In the civil war that followed the Treaty, the Irish capitalist class unleashed a wave of murder against Irish Republicans, executing dozens of prisoners at the behest of an imperialist ‘settlement’ which partitioned the country that remained in the Empire as a ‘free state.’ The killings accelerated after the writing of this article.

‘Irish Capitalist Henchmen Murder Republicans’ from Voice of Labor (Chicago). Vol. 11 No. 583. January 26, 1923.

Within the last few months forty-five Irish rebels have been murdered by the Irish capitalist lackeys who are carrying out the private instructions of the British government. This wholesale murder has the blessing of the Catholic church in Ireland but so cowardly are our Irish American bourgeois patriots that they fear to give this fact any publicity.

While the Black and Tans were ravaging Ireland with fire and sword our Irish capitalist politicians in America dwelt with emotion on the crimes that were committed against humanity by the English degenerates who composed the Black and Tans. They told us that Irishmen were incapable of such crimes. Now it is a well known fact that there were as many Irishmen among the Black and Tans as English and Scotch, but the blatherskites who use Ireland’s sufferings to keep themselves in office through the medium of Irish votes were more concerned with keeping the Irish and English workers separated by playing on their racial emotions than in freeing Ireland from British rule.

But a difference in race did not keep the Irish capitalists apart when the time was ripe for them to make peace advantageous to the Irish and English bourgeoisie. Let the workers of both countries kill each other while the capitalists and their lackeys wine and dine together and rob their respective wage slaves at their leisure!

How shallow this race nonsense is has been revealed to the Irish people since the so-called “freedom” was granted to Ireland. Irishmen are now executing Irishmen in the name of law and order. The men whose praises were sung to high heaven a few years ago for their bravery in fighting the British government are now murdered by firing squads at the orders of the very men who were loudest in singing their praises. Why? Because those men who have fought for the Republic are receiving the same treatment that their kind have always received. They fought for and won the concessions that the Irish middleclass and capitalists have been begging from England for generations and when these concessions were granted why continue the struggle. It is true the Republic was not won, but in this era of practical politics and international capitalism what does a republic signify?

The Irish may continue to fight, they may continue to angle for the Pope’s blessing and to assert their devotion to the saints and go to the gallows accompanied by priests asking forgiveness for their enemies but sooner or later they will realize that under the world conditions existing today’s capitalist republic is only a bauble thrown to political children to play with; it means nothing to the workers; there is only one road for, the Irish who want a Republic to travel and that is the road of social revolution.

On that road the prayers of clergymen will not ring in their ears; they will not be showered with Papal blessings; their names will not be featured in the capitalist press as heroes fighting for a glorious cause but they will have the cooperation of the revolutionary workers of the world which may not be spiritual but nevertheless material. And in the struggle they will and must line up with their comrades in England in order to overthrow the British government, which rests on a foundation of robbery and exploitation, beginning inside in Merry England itself and spreading its tentacles through every quarter of the world.

The labor movement in Ireland must be developed with a view to establish a Workers Republic. Romantic visionaries, young in years and lacking in experience may imagine that a short cut lies in other directions, i.e. instructing the workers to give first preference to DeValera’s party in the elections and second to the Labor Party, but this is a suicidal policy, in that it shoves the economic question in the background and lines or attempts to line up the workers with, a section of the bourgeoisie because forsooth that section mouths fine phrases about a republic, which means nothing to the workers unless it be a Workers’ Republic. The class struggle must never be allowed to take a back seat no matter what tactics revolutionists may have to adopt temporarily.

The Voice of Labor was a regional paper published in Chicago by the Workers (Communist) Party as the “The American Labor Educational Society” (with false printing and volume information to get around censorship laws of the time) and was focused on building the nascent Farmer-Labor Party while fighting for leadership with the Chicago Federation of Labor. It was produced mostly as a weekly in 1923-1924 and contains enormous detail on the activity of the Party in the city of those years.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/vol/v11n583-jan-26-1923-VOL.pdf