>>605169
Connolly was a committed marxist. He certainly wasn't idpol. Throughout the time that he was politically active he stressed the need for an internationalist workers struggle and the primacy of the class struggle over even the national struggle, and consequently succeeded in many cases in uniting both catholic and protestant layers of the Irish proletariat. For example, throughout the 1913 Dublin lockout, he repeatedly appealed to the class solidarity of all British workers:
> "Perhaps they will see that the landlord who >grinds his peasants on a Connemara estate, >and the landlord who rack-rents them in a >Cowgate slum, are brethren in fact and deed. >Perhaps they will realise that the Irish worker >who starves in an Irish cabin and the Scots >worker who is poisoned in an Edinburgh garret >are brothers with one hope and destiny." (C.D. >Greaves, James Connolly, p. 61.)
Another famous quote from Connolly:
>If you remove the English Army tomorrow and >hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle., >unless you set about the organization of the >Socialist Republic your efforts will be in vain. >England will still rule you. She would rule you >through her capitalists, through her landlords, >through her financiers, through the whole array >of commercial and individualist institutions >she has planted in this country and watered >with the tears of our mothers and the blood of >our martyrs.
Connolly was an excellent Marxist and any claim that his political activity was motivated by idpol is ignorance at best and intellectual dishonesty at worst. Faggot.
Also if you think that that quote demonstrates idpol on connolly's part you need to actually read some Marx. For instance, in The Holy Family, he quotes Fourier:
>The change in a historical epoch can always >be determined by the progress of women >toward freedom, because in the relation of >woman to man, of the weak to the strong, the >victory of human nature over brutality is most >evident. The degree of emancipation of >woman is the natural measure of general >emancipation.
While in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write:
>The nucleus, the first form of [property] lies in >the family, where wife and children are slaves >of the husband. This latent slavery in the >family, though still very crude, is the first >property …
Recognising that issues such as the generally disadvantaged position of women in society are part of the superstructure which emerges from capitalism (indeed, the modern family structure that gives rise to these phenomena constitutes a part of the material base of capitalist society!) is not idpol. What is crucial is the recognition that issues like the socioeconomic position of women are part of the superstructure which emerges (in the last analysis) from capitalism and as such can only be solved by the utter upheaval of the present economic base of society (ie capitalism). It is to suggest other wise that is idpol, which is not what connolly was doing.
Another issue entirely is the fact that Connolly's image was co-opted by nationalists, completely ignoring the class-based nature of his political activity and using it to defend idpol nationalist terrorism. There's no marxist defence of that, but you can hardly blame connolly for it. A similar process is described by lenin in The State and Revolution:
>After their death, attempts are made to >convert them into harmless icons, to canonize >them, so to say, and to hallow their names to >a certain extent for the “consolation” of the >oppressed classes and with the object of >duping the latter, while at the same time >robbing the revolutionary theory of its >substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and >vulgarizing it.