By James Beirne
Published in Interventions, January 2025.
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Abstract

This essay puts Irish revolutionary James Connolly into conversation with the much more well-known figure of Frantz Fanon. Both thinker-combatants were deeply situated in their own contexts, giving rise to political theory and action as expressions of the politics of colonized peoples. While David Lloyd has suggested that the similarities between these and other “national Marxists” are tendential, there do exist numerous positive similarities in their work. Both Connolly and Fanon were anticolonial theorists committed to a project of disalienation beyond mere expropriation of the means of production but encompassing the realm of the symbolic. Both were ardent internationalists, presenting a theory of the relationship of the universal to the particular which saw national liberation as an intrinsic part of the socialist struggle – and vice versa. And both stressed revolutionary transformation as a necessary mode of liberatory praxis, up to and including the use of organized violence. While James Connolly and Frantz Fanon were never directly linked, they are of a type, and this essay marks a small first step towards bringing their work into a larger, productive synthesis.