Larkin and the Comintern

The 1920s were difficult years in Ireland. The country had just experienced two and a half years of armed insurrection against British rule, followed by a bloody civil war. The most right-wing elements in the national movement triumphed over their opponents and ruthlessly went on the attack against workers’ wages and conditions. There was virtually no resistance to this offensive from the reformist labor leaders who backed the newly established “Free State.” Ireland’s workers were roundly defeated and demoralized.

Internationally, matters were no better. In the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks were in retreat. Their 1917 revolution hadn’t spread to the industrialized West, and with the defeat of the German communist uprising in late 1923, the notion that Russia could go it alone, building “socialism in one country,” gained traction among the growing Soviet bureaucracy, with Joseph Stalin at its head. This perspective became more national and self-serving than international, marking a sharp break from the Bolshevik tradition pursued by Lenin.

This was the world to which Larkin returned from his American prison cell. Almost immediately, he was at war with the renegades at the head of his old union, the ITGWU, grouped around the leadership of William O’Brien. In 1924, when Larkin was attending a Comintern congress in Moscow, where he was elected to its executive, his militant supporters formed a breakaway union, the Workers’ Union of Ireland (WUI), after ITGWU bosses had deployed armed soldiers against them.

At the time, Comintern policy was against breakaway unions. However, Larkin took charge of the WUI on his return to Ireland, and the Comintern accepted it into its trade-union wing, the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU). The split in the Irish labor movement persisted for decades, but in the immediate aftermath, it poisoned relations between Larkin and his political mentors, the CPGB.

From the outset, as Comintern documents reveal, the CPGB took an entirely hostile attitude toward the WUI. Citing Comintern policy, it refused support to the WUI during its sometimes life-and-death industrial battles, and even demanded that the Comintern compel Larkin to disband the new union and seek readmission to the treacherous ITGWU. This was something that neither he nor his followers could ever agree to.

While the British communists blamed the split on Larkin’s ego, he believed that they had betrayed him. Larkin felt that they lacked a proper understanding of the Irish situation and were acting toward him in an overbearing, “imperialistic” manner.

This hostility between Larkin and the British communists was never overcome, but Larkin was not alone in his criticism of their attitude. The Indian communist leader, M. N. Roy, also denounced the CPGB’s imperial hauteur, while other communists from colonial countries, including Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, found a similar inclination prevalent in the upper echelons of the Comintern itself by the mid-1920s.

Alchemists of Revolution

The Comintern had tasked Larkin with building a mass-based workers’ party in Ireland, and the CPGB sent one of its leading figures, Bob Stewart, to guide his work. In May 1925, Stewart came close to getting a party off the ground, but abandoned the plan at the last minute when Larkin withheld his imprimatur.

This is an event that has gone down in communist history as Larkin’s moment of treachery. In his memoirs, Stewart made no reference to any of Larkin’s serious concerns about how the CPGB and Comintern had acted toward him in the past, offering the following conclusion instead:

Big Jim would never accept the democracy of a disciplined Marxist party. He always had to be at the centre of the stage. . . . and to join a party where the emphasis is put on collective work was not for him.

This may have been partially correct, but it was very far from the whole story. Larkin himself never spoke publicly about the matter, but he made his views clear in a letter to Comintern president, Grigory Zinoviev:

A Party cannot be brought about simply by drafting a decree in a room. . . . but people come along and dare to venture that at a certain hour or on a certain day a certain event will take place. Like some of the old astrologers or alchemists they want to write a formula and then make a hocus-pocus and, lo and behold, we have pure metal. . . . We believe that a natural birth resulting from the necessities of the time is the appropriate way [and] our immediate needs require what may be called local tactics beyond world tactics.

Stewart’s mission had been to launch an Irish party at the very time when Stalin’s power was growing. Under Stalin’s authority, communist parties throughout Europe and the wider world were being beaten into shape to ensure unquestioning support for “socialism in one country.” Larkin’s resistance to being sucked into this process, evident in his assertion of the rights of a national section against central diktat, remained instinctive, however, and was never intellectualized.

In the meantime, relations with the CPGB took another nosedive. The Comintern had ordered the CPGB to mount a campaign in the UK for the withdrawal of British-based trade unions from Ireland. These unions were generally pro-empire, and their members frequently scabbed during WUI strikes.

However, the CPGB point-blank refused to implement Comintern policy — in sharp contrast to its adherence to the line on breakaway unions. Now it argued that implementing the new policy would jeopardize its own influence within the unions.

For Larkin, the CPGB’s open defiance became a major grievance, and the Comintern’s failure to force the British party to obey orders deepened his alienation from the Moscow center. This all made the task of the next Comintern agent to arrive in Ireland, the Norwegian communist Christian Hilt, infinitely more difficult.

“Orders Were Orders”

Hilt arrived in the summer of 1927, with Irish parliamentary elections due to be held in September. On Comintern instructions, Hilt — supported in person by the CPGB’s Jack Murphy — insisted that Larkin stand. Larkin himself argued that this was a waste of resources because, as an undischarged bankrupt, he wouldn’t be able to enter parliament even if he was elected. “I was against fighting, but I was overlooked,” he later complained. “Moscow had determined that we should proceed, and as orders were orders, we obeyed.”

In the election, Larkin’s primary objective was to see the right-wing Labour Party defeated. To this end — and in keeping with the Comintern’s then-policy of forming blocs with bourgeois nationalist movements — he allied with Éamon de Valera, leader of the nationalist Fianna Fáil party. Several prominent British communists came to help in the campaign, but they followed their own agenda, urging workers to vote Labour. Larkin complained bitterly about the CPGB’s disruptive interference — and the Norwegian, Hilt, agreed with him.

Despite the confusion caused by British meddling, Larkin was elected but, as he had predicted, was unable to take his seat. As he saw it, he had been forced, against his will, into a very costly, exhausting, and ultimately futile campaign by people who thought they knew better than he did about how to conduct the struggle in Ireland. Yet the Comintern perceived this as an opportunity to capitalize on Larkin’s reemergence into the limelight, and it dispatched another agent, Jack Leckie, with instructions to immediately form an Irish workers’ party.

Leckie’s Moscow handlers had promised that £150,000 (in today’s money) would be waiting for him in Dublin to finance the party and produce a new workers’ paper. Failure to send the cash, he warned them, “would make me appear ridiculous, neutralize my influence, and prevent me carrying out successfully the tasks entrusted to me.” And, he added, it would deepen the rift with Larkin. His warning proved entirely prophetic. There was no money awaiting him, and no explanation for its non-arrival.

A furious row with Larkin ensued. Jack Carney, Larkin’s closest associate, told Leckie that “everyone was becoming embittered” because “the centre continued to make promises which were left unfulfilled.” According to Carney, the problem was exacerbated by “interference from English party representatives [and] the comrades locally were sick and bitterly disappointed with the whole affair.” Leckie packed his bags and left Ireland, furious at the Comintern for letting him down.

In the midst of all these problems, the CPGB and the Comintern had gone behind Larkin’s back to send senior Irish Republican Army (IRA) officers to Moscow in an attempt to win new friends who could help them bypass Larkin. When Larkin found out, he was incensed, as he considered the IRA to be petty-bourgeois terrorists. And worse was to come.

The Unreasoning End

Early in 1928, the Comintern adopted a dramatic change of line. This ushered in an era of ultraleftism in communist politics that owed more to developments within Russia — where Stalin was forcibly collectivizing the land — than it did to the needs of workers internationally.

Under the new “line,” Larkin was ordered not just to form a united front with the IRA, but to wage all-out war against de Valera, his ally of a few months previously, even though de Valera’s politics remained unchanged. But what really irked Larkin was the fact that no Irish representative had participated in shaping the new line in Moscow. Stalin’s Comintern now worked through orders from the top. The end of Larkin’s troubled relationship with Moscow was fast approaching.

The immediate issue that led him to finally sever ties was the arrival in Ireland of the Soviet company, Russian Oil Products (ROP). Larkin saw this as an opportunity to showcase the superiority of socialist enterprise over the capitalist variety. Instead, ROP acted like the worst capitalists, offering wages below union rates, and employing workers who had scabbed during WUI strikes.

Larkin complained bitterly about this to Moscow, but he got no satisfaction. This was simply the final straw. In the summer of 1928, Larkin resigned his seat on the Comintern executive, while the WUI disaffiliated from RILU. His four-year association with Soviet Russia was over.

Larkin wasn’t the only former syndicalist-turned-Bolshevik who broke away at the time. Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Monatte in France, James P. Cannon in the United States, the Russian Victor Serge, and the Catalan Andreu Nin all split from the Comintern. While they expressed opposition to Stalin and support for Leon Trotsky, Larkin remained silent on the struggle within the Soviet communist movement.

Yet it was no coincidence that his growing disillusionment coincided with Stalin’s rise, and it was hardly surprising that claims of Trotskyist sympathies were leveled in his direction. Jack Carney’s response to these allegations is illuminating:

I would rather be a Trotskyite and be wrong than be right among those at the centre who play fast and loose. We have paid a bitter price for our affiliation with the centre and the centre in return has acted worse than any group of social democrats. Someday they will receive a kick in the unreasoning end of their anatomy.

While Larkin wasn’t a Trotskyist, he was always more syndicalist than Bolshevik, with little inclination to submit to strict party discipline. But the purpose of the discipline to which he was expected to submit can’t be separated from the process. In the era of “socialism in one country,” as the Comintern was reshaped to do Stalin’s bidding, Larkin’s instinctive resistance turned to disillusionment, and finally to divorce.

A Defeated Army

The domestic context in which Larkin was operating also shaped his despondency. As the great American novelist James T. Farrell noted:

After defeat, the Irish labor movement needed someone to lead it who could remould a defeated class. Larkin was a great and courageous agitator, but not a leader of a defeated army.

Yet if Larkin wouldn’t do Moscow’s bidding, others would. Several young Irish workers, among them Larkin’s son and namesake, James Larkin Jr, were selected to attend the Lenin International School in Moscow, where the next generation of leaders of the world’s communist parties were trained. Their daily lessons began with instruction on the “errors” of Trotsky and the infallibility of Stalin.

At the end of their studies, the Irish students returned home to organize the party that Larkin had failed to deliver. This was to be an organization that would faithfully follow the line from Moscow, even when such loyalty was damaging to the party’s own prospects and to the cause of socialism in general.

In the meantime, Larkin himself retreated both personally and politically. Disenchanted and world-weary, he moved further and further away from the cause that had once inspired and impelled him. He ended his political career as a member of parliament for the same Irish Labour Party whose betrayal of the working class he had once railed against with such passion and zeal. It was a sad finale for the greatest labor leader Ireland has ever known.