workingclasshistory:

On this day, 12 May 1916, James Connolly was executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. He was sentenced to death by the British authorities for his role in leading an armed revolt that had aimed to establish an Irish Republic. Because he had been wounded in the fighting, he faced the firing squad tied to a chair.
Politically, Connolly was a complex character. Born in Edinburgh in 1868, he participated in workers’ struggles in Scotland, the United States, and Ireland. He at times wrote and acted as an industrial syndicalist or a party socialist, and at different stages of his life he was active in the Industrial Workers of the World and the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, as well as the Scottish Socialist Federation, the Socialist Labour Party of America, and the Irish Socialist Republic Party.
He maintained contradictory positions on nationalism, and in the final years of his life he abandoned trade unionism in favour of a cross-class conspiracy. He supported imperial Germany in WW1 and romanticised the feudalist Gaelic society of yore as “a country in which the people of the island were owners of the land upon which they lived, masters of their own lives and liberties, freely electing their rulers,” and living in “a system evolved through centuries of development out of the genius of the Irish race, safeguarded by the swords of Irishmen, and treasured in the domestic affections of Irish women.”
But while his analysis and methods are open to debate, his commitment to the emancipation of the working class is beyond question.
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