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“The lever must be applied in Ireland”: Marx, Engels, and the Irish Question

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2008

John Rodden
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Abstract

This article integrates economic and social history, biography, and political theory as it explores how the personal ties of Marx and Engels to Ireland stamped their thought. Marx and Engels struggled to integrate Ireland into their theory of revolution, conceptualizing it as a “special case” of capitalist accumulation, a formulation partly motivated by their human sympathies for the Irish (especially strong in the case of Engels and Marx's daughters). Extended attention in this essay is thus devoted to the special place of Ireland in Marxist theory and praxis, which is pursued on two interconnected research fronts: Ireland's anomalous role in Marx's revolutionary vision and the Irish people's prominent role in the lives of Marx and Engels. While Marx's primary aim was always to capture the citadels of capitalism such as Great Britain, he and Engels concluded in the late 1860s that the thrust could not be administered frontally: they would have to strike at England's soft underbelly – Ireland. Throughout the life of the First International (1864–72), Ireland's place in Marx's strategic vision moved to the center, transforming Ireland into the “lever” of a European-wide revolution. For a half decade in the late 1860s to the early 1870s, Marx and Engels invested the Irish peasantry with this decisive geopolitical role; soon thereafter, their conception of Ireland's theoretical significance altered and dissolved alongside their fading hopes for a European socialist revolution.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 70 , Issue 4 , Fall 2008 , pp. 609 - 640
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2008

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References

1 Marx, Karl, On the First International, ed. Padover, Saul (New York: McGraw-Hill Co., 1973), 171Google Scholar. An earlier, little-known, small collection of letters, Marx, Engels and Lenin on Ireland, ed. Ralph Fox (New York: International Publishers, 1940), has been out of print since the 1940s. See also Bloom, Solomon F., The World of Nations (New York: AMS Press, Inc. 1967), 202Google Scholar.

2 On the First International, 172.

3 Marx, Karl, letter to Sigfried Meyer and August Vogt, 9 April 1870, collected in Ireland and the Irish Question, ed. Golman, L. I. and Kunina, Valeria (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 293Google Scholar.

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5 Ibid., 284. Marx acknowledges in an 1867 letter to Engels:

For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite…The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.

6 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, 290.

7 See his introduction to Ireland and the Irish Question, 20.

8 See his foreword to Ireland and the Irish Question, 15.

9 This dialectical maneuver in Marxist revolutionary strategy proved enormously attractive to Irish socialists such as James Connolly, who taught himself German, interacted (during a lengthy sojourn in Edinburgh in the 1890s) with many of Engels's followers, and championed Ireland's struggle for national independence. Connolly promoted the doctrine as a key element in the appeal of Marxism to his Irish countrymen.

10 As that phrase suggests, Marx and Engels clearly struggled to integrate Ireland into their theory of revolution. But their human sympathies, aroused by their Irish connections, led them to see Ireland as the lever of revolution in Britain.

11 Marx and Engels had many disagreements with the Narodniks (Populists) in the International Workingman's Association on this point. Both the disputes and Marx's apparent lack of confidence in the Russian peasant may, in part, have arisen from his open dislike of Russians and his thinly veiled hatred of Michael Bakunin, an outspoken anarchist adversary during the period of the First International.

12 All this invests the radical slogan of the 1980s, “the personal is political,” with a new, ironic accent in the lives of the fathers of revolutionary radicalism – and, no less, a century before its coinage.

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27 Ireland and the Irish Question, 85.

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31 Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class, 101.

32 As had her sister Mary thirteen years earlier, Lizzie Burns accompanied Engels on his second extended visit to Ireland in 1869. The correspondence between Engels and Marx during the First International years makes clear that the former's personal tour of Ireland not only deepened his affection for and commitment to the Irish – even inducing him to start lessons (in 1870) in the notoriously difficult Gaelic language. His sojourns also informed his interpretations of both the causes of Irish nationalism and the Marxist concepts of national liberation and agrarian revolution. Perhaps most importantly, Engels's visits also gave him first-hand knowledge of Irish conditions and thereby heightened his credibility with Marx on the Irish Question. In this unusual case, Engels may be said to have influenced Marx more than the reverse.

33 Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class, 101.

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40 Two sentences later in his letter to his daughter, Marx clarifies his revolutionary strategy, envisioning a kind of European domino effect that will be triggered by the collapse of the leading bourgeois democracies: “To accelerate the social development in Europe, you must push on the catastrophe in England. To do so, you must attack her in Ireland. That is her weakest point,” Ireland and the Irish Question, 290.

41 Ibid., 28.

42 Ibid., 14.

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44 Engels, The Condition of the Working Class, 306.

45 Ibid., 306.

46 Most land in England was owned by great landowners, but the land was actually farmed by tenant farmers and their hired laborers. The difference is that the tenancies in England were much larger than in Ireland, and tenant farmers in England were protected by custom and tradition, while tenants in Ireland were not.

47 Ibid., 307.

48 Brown, “Nationalism and the Irish Peasant, 1800–1848,” 412.

49 Engels, The Condition of the Working Class, 307.

50 Ibid.

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55 Ibid., 412.

56 Marx, Karl, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany,” New York Daily Tribune, 25 October 1852Google Scholar. Quoted in On Colonialism, 113.

57 Gottheil, Frederick, Marx's Economic Predictions (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 175Google Scholar. See also Daly, Social and Economic History of Ireland since 1800.

58 Quoted in Gottheil, Marx's Economic Predictions, 175.

59 Ibid., 175.

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61 On the First International, 171.

62 Ibid., 172.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid., 173. See also Hazelkorn, Ellen, “Capital and the Irish Question,” Science and Society 44 (3) (1980): 326–56Google Scholar. For a detailed non-Marxist analysis of Ireland's economic development, in which concrete examples (such as the roles of government debt, railway building, corporate borrowing, and public expenditures from Dublin and London) are addressed, see Thomas, A. W., “The Evolution of a Capital Market: The Case of Ireland,” Journal of European Economic History 16 (3) (1987): 527–60Google Scholar. On the immense acquisition of new property and the considerable overall improvement in the economic position of the Irish Catholic Church following the Great Famine, see Larkin, Emmet, “Economic Growth, Capital Investment, and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland in the 19th Century,” American Historical Review 72 (3) (1967): 852–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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66 Ibid., 173.

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69 Quoted in Gottheil, Marx's Economic Predictions, 174.

70 Ireland and the Irish Question, 141.

71 Brown, “Nationalism and the Irish Peasant, 1800–1848,” 434.

72 O'Farrell, Ireland's English Question, 115.

73 Ireland and the Irish Question, 174.

74 Ibid., 283.

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81 Quoted in Lichtheim, “Marx and the Asiatic Mode of Production,” 151.

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83 On Colonialism, 313.

84 Lichtheim, “Marx and the Asiatic Mode of Production,” 154.

85 On Colonialism, 79.

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid., 79.

88 Lichtheim, “Marx and the Asiatic Mode of Production,” 167.

89 On Colonialism, 348.

90 Ibid., 347.

91 Ireland and the Irish Question, 334.

92 On the similar hopes of Marx for Ireland and Lenin for Russia, see Lichtheim, “Marx and the Asiatic Mode of Production,” 168.

93 Ireland and the Irish Question, 334. The spirit – if not the movement itself – of the Fenians did, however, endure – and its remnant formed the spark that gave rise to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was central to the 1916 Eastern Rebellion and later to the emergence of the Irish Republican Army.

94 See Brown, Thomas N., “The Origins and Character of Irish-American Nationalism,” Review of Politics 18 (1956): 327–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an analysis of the differences between Irish-American nationalism and the situation of the Irish in Britain during the mid-nineteenth century, see Belchem, John, “Nationalism, Republicanism and Exile: Irish Emigrants and the Revolutions of 1848,” Past & Present 146 (1995): 103–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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96 Lichtheim, “Marx and the Asiatic Mode of Production,” 162.

97 Brown, “Nationalism and the Irish Peasant, 1800–1848,” 410.

98 Ireland and the Irish Question, 279. It would be interesting–and this I have not been able to do–to explore the religious affiliations and degrees of piety, if any, of the Burns sisters, and also of the Fenian revolutionaries whom they befriended. Some of them were undoubtedly devoted Catholics.

99 Cited in Curtis, L. P. Jr., Coercion and Conciliation in Ireland, 1880–1892 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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