Marxist Mythology

...Wherever possible, they quoted directly from the sources, letting the crude, ungrammatical words speak for the people who wrote them...

...the Catholic Church...

...O'Connell is vilified in an entire chapter, perhaps because he alone was successful in forging a mass-based political organization that managed to secure some political concessions for Irish Catholics in the 19th century...

...Scholars like Eugene Genovese, Staughton Lynd and Herbert Gutman offered new and sometimes radical perspectives on our development...

...the other offers a mythological past that is emotionally satisfying to nationalist revolutionaries and their intellectual supporters...

...Protestant and Catholic workers must be made to see that religion is merely a diversion, and unite with one another for the real struggle against capitalism...

...They therefore championed self-government, which would have spelt destruction for the northern industrialists...

...Eric Hobs-bawm (Labouring Men) wrote about such phenomena as the "tramping artisan" and the "aristocracy of labour...

...When the history of the Irish working class is actually written, it will be done by an industrious scholar who is unencumbered by the antiquated dogmas vitiating this study...

...As an orthodox Marxist, he believes that it is a non-issue, foisted upon the people by greedy capitalists to obscure their true intentions...

...Consequently, we now have both a far richer perspective on English working-class history and an assortment of models for historical inquiry that can be applied to other countries...

...George Rude (The Crowd in History, 1730-1848) analyzed the social composition and motivation of violent mobs...

...The book's villains are as predictable as its heroes: capitalists...

...The workers in this volume, like the blacks of Stanley Elkins' Slavery, are the passive victims of circumstance-raped by the English, exploited by the capitalists and deluded by the likes of Daniel O'Connell...

...Simply put, this chronicle from the barricades is a distortion of the Irish experience...

...Conor Cruise O'Brien recently noted that there are two versions of Irish history: One approximates reality...

...And finally, they investigated, and often supported, certain ideas an earlier generation of Marxists considered heretical: that Methodism might not have been an entirely reactionary force, or that "class," rather than deriving from exploitative conditions, was the result of a total cultural milieu...

...To do so, however, requires that a historian modify or even abandon older categories of Marxist historiography, undoubtedly a discomfiting prospect for men like Ellis, whose vision is strictly limited by their political commitments...

...The last hangs on "the risings of the people"-with visions of hard-muscled sons of Erin, marching forth from mud-walled cabins, pikes in hand, to combat the English invader-and jumps from Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet to Young Ireland and the Fenians, then to the Easter Rising and the IRA...

...and Daniel O'Connell, "the enemy within...

...Thus his explanation of resistance to Home Rule in Ulster in 1912 ignores religious differences: "Since the Union of 1801 the capitalists' industries of the north had been developed for the English imperial markets and so industrial capitalism had thrown its weight behind the union with England...

...and E. P. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class) demonstrated how religion, work patterns, popular culture, and political literature combined to create a class consciousness among English workers in the first half of the 19th century...

...The mainly southern petty capitalist, however, relied on the home market and needed to seal off the Irish market behind strong protective barriers in order to bring about a flourishing native manufacturing capitalism in Ireland...

...His Irish rebels were fighting English capitalism as well as the English, and when he mourns them, he grieves not only for the loss of brave men, but also for the Socialist republic that might have been...

...His one-dimensional portrait of the Irish working class deals exclusively with the rare outbursts of open conflict between those the author imagines to be workers and their oppressors...

...The most important contributions were made by three Marxist historians...

...Ellis' hope for the future of Ireland is an extension of this analysis...

...Their success was due to several factors...

...For Ellis, this accomplishment was the product of O'Connell's guile, together with intimidation by the priests, and served "to turn the mass of the Irish people from their life and death struggle to a subject of interest to bourgeois placeseekers only...

...Reviewed by T. M. Parssinen Assistant Professor of History, Temple University Against the tumultuous backdrop of American society in the 1960s, a number of historians began to uncover parts of the national experience that had previously been forgotten or ignored...

...Ellis has maintained this nationalist frame of reference, but has substituted the red flag for the green...

...Ellis is most myopic when discussing religion...

...They are without culture, without voices, without history, and the author takes note of them only on those rare occasions when they spring to the barricades for an ill-fated rising...

...They stressed the richness of lower-class life, the conflicts in the fabric of the American past, and the exploitative rather than cooperative relationships that existed between the social classes...

...They did innovative research, digging out evidence-Tn police documents, statistical surveys, government informers' reports-That had been overlooked by their predecessors...

...We are told nothing of their labor (!), leisure or family life, but instead are plied with detailed accounts of Marxist factional struggles and doctrinal disputes, the ups and downs of political parties, and Jim Larkin's pilgrimages to Moscow...

...In contrast to the efforts of Rude, Hobsbawm and Thompson, P. Berresford Ellis' study is a relic from the Stone Age of Marxist historiography...

...In England, too, the decade of the '60s was a period of rediscovery, especially in working-class history...

...His description of Wolfe Tone and the disastrous rising of 1798 is indicative of Ellis' thought (not to mention his writing): "But it must be emphasized that Tone's policies were developed on a basis of the interest of the Dissenting middle class which developed from the Plantations that encompassed the newly emerging Catholic middle class, then the mass of the peasantry, forging a revolutionary alliance to create a national democratic revolution which would have created a modern bourgeois nation, which happened in France...

...Rude, Hobsbawm and Thompson have demonstrated that if one goes beyond the ruminations of Marx and Engels and the manifestoes of revolutionary parties, one can find in the archives evidence of a working-class culture that was articulate and resilient...

...They considered topics like leisure activities and counterrevolutionary violence, which previous historians had ignored as either irrelevant or embarrassing to working-class history...