that rising - of the Irishmen and women who so bravely took on the might of British imperialism and held out for four days; of the leaders who were rounded up afterwards and executed, each of them defiant to the end; of the aftermath and the armed struggle waged by the IRA under Michael Collins, leading to the formation in 1921 of the Free State Republic and a two year civil war - has been well documented.

The life of James Connolly, however, in its ceaseless and unwavering commitment to the cause of socialism, despite obstacles that would have deterred even the most dedicated of his kind, is surely worthy of special tribute.

It is a story which begins amid the grinding poverty of a disease-ridden slum populated by Irish immigrants in Edinburgh towards the end of the 19th century.

Anti-Irish sentiment in Scotland was commonplace during this period, with the poison of religious sectarianism exacerbated by the poverty suffered by the working class as a direct result of a laissez faire capitalist model which pitted all against all in an unremitting struggle for the crumbs from the bosses’ table. In Edinburgh poor Irish immigrants were squeezed together in their own ghetto in the centre of the city. The locals named it 'Little Ireland' and here the ravages of poverty – in the shape of alcoholism, crime, and diseases such as cholera and typhus - were part of every day life.

James Connolly, born 5 June 1868, was the youngest of three brothers. At the age of ten, after his mother died, he lied about his age and began work in the print-shop of a local newspaper.

At an age when his life should have consisted of going to school and running free with other boys his age, here he was being introduced to the cruel world of wage slavery, a mere child experiencing all the dirt and noise and smells of heavy machinery amongst the worn and broken men who toiled long hours for starvation wages.

Desperate to escape such a fate, at the age of fourteen Connolly once again lied about his age and joined the British Army. He was posted to Ireland, the birthplace of his parents, and it was there, witnessing the atrocities being carried out against the Irish people by the British Army, that the seeds of class consciousness and hatred of oppression were planted.

It was also during this period that he met his wife, Lillie Reynolds, who worked as a domestic servant for a prominent unionist family in Dublin. Lillie would remain by her husband’s side to the end of his life, sharing in his triumphs and defeats, her dedication to the struggle marking her out as an outstanding figure in her own right.

Connolly deserted from the British Army at the age of 21, moved back to Scotland with Lillie and there began his involvement in the class struggle, joining the Socialist League in 1889 whilst living in Dundee, an organisation committed to revolutionary internationalism which received the endorsement of Friedrich Engels.

A year later he moved to Edinburgh with his wife and by then two children, where he returned to the grind of punishing manual labour, picking up work here and there as he and his wife struggled against poverty. Throughout, Connolly continued to find time for politics and he became secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation. He entered a municipal election as a socialist candidate around this period and received 263 votes.

In 1896 Connolly returned to Dublin, a city he'd grown to love while posted there in the British Army, in response to an offer to work for the Dublin Socialist Club. Shortly after his arrival he founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party. In his first statement on behalf of the ISRP, he wrote:

“The struggle for Irish freedom has two aspects: it is national and it is social. The national ideal can never be realised until Ireland stands forth before the world as a nation, free and independent. It is social and economic, because no matter what the form of government may be, as long as one class owns as private property the land and the instruments of labour from which mankind derive their substance, that class will always have it in their power to plunder and enslave the remainder of their fellow creatures.”

Connolly had decided by this point that the two strands of revolutionary thought in Ireland, national liberation and socialism, rather than being antagonistic, were in fact complementary.

This was a view which ran counter to the prevailing current of socialist theory that obtained across continental Europe at that time, which held to the view that the struggle for socialism must reach across the false divisions of national, ethnic and cultural identity. Nationalist movements as such were scorned and vilified, deemed petit bourgeois in both character and design.

But those European socialists had no experience of living under the yoke of imperialism, and thus for them the national question could only ever exist in the abstract.

Some of Connolly’s most powerful writing and thinking focused on this very issue, demonstrating a development which placed him at the vanguard of Marxist revolutionary theory.

“The struggle for socialism and national liberation cannot and must not be separated.”

“The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland; the cause of Ireland is the cause of Labour.”

Emphasising his status as a theoretician of the first rank, Connolly was also an early champion of women's rights.

“The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.”

In 1903, as work and finances in Dublin dwindled, Connolly moved to the United States. He'd visited there the year before; travelling across the country lecturing on political philosophy and trade unionism, and his lectures had received a warm reception and much praise from leading figures within the nascent US socialist movement of the period, in particular Daniel De Leon.

After a hard initial few years in his adopted country, Connolly eventually managed to find stable work, and in 1906 became a paid organiser for the recently formed Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), led by the legendary Big Bill Haywood. He also joined the American Socialist Labor Party and founded a monthly newspaper, The Harp, with which he aimed to reach the East Coast's huge Irish immigrant population.

Largely due to Connolly's focus on Irish immigrants, he and De Leon soon split. De Leon, an orthodox Marxist, abhorred Connolly's belief that Marxism should be adapted to varying cultures and traditions if a nation of immigrants was to be mobilized in the cause.

The split was acrimonious, Connolly accusing De Leon of being elitist, De Leon questioning Connolly's methods and grasp of Marxist theory and practice. However, Connolly continued on the path he had chosen, and it was obvious by now that a large part of his motivation in doing so was an increasing homesickness for his beloved Ireland.

In 1910 his dream of returning to Ireland became reality. He returned after being invited to become national organizer for the newly-formed Socialist Party of Ireland. Soon after his return he published a number of pamphlets, one of which, Labour in Irish History, was a major step in the development of an understanding of Irish history from a Marxist viewpoint.

By now possessing an unshakable belief that any hope of revolution lay with the trade union movement, Connolly joined with Larkin in his Irish Transport and General Workers Union. Connolly moved north to Belfast to organize for the ITGWU, hoping to smash down the barriers of religious sectarianism and unite the working class in the shipyards around which the city was built.

He had little success.

In 1913 he moved back to Dublin to join Larkin in the titanic struggle which began when the Dublin employers locked out thousands of workers in an attempt to break the increasing influence and strength of the ITGWU.

A protest meeting of the workers was held despite a ban on such meetings having been ordered by the authorities. It was savagely attacked and broken up by baton-wielding police and afterwards Connolly was arrested. He refused bail for good behaviour and was sentenced to three months in prison. Immediately embarking on a hunger strike, he was released after just one week.

Connolly's first task upon his release was to form a workers' militia. Never again, he vowed, would workers be trampled into the ground by police horses or beaten down under police batons. He called this new militia, which comprised around 250 volunteers, the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). The day after its formation, Connolly spoke at a meeting.

“Listen to me, I am going to talk sedition. The next time we are out on a march, I want to be accompanied by four battalions of trained men.”

When Larkin left Ireland for a fundraising tour of the United States in 1914, Connolly became acting general secretary of the ITGWU. The same year, watching as millions of workers went off to be slaughtered in the First World War, he was devastated.

“This war appears to me as the most fearful crime of the centuries. In it the working class are to be sacrificed so that a small clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped, and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.”

All over Europe even socialists succumbed to the poison of patriotism, joining the war efforts in their respective countries and thus heralding the end of the Second International in which socialist parties and figures representing Europe's toiling masses had vowed to campaign against the war and the slaughter of worker by worker. Connolly's analysis of the war was scathing:

“I know of no foreign enemy in this country except the British Government. Should a German army land in Ireland tomorrow, we should be perfectly justified in joining it, if by so doing we could rid this country for once and for all the Brigand Empire that drags us unwillingly to war.”

The British Government attempted to buy off Irish sentiment in support of outright independence from the Empire with a Home Rule bill, which in effect promised devolved power if the political leadership in Ireland at that time - people like John Redmond of the Irish Parliamentary Party - would agree to the recruitment of Irish workers to be slaughtered in the trenches in an imperialist war.

The bill split the Irish national liberation movement into those who supported it as a step towards outright independence and those, like Connolly, who were totally against it.

“If you are itching for a rifle, itching to fight, have a country of your own. Better to fight for our own country than the robber empire. If ever you shoulder a rifle, let it be for Ireland.”

It was now that Connolly's position shifted with regard to physical force. Previously, he had wanted no part in it, eschewing it as reckless and contrary to Marxist doctrine of a mass revolution of the working class, whereby consciousness precedes action.

But with the retreat of the European socialists, and the failure of the trade unions to act against the war, Connolly despaired of ever achieving the society he’d dedicated his life to without armed struggle.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood was planning just the kind of insurrection which Connolly had in mind. Connolly had taken a dim view of the IRB and its leaders up until then, viewing them as a bunch of feckless romantics. However, when they revealed their plans to him at a private meeting – plans involving the mobilization of 11,000 volunteers throughout the country - and that a large shipment of arms was on the way from Germany, he agreed to join them with his own ICA volunteers.

Connolly was respected enough by the IRB leaders, in particular Padrig Pearse, to be appointed military commander of Dublin's rebel forces. Pearse, a school teacher, was certain that they would all be slaughtered. He was imbued with a belief in the necessity of a blood sacrifice to awaken the Irish people, holding obscurantist beliefs that were steeped in Irish history and the Gaelic culture. But for all that he was no less committed to his cause than Connolly to his, and as a consequence they soon developed a grudging respect for one another.

In the end, the plan for the Easter Sunday insurrection went awry. Rebel army volunteers deployed out with Dublin received conflicting orders and failed to mobilize, leaving Dublin isolated. After postponing the insurrection for a day due to the confusion, the Dublin leadership decided to press on regardless. Connolly assembled his men outside their union headquarters, known as Liberty Hall. By now he knew their chances for success were slim at best, and indeed it is said that he turned to a trusted aide as the men formed up and, in a low voice, announced:

“We’re going out to be slaughtered.”

With Pearse beside him, Connolly marched his men to their military objective, the General Post Office building on O'Connell Street in the centre of Dublin. They rushed in, took control of the building, and barricaded themselves in to await the inevitable military response from the British.

Connolly, Pearse and another leader of the insurrection, Thomas C. Clarke, marched out into the street to read out the now famous proclamation of the Irish Republic. In it, at Connolly's insistence, the rights of the Irish people to the ownership of Ireland, to equality and to the ending religious of sectarianism were included.

“The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious to the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.”

After holding out against the British Army for four days, during which Connolly inspired the men under his command with his determination and courage, in the process suffering wounds to the chest and ankle, British reinforcements and artillery arrived from the mainland to begin shelling rebel positions throughout the city.

The leadership, upon realizing the hopelessness of their situation, and in order to prevent the deaths of any more of their volunteers and civilians in a losing fight, reluctantly decided to surrender.

In the aftermath the ringleaders of the Rising were executed. Connolly was saved for last, the severity of his wounds failing to deter the British from taking their revenge as they tied him to a chair in the courtyard of Kilmainham Jail, where he was executed by firing squad.

At his court martial days prior, held in his cell in deference to those same wounds, James Connolly made the following statement:

“Believing that the British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the presence, in any one generation of Irishmen, of even a respectable minority, ready to die to affirm that truth, makes the Government forever a usurpation and a crime against human progress.

“I personally thank God that I have lived to see the day when thousands of Irishmen and boys, and hundreds of women and girls, were ready to affirm that truth, and to attest to it with their lives if need be.”

When news of the Rising was released, some leading European socialists dismissed it as a putsch of little or no great consequence. However, Lenin was not one of those, and went so far as to refute such criticisms in his article, The Results of the Discussion on self-determination. To him the Easter Rising stood as an example of the awakening of the proletariat that was taking place across Europe, providing hope that world revolution was on the horizon. He wrote:

“Those who can term such a rising a Putsch are either the worst kind of reactionaries or hopeless doctrinaires, incapable of imagining the social revolution as a living phenomenon.”

Today a statue of James Connolly stands pride of place in the centre of Dublin. A brass engraving of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic also sits pride of place in the window of the General Post Office headquarters, where Connolly made his stand for the liberty of his nation and his class during those four fateful days in April 1916.

Scotland's Republican Socialists

The Scottish Socialist Freedom Group are the real Republican Socialists in Scotland who support the following:

Campaign for Yes in an independence referendum.

Unity amongst the pro-independence left.

A green socialist republic for Scotland.

To join the Scottish Socialist Freedom Group send an email to redlarry1962@googlemail.com

We represent a non-sectarian group that is cross-party politics of the republican socialist left in Scotland.

All are welcome who endorse our manifesto.

Click here to read our website

Scottish Independence petition

Click here to sign the petition

To: The Scottish Government

We demand that Scotland becomes a full sovereign Independent country. We demand this because we don't believe the unionist lies of Labour and believe that Scotland would be a wealthier, healthier, smarter, safer & more just nation with Independence.

Scotland is being held back under the UK! We want Scotland to do what Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, and Andorra have all done (with either similar or even smaller populations to Scotland) and to MOVE FORWARD and create a better future for everyone!

We will make our voice be heard and we will demand Independence & Freedom for Scotland!! The Scottish people have a right to self determination & have the right to decide our nations future in a referendum to allow the people of Scotland to vote for a new beginning for Scotland with Independence!!

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Aims and Principles of The Scottish Socialist Freedom Group

From the SSFG website

Aims and Principles of the The Scottish Socialist Freedom Group

The SSFG is an organisation of revolutionary class struggle that will result in an Independent Socialist Republic of Scotland. We aim for the abolition of the United Kingdom, all hierarchy, and work for the creation of a world-wide classless society.

Capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class by the ruling class. But inequality and exploitation are also expressed in terms of race, gender, religion, sexuality, health, ability and age, and in these ways one section of the working class oppresses another. This divides us which benefits the ruling class.

We believe that fighting racism and sexism is as important as other aspects of the class struggle. A Republic of Scotland cannot be achieved while sexism and racism still exist. In order to be effective in their struggle against their oppression both within society and within the working class, women, lesbians and gays, and black people may at times need to organise independently. However, this should be as working class people as cross-class movements hide real class differences and achieve little for them. Full emancipation cannot be achieved without the abolition of capitalism and this cannot be done without the destruction of its founder, the United Kingdom.

As well as exploiting and oppressing the majority of people, Capitalism threatens the world through war and the destruction of the environment.

It is not possible to abolish Capitalism without a revolution, which will arise out of class conflict. The ruling class must be completely overthrown to achieve true Scottish Independence and freedom. Because the ruling class will not relinquish power without their use of armed force, this revolution will be a time of violence as well as liberation.

Unions by their very nature cannot become vehicles for the revolutionary transformation of society. They have to be accepted by capitalism in order to function and so cannot play a part in its overthrow. Trades unions divide the working class (between employed and unemployed, trade and craft, skilled and unskilled, etc). Even syndicalist unions are constrained by the fundamental nature of unionism. The unions have to be able to control its membership in order to make deals with management. Their aim, through negotiation, is to achieve a fairer form of exploitation of the workforce. The interests of leaders and representatives will always be different from ours. The boss class is our enemy, and while we must fight for better conditions from it, we have to realise that reforms we may achieve today may be taken away tomorrow. Our ultimate aim must be the complete abolition of wage slavery. Working within the unions can never achieve this.

Genuine liberation can only come about through the revolutionary self activity of the working class on a mass scale. A Socialist Scotland means not only co-operation between equals, but active involvement in the shaping and creating of that society during and after the revolution As Scottish Republicans we organise in all areas of life to try to advance the revolutionary process. We believe a strong organisation is necessary to help us to this end. Unlike other so-called socialists we do not want power or control for our organisation. We recognise that the revolution can only be carried out directly by the working class. However, the revolution must be preceded by organisations able to convince people of the Socialist Republican alternative and method. We participate in struggle as Scottish Republicans. We reject sectarianism and work for a united revolutionary Scottish Freedom movement.

The Declaration of the Scottish Republic

To the people of Scotland: Scotland, through us, strikes for her freedom. We declare the right of the people of Scotland to the ownership of Scotland, and to the control of Scottish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished. In every generation the Scottish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty, they have asserted it both in arms and through political institutions. Standing on that right, we hereby proclaim the Scottish Republic as a Sovereign Socialist Independenct State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and its place among the Independent nations of the World.

The Scottish Republic is entitled to the allegiance of every Scot. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, oblivious to the differences carefully fostered by a foreign government, which have divided us in the past and present.

We place the cause of the Scottish Republic under the protection of the sovereignty of the Scottish people, and we demand that all those who serve the cause honour it with dignity. In this supreme hour the Scottish nation must sacrifice themselves for the common good, proving itself worthy of the destiny to which it is called.


Signed by

The Scottish Socialist Freedom Group

James Connolly: The Great Irish Revolutionary

A system of society in which the workshops, factories, docks, railways, shipyards, &c., shall be owned by the nation, but administered by the Industrial Unions of the respective industries, organised as above, seems best calculated to secure the highest form of industrial efficiency, combined with the greatest amount of individual freedom from state despotism. Such a system would, we believe, realise for Ireland the most radiant hopes of all her heroes and martyrs. - James Connolly

James Connolly, the great Irish revolutionary was martyred in 1916, and is a man whose revolutionary legacy is, at any one time, being claimed by many diverse groups, many of them diametrically opposed to each other, from anarchists, to nationalists to communists and socialists.

So let us start at the beginning, where it all began. Connolly was born in 1868 to Irish immigrant parents in the Cowgate area of Edinburgh, Scotland. His father worked as a manure carter, removing dung from the streets at night, and his mother was a domestic servant who suffered from chronic bronchitis and died young from that ailment.

Anti-Irish feeling in Edinburgh at the time was so bad that most Irish were forced to live in the slums of the Cowgate and the Grassmarket areas, which became known as ‘Little Ireland’. Overcrowding, poverty, disease, drunkenness and unemployment were rife, most of the jobs available to Irish were selling second-hand clothes and working as a porter or a carter.

Though he attended St. Patricks School in Cowgate, at the age of ten he left in order to enter the workforce. He got a job with Edinburgh’s Evening News newspaper, where he worked as a ‘Devil’, cleaning inky rollers and fetching beer and food for the adult workers. His brother Thomas also worked with the same newspaper. In 1882, aged 14, he joined the British Army in which he remained for nearly seven years, all of it in Ireland, where he witnessed first hand the terrible treatment of the Irish people at the hands of the British. The mistreatment of the Irish by the British and the landlords led to Connolly forming an intense hatred of the British Army.

In 1889 while living in Dundee James first got involved in socialist politics joining the Socialist League while his older brother John was involved in a free speech campaign alongside the Social Democratic Federation and the local Trades Council.

He became active in Socialist and trade union circles and became secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation, almost by mistake. At the time his brother John was secretary; however, after John spoke at a rally in favour of the eight-hour day he was fired from his job with the corporation, so while he looked for work, James took over as secretary. During this time, Connolly became involved with the Independent Labour Party which Keir Hardie formed in 1893.

By 1892 he was involved in the Scottish Socialist Federation, acting as its secretary from 1895, but by 1896 he had gone to Dublin to take up the full time job of secretary of the Dublin Socialist Society, which at his instigation quickly evolved into the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP). The ISRP is regarded by many Irish historians as a party of pivotal importance in the early history of Irish socialism and republicanism. While active as a socialist Connolly was among the founders of the Socialist Labour Party which split from the Social Democratic Federation in 1903. While in America he was member of the Socialist Labor Party of America (1906), the Socialist Party of America (1909) and the Industrial Workers of the World, and founded the Irish Socialist Federation in New York, 1907. On his return to Ireland he was right hand man to James Larkin in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. In 1913, in response to the Lockout, he, along with an ex-British officer, Jack White, founded the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), an armed and well-trained body of labour men whose aim was to defend workers and strikers, particularly from the frequent brutality of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Though they only numbered about 250 at most, their goal soon became the establishment of an independent and socialist Irish nation. He founded the Irish Labour Party in 1912 and was a member of the National Executive of the Irish Labour Party when he was executed in 1916.

Syndicalism:

James Connolly was first and foremost a Marxist and a socialist, but when he himself was asked to elaborate upon the specifics of his position he would often advocate revolutionary or radical syndicalism, though he would mostly refer to his ideas as Industrial Unionism rather than syndicalism.

Broadly, Syndicalism refers to ideas, movements and tendencies which share the aim of transforming capitalist society through direct action by the working class on the industrial front, at the point of production. For syndicalists, labour unions are the potential means both of overcoming capitalism and of running society in the interests of the majority. Industry and government in a syndicalist society would be run by labour union federations.

However, in attempts to smear this part of his life and thought, and to promote their own rigidly dogmatic positions, Stalinists have often claimed that the syndicalism professed by Connolly was a youthful misadventure, an aberration that by the time of his martyrdom at the hands of the British following the 1916 Easter Uprising he had all but abandoned. However even a cursory reading of Connolly’s writings dispels this myth propagated by the Stalinists. In his last major work, The Re-Conquest of Ireland, published on the 14th of December 1915, just over five months before the Easter uprising, he fervently advocates syndicalism, or ‘Industrial Unionism’, writing:

The principle of complete unity upon the Industrial plane must be unceasingly sought after; the Industrial union embracing all workers in each industry must replace the multiplicity of unions which now hamper and restrict our operations, multiply our expenses and divide our forces in face of the mutual enemy. With the Industrial Union as our principle of action, branches can be formed to give expression to the need for effective supervision of the affairs of the workshop, shipyard, dock or railway; each branch to consist of the men and women now associated in Labour upon the same technical basis as our craft unions of to-day.

Add to this the concept of one Big Union embracing all, and you have not only the outline of the most effective form of combination for industrial warfare to-day, but also for Social Administration of the Co-operative Commonwealth of the future.

A system of society in which the workshops, factories, docks, railways, shipyards, &c., shall be owned by the nation, but administered by the Industrial Unions of the respective industries, organised as above, seems best calculated to secure the highest form of industrial efficiency, combined with the greatest amount of individual freedom from state despotism. Such a system would, we believe, realise for Ireland the most radiant hopes of all her heroes and martyrs.

It is clear as day that, despite the revisionist claims of Stalinists and others, Connolly was not just an ardent supporter of socialism and Irish liberation, but also a supporter of revolutionary syndicalism. It is impossible to deny that Connolly was a major organizer of The Industrial Workers of the World during his years in the United States, an avowedly syndicalist organization. He was also heavily influenced by Daniel De Leon, and was even for a few years a member of De Leon’s Socialist Labour Party, considering himself for a number of years to be a De Leonist. However it would be wrong to try and place Connolly entirely within one of the two major schools of revolutionary syndicalism, namely De Leonism and anarcho-syndicalism. De Leon’s major revolutionary theory was that socialist revolution could only be achieved by the working-class electing a socialist party to power backed by a power and organized Industrial Union. Connolly thought this tactic to be incorrect, and he turned the model on its head, advocating rather for the Industrial Unions to seize power with the backing of a strong socialist party. The distinction may seem trivial, but it is an important one as it not only keeps him firmly outside of the De Leonist school of thought, but also the anarcho-syndicalist camp, which eschews political organization entirely in favour of industrial organization.

Nationalism

Connolly was also - as he is primarily remembered - a great Irish nationalist, something that has allowed his legacy, for better or for worse, to be claimed by Irish nationalists of all stripes. Unlike the many anarchists who also claim Connolly, I do not reject this part of his life and thought out of hand. Connolly’s Irish patriotism and his avocation of national liberation is one of the major parts of who he was. To excise national liberation from Connolly is to practically remove the memory of the Easter Rebellion. Despite the disingenuous, even outright wrong claims of many anarcho-syndicalists and anarchist communists, this is a type of nationalism that does not assume a common interest (that of national liberation) between the working-class and the national bourgeoisie. Connolly held true to the idea that the national revolution and the social revolution were linked, and that to separate them would mean failure, famously saying:

After Ireland is free, says the patriot who won’t touch Socialism, we will protect all classes, and if you won’t pay your rent you will be evicted same as now. But the evicting party, under command of the sheriff, will wear green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the roadside will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic.

Now, isn’t that worth fighting for?

And when you cannot find employment, and, giving up the struggle of life in despair, enter the Poorhouse, the band of the nearest regiment of the Irish army will escort you to the Poorhouse door to the tune of St. Patrick’s Day.

Oh, it will be nice to live in those days…

Now, my friend, I also am Irish, but I’m a bit more logical. The capitalist, I say, is a parasite on industry…

The working class is the victim of this parasite - this human leech, and it is the duty and interest of the working class to use every means in its power to oust this parasite class from the position which enables it to thus prey upon the vitals of Labour.

Therefore, I say, let us organise as a class to meet our masters and destroy their mastership; organise to drive them from their hold upon public life through their political power; organise to wrench from their robber clutch the land and workshops on and in which they enslave us; organise to cleanse our social life from the stain of social cannibalism, from the preying of man upon his fellow man.

One can see that Connolly could not, and would not separate the national and social revolutions, for him Ireland could only truly liberated if capitalism itself was also overthrown. He set the stage, even before Lenin and the Russian Revolution, for the post-Second World War socialist national liberation groups who viewed their cause as invariably part of the internationalist cause to bring down global capitalism and imperialism and establish global communism.

Generally I tend to view any anarchist attack on Connolly’s nationalism as highly facetious and disingenuous. It is based on the flawed anarchist understanding of national liberation and internationalism. This flawed understanding of the struggle also demonstrates why anarchism and anarchists are generally no friends of the struggles for national liberation. Finally, concerning his views on national liberation and the social revolution Connolly makes it clear that the Irish are the working-class and the working-class are Irish, saying:

We are out for Ireland for the Irish. But who are the Irish? Not the rack-renting, slum-owning landlord; not the sweating, profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman - the hired liars of the enemy. Not these are the Irish upon whom the future depends. Not these, but the Irish working class, the only secure foundation upon which a free nation can be reared.

The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered. Ireland seeks freedom. Labour seeks that an Ireland free should be the sole mistress of her own destiny, supreme owner of all material things within and upon her soil. Labour seeks to make the free Irish nation the guardian of the interests of the people of Ireland, and to secure that end would vest in that free Irish nation all property rights as against the claims of the individual, with the end in view that the individual may be enriched by the nation, and not by the spoiling of his fellows.

The United Front:

Connolly was also an early proponent of the idea of a united leftist front. He believed, as do I and many other revolutionary socialists, that a successful social revolution can only be carried out by a united front of various anti-capitalists groupings.

In support of the United Front he said:

the development of the fighting spirit is of more importance than the creation of the theoretically perfect organisation; that, indeed, the most theoretically perfect organisation may, because of its very perfection and vastness, be of the greatest possible danger to the revolutionary movement if it tends, or is used, to repress and curb the fighting spirit of comradeship in the rank and file.

For Connolly, the struggle for socialism, for the co-operative commonwealth, for a workers’ republic, for the re-conquest of Ireland; for the new social system, should be conducted on every front. He recognized revolutionary potential in all autonomous working class organisations and movements. He fully supported to the co-operative movement as well as the Irish language movement. Despite rather cynically observing that “you can’t teach a starving man Gaelic” , Connolly saw the Irish language movement as one “of defiant self-reliance and confident trust in a people’s own power of self-emancipation”.

It is because of, not in spite of his views on working-class and left unity that Connolly railed against the evils of craft unionism. Connolly’s attack on craft, or trade, unionism has the same basis as the modern attack on it, namely that it divides the workers into unions based on crafts, despite being employees of the same industry and struggling against the same bosses. This type of unionism of groups like the AFL-CIO plays right into the hands of the bosses and the managers because it turns the workers against themselves in struggles for shorter work days and higher wages, providing for a sort of divide and conquer strategy for the capitalists. To this end Connolly was a supporter of the One Big Union concept put forward by groups like the Industrial Workers of the World. He believed that all workers of all crafts should be united in one union in the common struggle against the bosses and capitalism. On this he said:

The enrolment of the workers in unions patterned closely after the structure of modern industries, and following the organic lines of industrial development, is par excellence the swiftest, safest, and most peaceful form of constructive work the Socialist can engage in. It prepares within the framework of capitalist society the working forms of the Socialist Republic, and thus, while increasing the resisting power of the worker against present encroachments of the capitalist class, it familiarizes him with the idea that the union he is helping to build up is destined to supplant that class in the control of the industry in which he is employed. The power of this idea to transform the dry detail work of trade union organisation into the constructive work of revolutionary Socialism…It invests the sordid details of the daily incidents of the class struggle with a new and beautiful meaning.

I believe today that the only way we can achieve an effective socialist revolution is to follow Connolly’s model of the united front. Do we have to include traitors to the working-class such as authoritarian socialists and centrist social democrats? No, I would not think so, because to do so would mean having to make more than compromises than most revolutionaries would be comfortable with. Again, it is disingenuous of anarchists to claim that any sort of united front would have to include these movements, it is simply an attempt to come up with excuses for not working with those you may have slight ideological differences with. We must recognize that no one group, be it syndicalists, revolutionary democratic socialists, anarchists etc are going to have all the best ideas, militants or organizers, so we must work together for the creation of a socialism, the details can be hammered out later. To deny this is handicap the movement to overthrow capitalism and to only further entrench the shameful sectarianism that divides us.

Parliamentarianism:

As was discussed above, the American syndicalist and revolutionary socialist Daniel De Leon was a major influence on the thought of Connolly. Connolly never abandoned the idea of a revolutionary party of the working-class, as hose who would later come to be known as anarcho-syndicalists would. But, as was also discussed before, Connolly turned the De Leonist revolutionary model on its head, advocating for the seizure of power and the overturning of capitalism by the unions who would in turn be backed by a strong, revolutionary socialist party. De Leon agitated for a political revolution that would in turn lead to a social revolution. Connolly was arguing for a social revolution outright.

Like many revolutionary democratic socialists, Connolly believed that a true revolution could not be made simply by seizing state power away from the capitalists. Capitalism maintains its rule through the instrument of the state, which is the collection of armed forces (police, military, etc.) into a centralized power. In order for capitalism to be replaced, these bodies of capitalism’s agents must be dissolved or disbanded, and replaced by bodies of workers’ defence forces, fully accountable to the new society. Concerning the institutions of the state Connolly said:

The political institutions of today are simply the coercive forces of capitalist society they have grown up out of, and are based upon, territorial divisions of power in the hands of the ruling class in past ages, and were carried over into capitalist society to suit the needs of the capitalist class when that class overthrew the dominion of its predecessors.

Also concerning state ownership he said:

State ownership and control is not necessarily Socialism - if it were, then the Army, the Navy, the Police, the Judges, the Gaolers, the Informers, and the Hangmen, all would all be Socialist functionaries, as they are State officials - but the ownership by the State of all the land and materials for labour, combined with the co-operative control by the workers of such land and materials, would be Socialism

Anarchists reject this out of hand, deeming it to be state socialism, but again this demonstrates their flawed understanding of such matters as the state and private property. One has to remember the Marxist approach of the overthrow of capitalism into socialism followed by the transition from socialism to fully-fledged communism. It is my belief that the anarchist requirment of a direct transition from a heavily stated society to an acepholous society is both philosophically and practically unreasonable.

Connolly’s understanding of the state and the workers’ republic was radically different than that of the Stalinist dictatorships that grew up following the Second World War. Rather he advocated for something called the co-operative commonwealth. In such a society the productive property is owned collectively and managed by democratic co-operatives, which are in turn organised along co-operative lines, industry-by-industry, region-by-region. This is very similar to the ideas put forward by Council Communism and true Jeffersonion democracy (something else I am researching), it is true social democracy, not the kind espoused by many ’social democratic’ political parties around the world. Simply put, he wanted a society that was democraticly run and organized for the benefit of society.

Connolly’s support of parliamentarianism and socialist parties puts him firmly at odds with anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists who try to claim him, but keeps himin the realm of Marxism and the revolutionary movements based on it.

Legacy:

His legacy in Ireland is mainly due to his contribution to the republican cause and his Marxism has been largely overlooked by mainstream histories. However, as was said before his legacy as a socialist has been claimed by a number of diverse groups including the Communist Party of Ireland, Connolly Youth Movement, éirígí, the IRSP, the Labour Party, Sinn Féin, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers’ Party, the Scottish Socialist Party and a variety of other left-wing and left-republican groups. Also, despite claims to the contrary, Connolly’s writings show him to be first and foremost a Marxist thinker.

Connolly was among the few European members of the Second International who opposed, outright, World War I. This put him at odds with most of the labour leaders of Europe - but meant he was a co-thinker of those that would come to later call themselves communists, such as Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg. He was influenced by and heavily involved with the radical Industrial Workers of the World labour union and the theories of Daniel De Leon.

Also, despite their ideological and theoretical differences, Lenin was apparently a great admirer of Connolly, though it is likely the two never met. Lenin berated other communists, who had criticised the Easter Rebellion in Ireland as bourgeois. He maintained that no revolution was “pure”, and communists would have to unite with other disaffected groups in order to overthrow existing social orders. He was to prove his point the next year, during the Russian Revolution.

In Scotland, Connolly’s thinking was hugely influential to socialists such as John Maclean, who would similarly combine his leftist thinking with nationalist ideas when he formed his Scottish Workers Republican Party.

To return to the beginning, Connolly’s legacy has seen attempts to co-opt it by people of almost every political stripe in Ireland from anarchists, to nationalists to Stalinists. However, while Connolly was a lot of things, there were also a lot of things he was not. Chief among these he was not an anarchist, despite the claims of many anarchist thinkers and writers. If you do a quick Google search on James Connolly and anarchism you will find many sites calling Connolly, among other things an “anarchist union organizer.” However, as I hope I have shown, while he did side against the Marxist De Leon in the I.W.W. split in 1908, he never abandoned parlimentarianism or the idea of a socialist party, something that is the very antithesis of anarchism, especially anarcho-syndicalism. He was a committed Marxist and an revolutionary Irish nationalist, two other strains of thought that place him outside of anarchism. But in the end Connolly will always be remembered as someone who struggled for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and imperialism, and someone who gave his life for it. I finish with probably my two favourite Connolly quotes:

The great only appear great because we are on our knees, let us arise!

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

Taken from the weblog By Any Means Necessary
Edited by Larry

Declaration of Arbroath

Although the English armies under Edward II were routed at Bannockburn in 1314 and by 1319, with the recapture of Berwick, effectively expelled from Scottish soil, they continued to mount attacks into Robert the Bruce's Scotland over the succeeding years.

The Pope had not accepted Scottish independence, perhaps partially because Robert the Bruce had been excommunicated for killing John Comyn in a church in Dumfries in 1306 (Comyn had formed an alliance with Edward, but perhaps had more of a right to be King than Bruce).

Thus the Declaration of Arbroath was prepared as a formal Declaration of Independence. It was drawn up in Arbroath Abbey on the 6th April 1320, most likely by the Abbot, Bernard de Linton, who was also the Chancellor of Scotland.

The Declaration urged the Pope to see things from a Scottish perspective and not to take the English claim on Scotland seriously. It used strong words, indicating that without acceptance of the Scottish case that the wars would continue and the resultant deaths would be the responsibility of the Pope.

The words of the "Declaration of Arbroath"