I

Although Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not ignore the pre-industrial nations of the nineteenth century, they focused their attention on what they called the capitalistic “bulwark” of Europe (England, France, and Germany) and on the United States.Footnote ¹ Residing in Britain for most of their adulthoods and intimately familiar with its political climate and social issues, they were especially interested in its potential to serve as the “lever for a serious economic revolution,” as Marx phrased it in a message to delegates of the First International.Footnote ²

Yet while Marx's primary aim was always to capture the citadels of capitalism such as Great Britain, he and Engels had already come to realize by the late 1860s that the thrust could not be administered frontally: they would have to strike at England's soft underbelly – Ireland. Throughout the life of the First International (1864–72), Ireland's place in Marx's strategic vision moved to the center, transforming Ireland into, as it were, “the bulwark of the bulwark”: England stood as the economic citadel of Europe (“the metropolis of capital, the power … ruling the world market”)Footnote ³ and Ireland represented “the bulwark of the English landed aristocracy.”Footnote ⁴

Or to switch metaphors, Ireland emerged by the 1860s in the Marxist revolutionary program as “the lever of the lever”: the “lever” of British (and ultimately of European) capitalism and the forthcoming socialist revolution. In an 1867 letter to Engels, Marx wrote:

Later, in a letter to his daughter Laura in March 1870, Marx refers to Ireland as England's “weakest point,” whose loss would mean “the British Empire is gone, and the class war in England, till now somnolent and chronic, will assume acute forms.”Footnote ⁶ That formulation discloses a fact largely neglected both by ideologists and scholars of Marxism-Leninism, namely that Marx thereby prefigured Lenin's “weakest link” theory by almost a half-century.

II

No complete work on Ireland was ever written by Marx or Engels. As Russian Marxist L. I. Golman, a Russian scholar of Marxism, notes: “We are compelled to glean their conclusions from handwritten notes and fragments, some of which saw light only recently, and from their references to Ireland in articles and letters.”Footnote ⁷ Nonetheless, I consider it possible to construct from their scattered journalism and personal correspondence a “completely ordered outlook” on Ireland, as C. Desmond Greaves phrased it in the foreword to a collection of their writings.Footnote ⁸

The present article contributes toward that end by integrating economic and social history, biography, and political theory as it explores how the personal ties of Marx and Engels to Ireland stamped their thought. My central topic is the special place of Ireland in Marxist theory and praxis, which is pursued on two interconnected research fronts: Ireland's anomalous role in Marx's revolutionary vision and the Irish people's central role in the lives of Marx and especially Engels. To what extent were Marx and Engels serious about their paradoxical claim for strategic importance of the Irish peasantry as the “lever” for overthrowing European capitalism? For a half-decade in the late 1860s to early 1870s, they were quite serious; soon thereafter, their conception of Ireland's theoretical significance altered and dissolved alongside their fading hopes for a socialist revolution in Europe.

So the first theoretical anomaly is that peasant Ireland, a British colony, became crucial to a continent-wide socialist revolution. This anomaly generates a related one: Marx and Engels exempted Ireland from their “law” governing the ordered succession of the developmental stages of historical materialism. A third discrepant role of Ireland in Marx's scheme has to do with nationalism, which Marx otherwise regarded as a reactionary force and a major obstacle to socialist revolution. Irish nationalism promoted international socialism, however, for Ireland's national liberation and subsequent self-determination would undermine British colonialism and facilitate full cooperation between the Irish and British working classes in a joint revolutionary struggle to topple the British Empire.Footnote ⁹ These three anomalies generate additional dialectical discrepancies, all of which give rise to a status for the island that might be termed “Irish exceptionalism.”Footnote ¹⁰

Indeed the conflicting conceptual paradigms governing the revolutionary programs that Marx and Engels envisioned in the 1870s for Ireland (and Western Europe) versus Russia represents still another aspect of “Irish exceptionalism” in Marxist historiography, and it bears direct connection to the aforementioned irony of subverting capitalist England through “peasant Ireland.” As a largely peasant nation, Russia was viewed by Marx as incapable of proceeding directly from feudalism to socialism without undergoing a capitalistic stage: a classic example of Marx's application of the “laws” of historical materialism to a specific case.Footnote ¹¹ But Marx held to his conviction that “premature revolution” – an uprising occurring before economic conditions were ripe – could be detrimental to the communist movement.

Yet, as I have already suggested, Marx and Engels did not apply this logic to Ireland: exempting it from their historical “law” of the successive stages of social development, they did not view rebellion by the Irish peasantry as premature revolt. Rather, they reconceptualized the Irish peasant class as the “agricultural proletariat” – a term they never applied to the Russian peasantry. This classification was significant, because Marx and Engels always envisaged the proletariat as the motor of their socialist revolution. Typically, they referred, however, to an industrial proletariat. Their views of both the Irish land question and the relationship between the English landed aristocracy and Irish tenant led them to apply their concepts of alienation and revolutionary consciousness to the Irish peasant as well. (Marx and Engels also consistently refer to Ireland as a “feudal” – not merely peasant-dominated – country, ostensibly because that was the only plausible conceptual category available within their lock-step historical schema of “lawful” stages of successive social development, even though they believed the Irish peasant class harbored revolutionary potential.)

To appreciate how the Marx-Engels view of Ireland calls into question established Marxist doctrines, this essay traces how their thought on the Irish Question developed. I approach their work on Ireland both chronologically and thematically, alternately examining Ireland's changing role in Marxist strategy and tactics and the personal connection of Marx and Engels to Ireland. Specific theoretical issues will be examined as they waxed and waned from the 1840s through the 1860s to the 1880s, particularly as they unfolded in the Marx-Engels doctrines of revolution and historical materialism.

To anticipate: a most surprising and significant discovery to emerge from my analysis is the degree to which the Marx-Engels account of Ireland contradicted their theory of historical materialism. Here again, the reason is that Marx and Engels treated Irish radicalism as an exceptional case in their general theory of the relationship between revolution and capitalism, which substantially owed to Engels's influence on Marx and the former's personal involvement with the Irish in England.Footnote ¹²

This personal involvement occupies a veiled, more far-reaching role in their theoretical work than both Marxist scholars generally and the editors of Ireland and the Irish Question, a volume of fugitive pieces on “poor Green Erin” from the New York-based International Publishers, have allowed. Ireland was in fact a lifelong subject of engagement for Marx and Engels, and their interest was not only ideological but also intimate. Engels indeed supported two Irish consorts throughout his lifetime, and both Marx and Engels housed and protected Fenian sympathizers and Irish proletarians. No research has been published on whether, or how, these Irish connections (particularly strong in the case of Engels) bore on the Marx-Engels revolutionary doctrines and programs. My own view is that the strong-willed, fervent agitator Mary Burns, Engels's wife in all but name for two decades (and whom he married on her deathbed in 1863), likely exerted substantial influence upon his thinking until her death – and that her sister Lizzie (and Engels's own Irish associates) did so in later years.

So Ireland became a distinctive conceptual category for Marx and Engels, and its special status throws a few new wrinkles on established Marxist doctrines.Footnote ¹³ Scholars of Soviet history and Marxism-Leninism should also note that, because Ireland induced Marx to contradict both his theory of historical materialism regarding the ordered succession of developmental stages and his revolutionary emphasis on the role of the industrial proletariat in the capitalist “bulwarks” – he thereby anticipated, however inadvertently, both Lenin's theory of the revolutionary vanguard and his revisionist theories of historical materialism.

Before examining the views of Marx and Engels on the Irish Question, however, let us return to their unique relationship with the Irish – a relationship such as they had with no other people. I believe that this compelling and lifelong personal and cultural tie wielded unacknowledged and possibly decisive force on their theoretical program and helped make Ireland the historical exception that it became in their work – though such a contention is at odds with their materialist conception of history and therefore obviously runs counter to their repeated claims of promoting a “scientific socialism.”

Ireland's exceptional status led Marx and Engels to attribute revolutionary potential to the “passionate” Irish peasants, who were therefore more “revolutionary” than the English peasants – a position inconsistent with the economic factors that purportedly determined revolutions. Neither did Marx and Engels recognize the connection between religion and revolution in Ireland's peasantry. Instead they misconceived the basic character of the Irish peasantry, failing to grasp that religion exerted equal or greater influence on the outlook of the Irish rebels as politics or economics. These errors and inconsistencies gain sharper focus as the essay compares Ireland's status with Marx's account of revolution in terms of the Asiatic mode of production.

III

For Marx, the goal of international revolution always remained paramount. His contacts with the Irish were chiefly through Engels's acquaintances and the members of the First International. Lenin's judgment of Marx's attitude toward Ireland as an expedient revolutionary tool – what I have called “the lever of the lever,” whose release might topple British (and ultimately European) capitalism – was accurate:

Yet Engels, as Nicholas Mansergh points out, “though equally devoted to that overriding aim, does not regard Ireland with the same cold-blooded detachment.”Footnote ¹⁵ The difference is vividly clear in Engels's own writings, a difference at least partly attributable to Engels's absorbing interest in Irish affairs and more intimate relationship with the Irish themselves. He studied Irish history thoroughly and even began to learn the Gaelic language. Engels planned to write a massive “History of Ireland” and did pen some interesting fragments about matters small as well as large. Several of these passages exhibit both familiarity with the particulars of the land question (e.g., whether Ireland is better suited “by her Nature” for farming or cattle grazing) and also deep concern for Ireland's geopolitical value (e.g., the future role of Ireland in Europe).

So while Marx and Engels generally opposed nationalism and national self-determination throughout Europe, Ireland became the exception for practical and perhaps even sentimental reasons. Awareness of her status as the Empire's jugular, England's “weakest point,” transformed Irish nationalism in Marxist theory into a form of socialist internationalism. As Engels expressed it: Ireland has “not only the right but even the duty to be nationalistic before … [it] becomes internationalistic. … [The Irish] are most internationalistic when they are genuinely nationalistic.”Footnote ¹⁶

Let us dwell a moment longer on Engels's personal attachments to the Irish. Upon coming to Manchester at the age of 22 to work in the Ermen & Engels Mills, young Friedrich met Mary Burns, a young Irish girl who also worked in the factory. Though illiterate, she had a sharp wit and introduced him into Irish working-class circles in Manchester. He maintained two residences in Manchester: an official townhouse in the center of the city and a cottage on the proletarian outskirts, where he resided with Mary. Engels sheltered dozens of Irish agitators in both homes over the years.

Engels devoted many pages in his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845) to a discussion of the “agricultural proletariat” in Ireland. The book is remarkable both because Engels had resided in England only 20 months before it was published and because he had never visited Ireland even once. This may account for some of the inaccuracies in the book. In any case, though he nowhere acknowledges any personal debts or native informants, I find it difficult to believe that Engels obtained such detailed information solely through published sources. He must have relied upon Mary Burns and the other Irish immigrants for a considerable amount of the descriptive data, about not only Ireland but also England.

Whatever his extraliterary sources, Engels – extrapolating from his months in Manchester – feels sufficiently well acquainted with the other island to write:

However much he drew on Mary Burns and the Manchester Irish for particular information, Engels otherwise voiced the sentiments of an upper-class Englishman. Moreover, he lacked the experience and insight to distinguish between the expatriate Manchester Irish factory worker and the native Irish tenant farmer.Footnote ¹⁸ As the passage above reflects, in extending his conceptions of the Irish across the Irish Sea from Manchester to Ireland itself, Engels makes one serious mistake: he assumes that the attitudes of the agricultural and industrial proletariats are identical. Engels believed “the ignorant Irish” – both in Britain and in Ireland – regarded the English as “their immediate enemies.” An entire chapter in Condition of the Working Class in England (titled “The Proletariat of the Land”) elaborates on this misconception.

In the case of the Irish factory workers in Manchester, Engels's observations and conclusions are accurate.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet as historians William LeckyFootnote ²⁰ and Thomas N. BrownFootnote ²¹ noted long ago, numerous Catholic peasants in Ireland rarely encountered an Englishman and therefore often had little personal hostility toward him. They felt hostility (usually borne of a sense of rivalry or envy) less toward their Anglo-Irish Protestant landlord than toward the people who worked alongside them and directly above them: their fellow Irish tenant farmers. Only a minority of more politically (and historically) aware Irish tenants and farm laborers despised their landlords, viewing them as colonial oppressors who had robbed them of their land and now exploited them relentlessly. Moreover, despite the existence of secret revolutionary societies such as the Ribbonmen and Whiteboys, the average peasant did not consider Ireland's national independence a high priority. Brown explains the peasant attitude at the time Engels was writing:

Engels also made a second grave error in his analysis of Ireland's peasantry. Although he noticed the contrast between the Irish Catholic attachment to their faith and the English indifference to religion, Engels never attributed proper significance to it. He failed – or more likely refused – to recognize that religious faith and “passions and sentiment” were directly related in the case of the Irish. For Marx and Engels, the Irish peasant problem was rooted solely in the land, just as the problem of the Irish factory worker was caught up in the spinning wheel. Religion was subordinate to economics, and religious differences were rationalized as economic outgrowths or simply dismissed, as in Engels's Manchester observations:

Yet as Patrick O'Farrell argues, the religious side of the land question was inseparable from the economic side:

Or as another observer of Irish peasant society phrased it: “The faith of the Irish peasant is entire, unquestioning, absolute as that of a thirteenth-century serf.”Footnote ²⁵

But Engels never associated the “humdrum nature” of the English with their religious indifference or the revolutionary potential of the Irish with their religious ardor.Footnote ²⁶ Economic oppression alone, according to Marxist theory, was to generate revolutionary fervor. Ideological conviction about the determining influence of the economic “base” over the religious “superstructure” thus blinded both Engels and Marx to the plainly observable facts: The Irish peasant serves as a clear example of passion ruling the pound.Footnote ²⁷ Moreover, as we shall see, not only Engels but also the three Marx daughters were personally attracted to the Irish because of what Engels admiringly called their “excitable, passionate nature” – though neither he nor anyone in the Marx family ever fully acknowledged that the people's ardor largely owed to their fervent peasant Catholicism.

IV

In 1856 Engels made his first visit to Ireland. He was struck by the gritty reality of peasant poverty that he had written about eleven years earlier. He invited Marx to “come over soon,”Footnote ²⁸ but there is no record of Marx's response. In any event, Marx never did visit the island. After Engels's 1856 visit, he and Marx wrote very little about Ireland until the Fenian uprising of 1867, which renewed their interest in the island and led to their revised judgment that the road to revolution in England was through Ireland.

The death of Mary Burns in 1863 was a milestone in Engels's life and triggered a near break-up in his relationship with Marx. This biographical landmark has received no attention from historians devoted to Marxist theory and revolutionary strategy; indeed it has gone virtually unremarked except by the two men's biographers.Footnote ²⁹ I believe, however, that it lends additional weight to the social and political significance accorded to Ireland in their revolutionary program as the period of the First International dawned. Indeed Mary's death provoked the only substantial rift between Marx and Engels that ever occurred. Their correspondence about her death discloses not only Engels's devotion to her and Marx's blithe unconcern, however, but also points up a less appealing side of Engels himself: his low regard for the Irish because of his class consciousness.

On January 7, 1863, Engels wrote from Manchester to Marx in London that Mary Burns had suddenly and unexpectedly died. Marx, who at that moment was in the throes of one of his numerous domestic crises, responded to Engels's news in a cursory way. He then went on to expound his own miseries with butchers, bakers, the rent, etc., concluding that “work under such circumstances is clearly impossible.”Footnote ³⁰ Deeply offended by Marx's lack of commiseration, Engels brooded for more than a week before answering Marx. He even composed several drafts of his response, toning down each one until he finally wrote that even his “philistine acquaintances” in Manchester had shown more sympathy than his lifelong friend. Marx sent a clumsy though sincere apology. Engels replied:

Coupled with his earlier confession to Marx (“I cannot tell you how I feel; the poor girl loved me with her whole heart”), Engels's deep feelings for Mary are apparent. (After Mary's death, Engels immediately transferred his sentiments to her younger sister Lizzie, who became – both for practical domestic reasons as well as for strong emotional ones – Engels's chief housekeeper and consort.Footnote ³²) But his biographer Steven Marcus is also justified in noting that Engels's remarks on Mary's death are chiefly self-references and that both his and Marx's letters are suffused with class discriminations.Footnote ³³

How this complex attitude toward the Irish translated itself in the First International's strategic program is hard to calculate. One fact is, however, clear: Except for Marx himself, open infatuation with the Irish permeated the Marx and Engels households. For instance, the Marx daughters (Jenny, Eleanor, and Laura) were friendly with the Burns sisters and took up the Fenian cause. Jenny wrote on behalf of the Fenians in a French newspaper. Eleanor (or “Tussy,” as her father called his favorite daughter) was so enamored of the Fenians and firmly on their side in the 1867 rebellion that she rewrote the English royal anthem:

After a visit to Engels (“Uncle Fred”) in 1868, Eleanor returned home and declared: “Formerly I clung to a man, now I cling to a nation.”Footnote ³⁵ So all-consuming was her interest in beleaguered Ireland that she dubbed it “The Poor Neglected Nation.” For years she even signed her letters “F.S.” for Fenian Sister.Footnote ³⁶

Engels's response to Lizzie's death in 1878 is analogous to his reaction to the news of Mary's demise fifteen years earlier:

Upon Lizzie's death, her 24-year-old niece Mary Ellen (“Pumps”) Burns assumed control of the Engels household in which she had grown up. But when a city merchant seduced Mary Ellen a few years later, Engels compelled him to marry her – something he himself never did with Lizzie and only did as a parting gesture with Mary, literally on her deathbed. His behavior seems at minimum inconsistent with both his personal conduct and his public attacks on bourgeois marriage in The Origin of the Family and The Communist Manifesto. (Unlike Mary and Lizzie, according to Engels's German biographer Gustav Mayer, Mary Ellen loved Engels “for his purse rather than his personality.”Footnote ³⁸ But she remained discreet about this preference and the aging Engels doted on her. He also bequeathed a sizable sum to her in his will.)

V

I believe that Marx and Engels's special personal relationship with Ireland contributed to Ireland's special theoretical status in the First International strategic program for international revolution.Footnote ³⁹ This is not to imply that sentiment was predominant in shaping Marxist theory. Marx's formulation of the theory of Ireland as “lever” and his attention to the Irish was invariably conditioned by shifting determinations about Ireland's political value; by contrast, Engels possessed a strong concomitant personal regard for the island and its people. In March 1870, Marx tells his daughter Laura, “You understand at once that I am not only acted upon by feelings of humanity” in choosing Ireland as the lever for the revolution.Footnote ⁴⁰ Lenin implies that Marx analyzed the British political climate with cold calculation and therefore readjusted Ireland's role:

If nothing else, Marx's close contact with Irish immigrants brought the Irish Question more fully to his attention. More likely, the personal involvements – most especially so in the case of Engels – induced them to posit not only the Irish “agricultural proletariat” as a distinctive revolutionary class, but also Ireland itself as “a special variant of the capitalist law of accumulation.”Footnote ⁴² As we have seen, Engels's association with the Irish both resulted in impassioned, enduring relationships and motivated him to study and write about Ireland's past as an example of historical materialism.

Marx and Engels use the term “rural proletariat” elsewhere in their work occasionally, usually in reference to “small” peasants, agricultural laborers, and small tenant farmers. Ostensibly, the term is meant to cover all farmers and farm workers who are not “big” peasants or landed aristocrats or “middlemen” in the tenant system (“rackrenters”). But Marx never distinguishes explicitly among these classes. Not until 1875 in On Social Relations in Russia does Engels differentiate them. Even at that, Engels offers no criteria as to what constitutes a small or large peasant, and neither Marx nor Engels clarifies their phrase “rural proletarian.” The term is not validated empirically; as with “industrial proletariat,” it involves a relationship to the means of production, i.e., the land. One might infer from their writings that Marx and Engels understood the rural proletariat to be a class characterized by poverty, working for wages, experiencing alienation, and developing a revolutionary class-consciousness. Of course, the tenant farmer usually paid rent to the middleman or landed aristocrat (often in the form of an in-kind payment) and did not work for wages. The rural laborer who toiled on the tenant's plot was a wage earner. One might speculate, then, that the farm laborer is even more of a “true” proletarian, even more “alienated” than his tenant boss since the tenant is not bound by wages but receives some of the fruits of his efforts. But such distinctions are not formulated by Marx and Engels themselves.

While Marx and Engels draw comparisons between Asian land systems (including Russia) and the Western systems (particularly Ireland), Asian land workers are nowhere referred to as rural proletarians. I will discuss how this difference arises from the Marxist view of history and the Marxist conception of Ireland's land system. In order to understand more fully how the Irish peasant related to the land question, however, let us first examine how Marx and Engels viewed the Irish land system, then address their attitude toward the peasant class generally and different peasant nationalities in particular. Marx's theory of the “Asiatic mode of production” illuminates the difference between the Asian (or Eastern) “peasant” and the Western “rural proletarian.” It also bears on Marx and Engels's crystallized view of Ireland in the 1870s and their controversy with the Narodniks about a peasant policy in semi-Asiatic Russia at that time.

VI

In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels writes (in “The Proletariat of the Land”) that Ireland is almost totally populated by small tenants and agricultural laborers, all of whom he considers “proletarians.” The term is roughly equivalent to what could be termed “soil slaves,” as Marx's 1853 article in the New York Daily Tribune implies:

Engels similarly describes the land system in his 1845 study:

This last sentence implies that income level, rather than relationship to the soil, is the criterion for proletarian status, an interpretation reinforced by Engels's comment that “there are in Ireland 75,000 agricultural proletarians more than in the neighboring island.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Apparently, Engels means more laborers, since England consisted of huge landed estates, not small tenant farms.Footnote ⁴⁶ Another translation of the sentence actually uses the word “laborer” [Hilfsarbeiter] rather than “proletarian.”

Engels notes that one of the major evils of the Irish tenant system is the “existence of middlemen between the landlord and the cultivator”:

Brown points out that “between the landlord, living perhaps in Dublin or London, and the vast swarms of peasantry working the land, there grew up a parasitic class of middlemen who sucked the blood of both.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Engels was writing in the mid-1840s, at the time of the “Great Clearances,” during which many landlords rid themselves of burdensome tenantry who could not pay their rents. But Engels maintained that the middleman system and land laws “merely determin[e] the way in which poverty manifests itself in Ireland. … This poverty is caused … above all by competition, which…takes the form of the continual subdivision of holdings.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Ironically, the main source of Irish misery is the emergent motor of capitalism – competition in so-called feudal Ireland itself – not in capitalistic England. Engels specifically downgrades English exploitation, the dictates of the Protestant Established Church, and the Irish character as “factors … which determine the way in which poverty strikes the Irish.” Engels's argument about the destructive nature of “competition” is broadly Malthusian. The Great Famine that began in 1845 – the very year he published Condition of the Working Class – would, however, demonstrate brutally that the loss of three and one half million people in 17 years would not bring sudden prosperity. For economics is more than abstract mathematical theory – and certainly more than Engels's faulty demographics:

Notably, Engels is judging Ireland here from a limiting perspective: an English perspective. Indeed, all their lives Marx and Engels wrote about Ireland from the vantage point of Englishmen in Manchester or London. Like the English, Marx and Engels erred in their understanding of both the Irish land question and the Irish character: both the potato and the people. Marx and Engels were, of course, principally concerned with capitalism – and the center of nineteenth-century European (and indeed global) capitalism was London, the metropolis of the British Empire. They accepted the Malthusian and Ricardian analyses of capitalism in order to attack its social evils and chart its inevitable collapse. But as Rudolph Schlesinger points out: “Erroneous conclusions as to the likely course of the breakdown of the capitalist system resulted from exaggerated emphasis put on the theoretical abstractions made in its analysis by the founders … and by the classical economists whose general attitudes in this respect were accepted by them with insufficient criticism.”Footnote ⁵¹

This “insufficient criticism” pertained to the situation not only in England but also in Ireland. Like the classical economists, Marx and Engels did not understand the difference between Ireland and England's economic development – a difference not merely of developmental maturity or “stages.”Footnote ⁵² As R. D. Collison Black explains in his Economic Thought and the Irish Question, the classical economists did not understand the differences in the systems of land tenure between England and Ireland.Footnote ⁵³ Instead, laissez-faire advocates repeatedly invoked the principles of political economy. They wanted to reconstruct the Irish economy along the lines of the English economy. Such political dogma, not Ireland's “failure” to compete successfully against Europe's emerging market economies, was the chief cause of the Famine. Therefore, even when the English tried to help, they hurt; the Irish and English economies were not merely different points moving along the same straight line. The Encumbered Estates Act of 1849 aimed to put Ireland on a British economic track: it was passed to eliminate dwarf farms and facilitate evictions of small tenants. But as Brown notes:“Though the Encumbered Estates Act failed, British politicians for many years retained their faith in the idea that Ireland's economic salvation lay in the large farm, run according to ‘those economical principles … that made England great.’”Footnote ⁵⁴ The classical economists failed to turn Ireland into a Little England, concludes Brown, and the very attempt proved disastrous: “Assimilation of the economies of Ireland and England was completed in the first quarter of a century following the Act of Union and its fruits were poverty, bitterness and chronic violence.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Marx and Engels did not only see through English glasses on important economic and political aspects of the Irish Question, but also on the religious aspects. The English treated the peasantry's Irish Catholic faith dismissively or patronizingly, and their hostility, or at best bemused disregard, inevitably also exerted influence on Marx and Engels. This is not to imply that Marx and Engels lacked definite attitudes toward Catholicism of their own, but the English tendency to elide the religious dimensions of the Irish Question probably contributed to Marx and Engels's own ideological bias to subordinate that issue.

Ireland was a nation of peasants during the lifetimes of Marx and Engels, however, and it is therefore important to return to the peasant question. Significantly, although Marx and Engels never discussed Ireland at length in any of their writings on the peasant question, the roles of Ireland and of peasants in the evolution of the Marxist revolutionary program traveled a parallel course. In the 1840s, socialism would burst forth directly from the decaying capitalistic core, believed Marx and Engels, rather than from outer pressures upon the core. Ireland was thus a nation of minimal political importance to them. But Marx theorized that, like the other pre-industrial countries, it too would receive the fallout of the capitalistic explosion thereupon and take a step toward socialism.

Likewise, in The Communist Manifesto (1848), the peasant was included in “petty bourgeois groups” and described as conservative, trying to “roll back the wheel of history.” In the early 1850s, Marx continued to hold that peasants could play at best a passive role in overthrowing the bourgeoisie. In a lengthy newspaper article in 1852, Marx notes their limited capacities for revolutionary action. Their possibilities are contingent on the class-conscious urban proletariat, who can become a proactive force:

Friedrich Gottheil points out that “while the misery of the peasant under capitalism exceeds even that of the proletariat, Marx nonetheless harbored a profound distrust about the peasant as a revolutionary.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Engels later made clear in his Russian correspondence that this distrust arose from the peasants' strong attachment to private property. In Class Struggles in France (1850), Marx describes the peasant revolution of 1848 as “clumsily cunning, knavishly naïve, doltishly sublime, a calculated superstition, a … piece of buffoonery [bearing] the unmistakable features of the class that represents barbarism without civilization.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The salvation of the peasant can only result from the institution of a proletarian government. As Gottheil has observed:

Two decades later, as the failed Fenian uprising drew his attention, Marx revised his thinking, which acknowledged in a December 1869 letter to Engels that we cited at this essay's outset. Let us recall Marx's words again:

Indeed there were no revolts or uprisings in Ireland from 1848 to late 1867, and so Marx had given little more than passing notice to developments there. But with Fenian agitation becoming increasingly hostile and violent in the mid-1860s, Marx devoted renewed attention to the island – a decision that coincided with his reevaluation of the peasantry as a revolutionary force. Paradoxically, however, Marx targeted England as the socialist goal to hit at least in part because “it is the only country where there are no peasants.”Footnote ⁶¹

VII

Once Marx seriously reconsidered the revolutionary potential of the Irish peasantry in the mid-1860s, he soon concluded that peasant Ireland is “the only point where one can hit official England.”Footnote ⁶² Referring again to Ireland as England's “bulwark,” Marx argues that landlordism in England must fall and

Elevating Ireland to the status of the crucial nation inciting the revolution was consistent with Marx's conclusion concerning historical materialism in Chapter 25 of volume 1 of Capital, which is titled “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” In this light, the case of agrarian Ireland might be referred to as “the special law of capitalist accumulation.”

Marx is, of course, referring to what has occurred already in “the classic form” in England, not in peasant Ireland, which had no capitalist class at all.Footnote ⁶⁵ The point is, however, that England itself serves as Ireland's capitalist class just as Ireland's peasantry serves as the revolutionary “lever” for England's transformation: “the English working class can never do anything decisive here in England until it separates its policy with regard to Ireland most definitely from the policy of the ruling classes, until…it makes common cause with the Irish.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The capitalist class in England, then, is also Ireland's capitalist class. The industrial and agricultural proletariats share a common enemy.

Solomon F. Bloom believes the reasons for Marx's reevaluation of Ireland's role in the revolution are twofold: the collapse of Chartism in England in the 1850s and the “resilience” of English capitalism. If “resilience” means the adaptive ability of capitalism to stifle the English proletariat's revolutionary tendencies, Bloom is correct. But Marx and Engels speak for the first time in 1870 about the potential of the Irish peasants as revolutionaries. The Irish will fill the void because they are “more passionate and revolutionary in character than the English.”Footnote ⁶⁷

That claim seems paradoxical, if not contradictory: according to the Marxist doctrines of historical materialism and economic determinism, is not Marxist revolution a consequence of economic factors rather than “passionate character”? Certainly that is Marx's position with regard to other nations and other historical situations. For instance, reviewing revolutionary activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, Marx concludes in an article on China that there had been no serious revolution that had not been preceded by a commercial and financial crisis.Footnote ⁶⁸ Marx maintains in The Class Struggles in France that the absence of revolution in France in May 1850 owed not so much to the peaceful attitudes of the bourgeois press but rather to commercial prosperity. (Stalin would later dispute that the absence of peasant involvement accounted for the failure of the 1850 revolution to materialize). In Class Struggles, Marx claims a directly inverse relationship between financial credit and revolution: “Public and private credit are the economic thermometer, by which the intensity of the revolution can be measured. To the same degree as they fall, the glow and generative force of the revolution rise.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Nowhere do Marx and Engels concede that religious ardor could be the animating force in the “revolutionary” Irish character. Engels and Marx never recognized the connection between religion and revolution in Ireland's peasantry.

Let us take another example. In 1867 Marx told the German Educational Workers Association that England had found it futile to attempt to wipe out Catholicism in Ireland. In fact, he noted, the Irish had made converts out of their Protestant conquerors. The obvious implication, of course, is that Catholicism is the source of the Irish peasant's resilience:

One must conclude that Marx and Engels failed utterly to comprehend the social dimension of religion in the case of the Irish: how religion occupied their collective consciousness and animated their minds and spirits. As Brown notes, “To the peasant, subject to the vagaries of nature, life was filled with mystery…If the potato crop failed and starvation threatened, it was the will of God.”Footnote ⁷¹ O'Farrell argues persuasively that for the Irish peasant the land question was not economic, but spiritual:

O'Farrell's conclusion points out how much the thinking of Marx and Engels on Ireland resembled that of the English aristocrat: “The existing structure of land ownership represented to the Irish both conquest and religious persecution. However, from the landlords’ viewpoint, the land question was simply one of property.”

In the first chapter of his History of Ireland, Engels casts aside the view of Ireland's history as religiously based. He considers Ireland's “misfortune” an economic issue stemming from natural resources and of “ancient origin”:

Repeatedly, Irish Catholics had demonstrated that they were willing to sacrifice economic gain and political privilege for their faith. But Engels, interpreting this “resilience” as “revolutionary” on one page and “insanity” on the next, waves away the religious convictions of the Irish as “honest madness”:

Thus, ironically, while the “sentence” on “condemned” Ireland had been “pronounced millions of years ago,” it was the rest of the world, not the Irish, who were the sinners.

VIII

So whereas the Irish and peasant questions were subordinate matters in the 1840s and early 1850s for Marx and Engels, they became issues of paramount concern by the late 1860s and early 1870s. The significance of the Irish Question during this latter period has already been indicated. In his 1870 preface to Marx's The Peasant War in Germany (1850), Engels no longer describes the peasantry as a homogenous, impotent class. He argues that the proletariat are “compelled to seek allies,” who are “to be found only among the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat of the cities, the small peasants and the agricultural labourers.” But the petty bourgeois are “extremely unreliable” and the lumpenproletariat is “the worst of all possible allies.”Footnote ⁷⁵

The other two classes, the small peasants and rural laborers, are the allies of the industrial proletariat. Engels draws precise distinctions, and includes the Irish land system as a type of small peasantry:

While Engels implies that both small peasants and rural laborers are “agricultural proletarians,” he uses that term only once and in reference to the latter class and their unique relationship to the land.

In The Peasant Question in France and Germany, Engels avers that socialist society “shall not even dream of expropriating” the small peasant but rather will “transform” their holdings into co-operatives, “not forcibly, but by way of example, and by offering social aid for this purpose.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Lenin quotes these lines in The Teachings of Karl Marx and his respectful proposed treatment of the small peasantry in a post-revolutionary Russia is an obvious extension of Engels's thought. Both Marx and Engels adopted this stance toward Asia, including Russia. Throughout the 1840s and ‘50s, Marx and Engels firmly opposed the Narodniks, who believed that pre-bourgeois Russia would witness a socialist revolution if their movement could both spearhead a peasant rebellion and establish the archaic village commune as the nucleus of a future Russian socialist society.

Marx and Engels later lent qualified support to the Narodniks. By the 1860s, perhaps influenced by the 1861 reforms emancipating the serfs, Marx stated optimistically that Russia had “the finest chance that history ever offered to a nation”: direct transition to socialism without suffering of the growing pains of capitalistic development. Both in Marx's 1882 preface to the Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto and in Engels's On Social Relations in Russia (1875), the two men agree that direct transition from the village community to socialism is possible on condition that the Russian democratic revolution coincides with a socialist revolution in the West. The latter revolution is essential, claims Engels in 1875, in order to generate

IX

It is this matter of “ownership” and its development into a “new, viable form” that manifests the difference between the Eastern “peasant” and the Western “proletarian” – and that made necessary, according to Marxist ideology, a revolution in Western Europe prior to or coincident with a Russian revolution. Marx and Engels considered this form of communal ownership the noteworthy feature of the “Asiatic mode of production.” Conversely, it is the absence of landed private property that distinguishes the Asiatic from the Western, the peasant from the proletarian. Discussing the land system in India in a New York Tribune article in 1853, Marx asserts that “the Asiatic system [makes] the State the real landlord”Footnote ⁸⁰ (emphasis mine). With no bourgeoisie, there is no proletariat.

It warrants emphasis that Marx's twin pillars concerning the geopolitical prerequisites for an Asiatic revolution – his claims that a new (i.e., Western) form of ownership had arisen in the East and that a Western proletarian revolution was essential to Eastern liberation – were theoretical doctrines. They emerged less from Marx's social observations and more from his materialist conception of history. Marx famously describes his four historical stages in the preface to The Critique of Political Economy in 1859: “In broad outlines, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.”Footnote ⁸¹

Here the Asiatic is the most primitive epoch and the feudal era is comparatively advanced. Moreover, as George Lichtheim notes in his description of the relationship between the economic process and historical process, “each [epoch] corresponds to a definite social order which in turn lays the foundation for the succeeding one.”Footnote ⁸² By 1859, Marx's attention to Eastern society had shaped his thinking on historical development: until he began focusing upon the East in the late 1840s and 1850s, he had not even formulated the characteristics of the Asiatic stage. Thirteen years earlier, in The German Ideology (1846), Marx conceives the premodern stages of social development as tribal, ancient, and feudal. The Asiatic mode subsequently replaced the tribal mode.

Marx argued in 1853 that lack of private ownership formed the basis of Oriental despotism: “The basis of all phenomena in the East … [is] the absence of private property in land.”Footnote ⁸³ Lichtheim explains that Marx “makes it quite clear … that it is the dominance of the State which excludes genuine private ownership of land, i.e., the precondition of feudalism. If anything defines ‘the Orient,’ according to Marx (and Engels), it is this supremacy of the State, which reduces the landowners to the role of merely ‘nominal landlords.’”Footnote ⁸⁴

Elsewhere Marx remarks on how India exhibited the worst aspects of both the Irish land system and of other European injustices:

The Irish connection is evident in the very next sentence. The agricultural proletariat emerges with the decline of feudalism; it cannot exist in Asiatic society because there is no private property. Yet despite the fact that the ryot's economic condition is even worse than that of the Irish agricultural laborer, “they [ryots] are, morally speaking, not sunk as low as the Irish cottiers.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Thus, the Indian peasantry – the class that is envisioned one day to incite the all-important, Eastern-liberating Western revolution – has not yet reached revolutionary consciousness despite its horrid economic condition. The Indian ryots are exploited even more ruthlessly than the Irish, but they are not yet ready for revolution, evidently because “morally speaking,” they have not “sunk as low” as the Irish. Once again, it is the Irish's religious character (or, more precisely, their kind of religion), distinct from that of the English or Indians, that endows them with revolutionary potential. Marx attributes the difference between the Irish and Indian economic conditions to his belief that the Indians are “possessed of more imagination” than the Irish.Footnote ⁸⁷

The opposite is the case if one examines Oriental culture and religion, as Lichtheim implies. Marx's “uncomfortable dilemma suggested by his researches into Oriental society” was how heavily to weigh a noneconomic, non-materialist aspect of human experience, “the element of personal freedom, so plainly lacking in that society and equally so plainly at the roots of West European feudalism (and capitalism).”Footnote ⁸⁸ Religion governed both Irish and Oriental society. But Western Christianity facilitated individualism (e.g., vide Weber's conception of the Protestant ethic) and self-expression; private property was a natural outgrowth. By contrast, Oriental religions emphasized subordination of the individual to the group and personal passivity; communal identity and state ownership were logical outcomes. Thus, religion, rather than economics, becomes the substructure of society.

Referring to the 1851 Chinese liberation movement that exploded into a peasants' war, Marx observes that “the rebellion assumed a religious character, the distinguishing feature of the peasant movement.”Footnote ⁸⁹ But it was also the distinguishing feature of the Irish agricultural proletariat, a fact to which Marx and Engels lent no theoretical or programmatic significance, as we have noted. The difference four decades later in the case of China becomes particularly noteworthy when Engels, writing in 1894, casts China in Ireland's old role: lever of the revolution to overthrow capitalism. China will be the “impulse” for worldwide revolutionary upheaval. A new historical claim that dispenses with the earlier Marxist doctrine that a Western revolution constituted the indispensable precondition for its Eastern counterpart:

To return full circle to Ireland and the connections among religion, revolution, and the Irish peasant temperament: the Irish character assumes, as it were, the role of Marx's vanguard. Indeed it is as though Marx casts the fiery, faith-centered Irish personality in a revolutionary position anticipating the role of Lenin's party. Because an impoverished proletariat with militant class-consciousness did not exist in Russia, the Bolsheviks replaced the theory of the proletariat with a theory based on the alliance of the workers and peasants. The “masses” became Lenin's proletariat. His substitute for a proletarian class-consciousness as the driving force of the revolution became the vanguard party: a cadre who are the standard bearers of the revolutionary spirit.

Of course, political parties and movements in nineteenth-century Ireland did exert considerable influence upon the Irish peasantry. The Ribbonmen, Whiteboys, Young Ireland, the Irish Confederation, Fenians, Land League, and other groups and movements attracted many followers. Yet no successful movement prevailed.Footnote ⁹¹ So Marx encouraged Irish revolutionaries to back almost any effort that appeared directed against English landlordism. He was hoping that a rebellious spark would somehow burst forth into a revolutionary conflagration; he envisioned, as it were, not one vanguard party but many loosely coordinated, converging parties. He advocated such a program because of the unique position of Ireland, a “liberating” position that Lenin later hoped Russia might also assume for the West. Once again, as Engels had expressed it in 1882, the Irish “are most internationalistic when they are genuinely nationalistic.”Footnote ⁹²

X

So Marx's attitude toward both Ireland's revolutionary position and the role of the European peasant changed in tandem: from marginality in the 1840s to centrality in the 1870s. As Marx and Engels attached greater import to the peasants in Europe and Russia in the 1880s and 1890s, however, Ireland receded into the background. Engels tells Eduard Bernstein in 1882 that the current form of Irish peasant resistance – “the shooting not only of hated landlords and agents … but also of the peasants who take over the farm … [and engage in] boycotting, threatening letters, night raids and intimidation” – is “local, isolated, and can never become a general form of political struggle.”Footnote ⁹³

Yet Ireland's role in Marxist thought returns to the margins in the 1880s not only because Ireland no longer can provide revolutionary leverage, but also because the country it is to have leverage upon is passing from power. If soon Britain will no longer be the world's revolutionary “lever,” then the onetime “lever of the lever” – Ireland – becomes strategically superfluous. A new Western “lever” has arisen on the other side of the Atlantic. In the same 1882 letter, Engels notes that America is “a land which in twenty years will be the most populated, richest, and most powerful in the world.” The moment to pull the Irish lever has passed with the eclipse of England as the “metropolis of capital.” Ireland cannot possibly play a comparable role in American economic and political affairs. Although Ireland's Fenian movement wins headlines in America, Ireland is not America's agricultural sector as she was England's. Irish affairs arouse the emotions of the expatriates, but Ireland's situation exerts little leverage on U.S. politics, let alone influences policymaking on the European continent.Footnote ⁹⁴

As the conceptual status of the Irish peasant class declined in significance during the 1870s for Marx, Russia increasingly preoccupied his attention. As Lenin remarked, Ireland's role as the “lever” was arguably already on “the way out” for Marx by the early 1870s in the wake of the political impotence exhibited by the English workers (which began as early as the 1868 parliamentary elections that failed to return a single workers' candidate). Soon thereafter, Marx accepted the Narodnik position that it might be possible for the village commune to become the basis of a Russian socialism.

Marx does not consider Russia an “Oriental despotism” to the extent of China and India. It is “semi-Asiatic.” Russia already has communal, though not state, ownership. Therefore, with the aid of a Western revolution, Russian peasants might acquire the “preconditions requisite for the transition” to socialism. Lichtheim comments on Russia's distinctive nineteenth-century status, a special place like Ireland's role in the West. Russia is a cross between East and West, between the Asiatic and feudalistic modes of production. The fact that Marx calls it “semi-Asiatic” rather than “semi-feudal” implies that it is more Eastern than Western, more primitive than “advanced.” Lichtheim writes:

By contrast with Russia, a fair Marxist characterization for Ireland's level of societal development might be “semi-feudal.” It has a strict tradition of allegiance to clan chiefs (a major criterion noted in the Grundrisse)Footnote ⁹⁶ yet also has the more modern polarization of aristocracy and workers into opposing camps. Brown implies that nineteenth-century Ireland represented for Marx this transitional limbo between feudal and bourgeois society:

XI

In conclusion, Ireland fascinated Marx and Engels both because it was such an anomaly in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and because it was so closely linked to the premier capitalist nation of their time: England. Yet I contend that for Engels, Marx's daughters, and even to an extent for Marx himself, Ireland represented more than simply a coldly calculated “lever” to pull in the revolutionary program. More than any other nationality, besides their fellow Germans, the Irish played a pivotal role in their domestic lives and engaged their hearts and minds. Their personal involvement with Irish workers riveted their attention on Irish affairs and exerted an impact on their revolutionary plans. For instance, Marx writes Engels to “immediately convey a vote of thanks to Lizzie” for suggesting the draft of a resolution on Fenian amnesty for prisoners captured by the English in minor rebellions, which Marx introduced into the General Council of the First International.Footnote ⁹⁸

So what was the “base” of the Irish Question – economics or religion? Echoing Edmund Burke's doubts in a famous formulation, Benjamin Disraeli voiced uncertainty decades later about whether it was “a question of potatoes or Popes.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Marx and Engels were not uncertain. Despite their close contact with the Irish, Marx and Engels dismissed the religious side of the peasant character and instead privileged economic analysis. Marx and Engels believed Ireland's problems were rooted in the ground. They referred to the Irish tenant farmer, and particularly the agricultural laborer, as “proletarians.” The proletariat's adversaries were not the Irish bourgeoisie but the English landed aristocracy and middlemen (and the English bourgeoisie who exacerbated tensions within the English and Irish industrial proletariat in England). The term “agricultural proletariat” is used infrequently by Marx and Engels; in The Condition of the English Working Class, Engels talks about it in reference to England and Ireland. (Later, he and Marx delineated the phrase's meaning to exclude big peasants, though not little peasants.)

As we have seen, during the life of the First International, Marx and Engels invested hope in Ireland as England's “weak link.” They theorized that the landed Anglo-Irish aristocracy represented the class link poised to break. Marx conceptualized his argument within his framework of historical materialism and his “laws” of societal development.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ While the roles of Ireland and the peasantry became increasingly important for Marx up to the early 1870s, Marx realized by the 1880s that industry, not land, represented the future economic foundation for Europe – and Ireland could be no lever for that. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels shifted the axis of revolutionary focus to Asia and conceived Russia and China as the new historical levers for a worldwide revolution. The most primitive societies thus replace the most impoverished. It is not that the Irish lever breaks down, just that it was never pulled hard enough or at the right moment. That failure arose far more from both British and European political affairs and from internal disputes among the Fenians, Land League, and other groups than from the numerous answers proposed by Marx and Engels – however accurate or misconceived – to the Irish Question.