Tom Johnson, Irish Labour leader . . . A comment by C. D. Greaves

When I was preparing my biography of James Connolly I used very frequently visit Tom Johnson at “Ralahine”, his bungalow in Clontarf. He was then over eighty and the “grand old man” of the Irish Labour Movement. It was he who salvaged what was left of that movement after the white terror that followed the defeat of the 1916 insurrection and started its upward progress. He had always regarded himself as a Marxist, but he told me on one occasion that only in his old age had he come to understand what Connolly meant by the class struggle. It was an inescapable conflict of interest, basically economic, but extending to every aspect of social action and consciousness, even the most abstract and remote.

This is roughly what he said, and it was a useful caution against the enthronement of economics as the sole determinant. Yet Johnson held the opinion that the Partition of Ireland was irrelevant to the class struggle. It is one thing to grasp a principle, another to apply it. And if you asked him about his much-criticised attitude to republicanism in the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary years, he would always explain, “I was not brought up in that tradition.” He was completely unaware that in effectively dismissing the national question he was contradicting his own definition of the class struggle, for he was a man of complete honesty and integrity, aware of his achievements, but modest and self-critical in all things. To understand this, we must invoke the concept of “ideology”, in which thought subdues itself and has escaped from dependence on reality.