Description

Connolly’s Marxism by Bernard Ransom

Used ,First edition ,published 1980 isbn 0861043081. 126 pages. The cover is creased but but the book is otherwise in good condition,some samll notes inside.

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James Connolly, born in Edinburgh 1879 and executed by the British in Dublin 1916, was a major socialist theorist. He worked his way out of a poverty-stricken Scottish childhood, through lengthy spells in the army and as a trade union organiser in America. He emerged as Ireland’s most clear sighted and resourceful socialist organiser and thinker.

In this interpretive study Bernard Ransom presents a complex Connolly – historian, philosopher, strategist and activist. In particular he shows how Connolly made Marxism relevant for Ireland by reconciling nationalist and socialist ideas; and how he restored a viable, realistic use of Marxist theory as a guide to action, at a time when most of its practitioners treated as an unchallengeable “scientific” dogma.

What emerges is a consistency of thought and action by a man not afraid to be inspired by Irish history and Christian traditions; a man whose life’s work, including the apparently “hopeless” Easter Rising of 1916, was an attempt to establish the theoretical and organisational basis for socialism in Ireland