The General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association first took up the issue of Ireland generally in 1867. At that time, Marx and Engels were the primary advocates of the cause of the Irish nationalism on the Council. Following the formation of Irish sections within the IMWA and the admission of a corresponding secretary for the Irish sections onto the Council, Marx and Engels continued to provide unfailingly staunch support to the Irish sections and their representative on the Council.
Marx’s strong feelings on the Irish issue were demonstrated often within the General Council of the International, as they were during an early debate on Fenianism, when, as he wrote to Engels, he had yielded the floor to another member rather than deliver his own speech on the subject as, “our subject, Fenianism, was liable to inflame the passions to such heat that I (but not the abstract Fox) would have been forced to hurl revolutionary thunder-bolts instead of soberly analyzing the state of affairs and the movement as I had intended.”
To Marx, the solution of the ‘Irish Question’-Irish national liberation-was the key to solving the ‘English Question’ for socialists and he saw that as the revolutionary ‘key’ for the rest of Europe. Marx viewed England as possessing “all the material prerequisites necessary for the social revolution,” but lacking “the spirit of generalisation and revolutionary
fervour.” The Irish, whom Engels called, “the most revolutionary element of the population”, he believed might supply this spirit. Marx viewed the General Council’s resolution on amnesty for the Fenian prisoners as only: an introduction to other resolutions which will affirm that, quite apart from international justice, it is a precondition to the emancipation of the English working class to transform the present forced union (i.e., the enslavement off Ireland) into equal and free confederation if possible, into complete separation if need be.
He considered Ireland of such great importance because he believed that Ireland was “the bulwark of English landlordism.” Of the demise of this last key foundation of feudalism’s continued existence in England Marx wrote: If it fell in Ireland it would fall in England. In Ireland this is a hundred times easier, since the economic struggle there is concentrated exclusively on landed property, since this struggle is at the same time national, and since the people there are more revolutionary and exasperated than in England.
Further, Marx argued that Ireland was “the only pretext the English Government has for retaining a big standing army,” which could be used against the English workers in struggle.
For Engels, the campaign around the Fenian prisoners had yet another significance, as shown in a letter he wrote to Ludwig Kugelmann: The Irish, too, are in a very substantial ferment in this business, and the London proletarians declare every day more openly for the Fenians and, hence-an unheard-of and splendid thing here-for, first, a violent and, secondly, an anti-English movement.
A sentiment reiterated by Engels many years later in a letter to Eduard Bernstein on the actions of the Irish Land League. Engels wrote: “The Irish are teaching our leisurely John Bull to get a move on. That’s what comes from shooting.” (British Leftists quick to attack the armed national liberation struggle in Ireland, please take note). Engels relationship to Ireland and the Irish national liberation struggle went beyond political advocacy.
Engels had, during the course of his life, two women as domestic partners-the second, following the death of the first. The women were sisters, Lizzie and Mary Burns, whose father was a leading Fenian in England. Perhaps as a result of these romantic and personal relationships, Engels made several visits to Ireland, undertook to learn the Irish langugage, and began work on a history of Ireland, which unfortunately remained unfinished, as pressing business of the international socialist movement left him insufficient time to complete it.
Two of Marx’s daughters also played significant roles in relation to the Irish national liberation struggle. It was Karl Marx’s daughter Jenny who first exposed the plight of the Fenian prisoners outside of the British Isles. She wrote a series of articles under the pseudonym, J. Williams in the French newspaper, Marseillaise, detailing the barbaric treatment of the prisoners, which, according to Engels, won the release of most the prisoners within a few weeks of the articles publication. Jenny went on to become the regular correspondent for the Marseillaise on Irish affairs.
Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor (Tussy) Marx- Aveling, was, according to Marx in a letter to his daughter Laura, a ‘head centre’ (leader) of the Fenians. This claim was likely made in jest, but Eleanor devote a great deal of work for the benefitof the Irish during the period of the First and Second Internationals. Later in her life, both Eleanor andher husband and English socialist-Edward Aveling, became initial subscribing members (financial backers) of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, when James Connolly first launched it in 1896.
The work of the Marxes and Engels on behalf of the Irish struggle has yet to be surpassed in the non-Irish socialist community and has, in fact, been largely ignored. Even many modern Irish Marxists have failed to recognize the importance of some of Marx’s comments on Ireland. Marx’s observation that Gladstone offered his Irish Land Bill at the very moment that the import of cheap corn and cattle from the United States threatened to depreciate the value of Irish land holdings, has generally not been explored, though it provides an altogether uniqueperspective on the passage of the Irish Land Bill.
Moreover, Marx’s conclusions regarding the importance of the resolution of the Irish Question to the English and European social revolutions, which might have provided a reason for the international socialist community to take note of Ireland, has received little attention from Irish socialists.
