A fascinating document from a moment in Ireland’s Revolution. Early 1919 and the revolutionary wave was cresting across Europe, with Ireland also participating in its particular was as the national and social revolutions were in convergence and conflict. The Revolutionary Socialist Party of Ireland was a short-lived organization organized in 1919, mainly by Belfast militants who had left the Independent Labour Party, active in events like that city’s General Strike and the Limerick Soviet. I am unsure of the biography of ‘Thomas Pennycook.’

‘Manifesto of the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Ireland’ from The Communist (National Organization Committee). Vol. 1 No. 2. July 26, 1919.

To The Irish Working Class

Fellow Workers:

There has not been a cause in Ireland for which Irish workers have not fought on the side of the oppressed against the oppressors. The time has at last come when they must fight for their own–for the emancipation of their class. The time has come when we must organize towards the establishment of our liberation from the wages-system which exploits our human power to labour and produce wealth.

If Ulster Unionist prevails there will still remain an Irish working class. If Sinn Fein prevails there will still be an Irish working class. There will still remain an Irish master class, content to be masters of Irish human beings Let us determine that we who produce all that is produced In Ireland—that we who make Ireland habitable and fertile shall no longer yield the produce of our labour to the maters who whip us with the tyranny of wages.

Let us resolve that we shall no longer “build and another inhabit—sow and another reap,” but that we shall make Ireland a Socialist Republic, wherein shall dwell no parasite nor profit-taker and all will contribute to the needs of all and the harmony of the commonwealth.

Irish Labour has been organised to a high percentage during the last two years particularly. All over Ireland are Trade Union branches. On the basis of “increased wages.” workers have organised. The working-class represents the vast majority of the people, and yet. even with “increased wages.” its standard of living never exceeds the bare subsistence level and never will as long the wages system endures, because wages, or the purchasing prices of human labour are always measured by the employing class according to the minimum level of qualifying and sustaining the wage labourer.

James Connolly pointed out that “Capitalism is the most foreign thing in Ireland.” It has now become the most obsolete because the national, or mass-mind of the rank and file see far beyond it in their conception of industrial democracy. They respond with an irrepressible fellowship to the new economic order with which Russia has begun to deluge the vile tyrannies of the capitalist system of the world.

Capitalism, which originated in aggrandisement and wholesale expropriation, has endured into the warfare of exhaustion.

We can dispense with the capitalists. We cannot dispense with labour and the power to produce wealth.

Only the working class possesses this power. The working class of the world has begun to assert this power.

The working class of Ireland is ripe for the same assertion.

The leaders of official Labour have failed during the revolutionary years of 1917-1919 to formulate or direct an economic policy upon the basis of the emancipation of the exploited Irish people.

They have not admitted their failure and claim that, as leaders, it is their function to be led by the rank and file.

Let us lead them! Let us see to it that they become the obedient servants of the class whose interests they advocate. Let us point the way and see to it that they neither impede nor fail us, but that they march side by side with us in fidelity to the magnificent cause of our emancipation. Remember! There is but one thing to destroy—capitalism; one thing to construct–Socialism.

It is impossible for us to take immediate control of the land of Ireland—the industries of Ireland because the existing organization of the workers is based on surface Trade Union safeguards and reform of present conditions.

Reform is no use to us. We require a revolution of the existing economic order, so that the many who have not shall come into control and possession, and the few who have all shall become dispossessed of all but the right to co-operate with us on terms of mere human equality.

We must organize ourselves into workers’ committees round the factories, farms and workshops where we are employed, and from these works’ committees elect in all the existing Parliamentary Divisions of Ireland Workers’ Councils, i.e. councils of working men and women, to whom we can depute the fulfillment of the social and industrial needs of the special areas which elect them.

By organizing on these lines we shall be liberating the local forces of the Irish working class. We shall create the incentive towards control and ownership of the means of production and social life, which at present, in the hands of the master class, are used as the means wherewith to exploit the mass of the Irish people. Fellow-workers, it is in the power of the rank and file to do this. It is in our power to transform existing organizations of our class out of their present appeals for “increased wages” and similar palliatives into forces which will function towards control of the means of life, and establish us once for all above our present slavery into a moral standard of human life Let us be fearless. In liberating the Irish working class we are lifting Ire· land into the lofty purpose of the Russian pioneers who have turned the base greed of the European war for possession of fresh markets of exploitation into the tremendous redemption of the world’s working class.

Let us contribute our heroism to the class war which is spreading over the world, so that from “generation to generation” those who come after us will do homage to our courage in an era of human release and golden opportunity, an era wherein the common and equal peoples of the future will tread across the memories of our age of degradation into the happy triumphs of human attainment such as the world has never theretofore known.

Let us not dream now. but arise and act. Let us act quickly. Let us escape from a neutrality which supports the master class of the world and take our stand firmly with the working class of the world in the class war which is thundering over the earth. All power to the Workers’ Councils of Ireland; the speedy emancipation of the Irish working class!

On behalf of the National Executive of the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Ireland.

THOMAS PENNYCOOK, (National Secretary.)

This ‘The Communist’ was published in Chicago by the Communist Party National Organization Committee starting in July 1919 by the made up largely of Michigan and Illinois activists and was edited by Socialist Party of Michigan activist Dennis E. Batt and Harry Wicks. Many of those associated with this trend would become the Proletarian Party established on June 27, 1920 and disagreed with the vast majority of the pro-Bolshevik US socialists of the time by rejecting the possibility of an imminent US revolution. They became the first ‘split’ in the movement when they were expelled from the Communist Party of America in 1920. Emulating the Bolsheviks who in 1918 changed the name of their party to the Communist Party, there were up to a dozen papers in the US named ‘The Communist’ in the splintered landscape of the US Left between 1919 and 1923. All them claimed adherence to the new Third International and sought that body’s endorsement. They were often published at the same time and in the same format, making it somewhat confusing to untangle their relationships.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/thecommunist/thecommunist2/v1n02-jul-26-1919.pdf