Mike Milottes clear and meticulous reconstruction of Irish communism in the 1920s leaves no stone unturned. He reassesses the communist movement and its key figures in light of previously overlooked or misinterpreted material from the Comintern archives.
During the revolutionary era, Roddy Connollys Communist Party robbed banks to fund its activities, and 20-year-old Connolly engaged in gun-running for the IRA while struggling to maintain control of his fractious party. In a later period of retreat, James Larkin refused to submit to the imperialistic British Communist Party or follow the dictates of Moscows Stalinist bureaucracy, resisting its policies and practices on instinct.
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part 1 The Heritage of James Connolly
1 The Easter Rising and its Aftermath
1Setting the scene
2The Easter Rising
3Filling the vacuum
4Fighting conscription
5Bureaucratisation and the decline of official militancy
6Sinn Féins triumph
2 The Working Class in Irelands War of Independence
1A ghostly army of sharpshooters versus mass action
2The Revolutionary Socialist Party of Ireland
3International rivalries
4Class struggle and national struggle
5The struggle for the land
6Factory seizures and workers soviets
Part 2 Irelands First Communist Party
3 What Sort of Republic?
1Irelands young Bolsheviks
2An open or clandestine organisation?
3Conceptualising the national question
4The second Comintern congress
5Loyalism and socialism: the problem in Belfast
6Unheeded pleas
4 From the Second Comintern Congress to the Formation of the CPI
1Virulent Bourgeois Terror
2Vying for Moscows ear
3The tide turns
4Roddy Connolly and the third Comintern congress: myth and reality
5Connollys secret mission
6Another failure
7Bold initiatives or daily struggles?
8Division, dissent, and the birth of the Irish Communist Party
5 From Truce to Civil War
1Not yet in touch with the masses
2Rubbish disposal: quality before quantity?
3Purging old comrades
4Cross-channel animosity
5A parting of the ways
6Communists and the Treaty
7Class struggle continues as the unemployed take to the stage
820,000 members in the next six months
9The road to civil war
10Revolutionary guns and reformist soviets
6 The Communist Party in the Civil War
1Prepared to fight as well as talk
2The Borodin-Connolly programme
3Connollys big proposition
4Liam Mellows and the communist programme
5Repression intensifies
6Connollys apologia
7 Turn to the Class
1The fourth Comintern congress and its aftermath
2Connollys solo run
3The CPIs first annual conference, January 1923
4McLoughlins bid for peace
5The CPIs second conference
6Connolly resigns
7Another round of struggle
8The CPIs third conference
9The prisoner issue, again
8 Larkins Return and the Demise of the CPI
1Wasps and aliens
2A losing battle
3What is to be done?
4Breaking resistance
5Last throw of the dice
Part 3 Communist Politics in the Larkin Era 192428
9 The Irish Worker League 192324
1Desperate times
2The labour movement splits
3CPGB hostility ramps up
4Larkin at the fifth Comintern congress
5Larkin at the third RILU congress
6Larkins return: triumph and treachery
7Bolshevising Larkin
8Agreement in Moscow
10 The Failure of Bolshevisation
1Old wine in new bottles?
2Winning friends and influencing people
3Party time?
4The Lansbury affair and its aftermath
5Bust-up in Battersea
6Larkins man in Moscow
7To break or not to break?
11 The Workers Party of Ireland 192627
1A missed opportunity?
2Fianna Fáil and the Irish left
3The WPI and the Comintern
4Larkin at the seventh plenum of the ECCI
5Defying Moscow
12 Larkins Pyrrhic Victory
1Resisting repression
2For Fianna Fáil, against Labour
3Building a Larkin bypass
4United front with whom?
5Unlucky Leckie
13 Larkin Breaks with Moscow, Summer 1928
1Larkin at the ninth plenum of the ECCI
2Back to the hustings
3Carney at the fourth RILU congress
4Yet more grievances
5The final straw
6The sixth Comintern congress
7I would rather be a Trotskyite
8Post Mortem on Larkin
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index
Mike Milotte earned his PhD on the Irish communist movement in 1977 and published the first full-length scholarly study of the subject in 1984. He later transitioned from academia to media, where he gained recognition as an investigative journalist, author, and broadcaster, winning numerous awards for his work.
