84 years ago today, the 1916 Easter Rising was forced to surrender. The Irish Citizen Army's participation in the Rising provides a glimpse of a working class militia, founded to protect locked out and striking workers from attack, then groomed for participation in class warfare, also had a direct role to play in the national liberation struggle against colonialism and imperialism.

To see the ICA's participation in the Rising solely in that context, however, is to do them only partial service. James Connolly's writings in the year leading up to the Rising plainly indicates another imperative in his mind: to transform the slogan of the Zimmerwald Left into a reality -- that is, to turn an imperialist war into a class war.

For Connolly, as was the case for virtually all revolutionary socialists of his day, the World War was a spectacle of tremendous carnage for the working class for no discernable goal or purpose relative to their own needs, but purely in the interests of the competing imperialist blocks of Europe, and to a lesser extent, North America and Asia.

Connolly spoke of setting an example for these misguided working class soldiers -- a means of demonstrating to them that if they must fight, they should shoulder their arms in service to their own needs as workers. To stand and fight as a class.

It was this objective that caused Connolly, rather than the Irish Volunteers to hasten preparation for a Rising in 1916, and it was because of this restless compulsion to set an example for the European working class that Connolly's militia became a concern of the Volunteers and the IRB personnel within their ranks.

There is cause for speculation, though it has not been fully proven, that the IRB kidnapped Connolly in January of 1916, in an attempt to discover the ICA's plans for a Rising, and to ensure that the ICA's efforts did not preempt their own. Connolly was not a man easily intimidated, however, and was only prepared to cooperate with the IRB when he himself was taken into the leadership of a joint Rising, and the ICA's participation and independence within that context was assured.

The facts that the Rising withstood the assault by far greater British forces for only five days, that Connolly was seriously wounded in the fight, and that he was shortly thereafter executed by the British all conspired to deprive Connolly of the opportunity to present clearly his perspective on the ICA's goals and strategy within the context of this pressed alliance.

Accordingly, myth makers were able to fit Connolly into a purely nationalist pantheon and erase the ICA's existence from the historical map, by falsely claiming that on Easter Monday 1916 the ICA liquidated into the newly formed Irish Republican Army. In actual fact, there are historical references to a still independent ICA existing in 1918, 1919, and into the 1920s, before an actual, if brief, rebirth in the 1930s.

This subsuming of Connolly and the ICA into a mythic nationalist realm worked against independent revolutionary socialist organising in the 1920s and helped to foster the counterproductive rift between Labour and republicanism in Ireland in that same period. There is sufficient statements in Connolly's writings on the very eve of the Rising, however, as well as his statement to the volunteers of the ICA going into battle to "hang onto their guns" in recognition of their coming conflict with the bourgeois agenda of the Volunteers, to assert that Connolly was not in support of a strategy that separated the struggle for national liberation and the fight for socialism into distinct stages. Rather, it appears clear that Connolly never departed from his recognition that national liberation, from the perspective of the working class, could not be achieved without the building of a Workers' Republic in Ireland.

Revolutionary socialists, when looking back on the Easter Rising should remain mindful of Connolly's revolutionary perspective on the tasks of the ICA in the Rising -- not only to fight British imperialist occupation of Ireland, but to press beyond this and challenge directly Irish capitalism, fighting for the interests of the working class alone, which are ultimately in direct conflict with those of all other social classes within Irish society. At the same time, because the interests of the working class leads it to ultimately liberate humankind in full from the tyranny of private property in the mode of production, their interests assume something of a universal purpose.

It is only through the workers' toppling of capitalism that humankind can be saved from descent into barbarism -- for as Rosa Luxemburg made clear, socialism or barbarism are the only options available when the capitalist system enters it phase of historic decline.

Irish Republican Socialists are proud of their heritage, their lineage. Those who carry the Starry Plough banner today -- the flag of the ICA -- come from a political tendency rich in heroes and martyrs, as well as in thinkers and people of action.

They stand in the tradition reaching back to William Thompson, who Marx cited in Capitol, and O Brien of the Chartists. Their lineage includes Fintan Lalor, James Stephens, John Devoy, J.P. McDonnell, Samuel Kavanagh, Michael Davitt, Jim Larkin, James Connolly, Liam Mellowes, Peadar O Donnell, George Gilmore, Mick Price, and Frank Ryan. Their heritage includes the admirers of Babeuf among the United Irishmen, Emmett's band of Dublin workers, the more radical of those engaged in the Young Ireland rising, the Irish sections of the First International, the most militant of the Fenians, the Land and Labour League, the Irish Socialist Republican Party, the Irish Citizen Army, the Limerick Soviet, Saor Eire, the Republican Congress, the Connolly Column and at least one Irish volunteer in the POUM, the revolutionaries within the Republican Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Irish Republican Socialist Party, and the Irish National Liberation Army . Their recent leaders and martyrs include Seamus Costello, Miriam Daly, Ta Power, and Gino Gallagher.

They are not simply a list of names now carved into granite headstones, however -- they are the women and men who continue to struggle for socialism and national liberation in Ireland today, those who languish in Long Kesh, Maghaberry, and Portlaoise, they include activists in Britain, the Americas, and Continental Europe who strive in support of an Irish Workers' Republic. They are the living, breathing movement representing the most class conscious elements of the Irish working class. And they are heroes -- humble and at times filled with self-doubt -- but heroes nonetheless.

They are not Left republicans of a somewhat pinker hue, but revolutionary Republican Socialists. And, they ensure, whether setting the weapons aside as the contemporary needs of the struggle dictate or not, that the Fight Does Go On.

ENDS