“The lever must be applied in Ireland”: Marx, Engels, and the Irish Question

Abstract

AbstractThis article integrates economic and social history, biography, and political theory as it explores how the personal ties of Marx and Engels to Ireland stamped their thought. Marx and Engels struggled to integrate Ireland into their theory of revolution, conceptualizing it as a “special case” of capitalist accumulation, a formulation partly motivated by their human sympathies for the Irish (especially strong in the case of Engels and Marx's daughters). Extended attention in this essay is thus devoted to 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 prominent role in the lives of Marx and Engels. While Marx's primary aim was always to capture the citadels of capitalism such as Great Britain, he and Engels concluded in 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 the “lever” of a European-wide revolution. For a half decade in the late 1860s to the early 1870s, Marx and Engels invested the Irish peasantry with this decisive geopolitical role; soon thereafter, their conception of Ireland's theoretical significance altered and dissolved alongside their fading hopes for a European socialist revolution.