Ireland and the Irish Question: Marx-Engels (Soviet Sourcebooks and Analyses of the Settler Colonial and Fascist Questions)

How did Marx and Engels respond in real-time to British settler-colonialism in Ireland? What was the approach of the First International? With essays on history, music, political prisoners, and national liberation movements like the Fenians, this is anti-colonial solidarity in practice. Settler colonialism: The eradication and forced dispossession of an Indigenous nation by a colonizer seeking to illicitly obtain and exploit the land and natural resources. The British used Ireland as a testing ground for methods they later deployed in the Americas, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Asia. Oliver Cromwell's methods were as brutal and genocidal as any seen elsewhere on this planet. Throughout their careers, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels actively observed, commented upon, and agitated on behalf of the Irish and their national liberation. In 1848, when they published The Communist Manifesto to celebrate the outbreak of the Continental revolutions, desperate, hungry members of the Young Ireland movement led a rebellion as a response to the cataclysmic impacts of the potato famine. While the Continent celebrated, Eire by contrast plead for mercy. Refugees fled to ports like London, Liverpool, New York, Boston, and Australia. "Begin with pauperizing the inhabitants of a country, and when there is no more profit to be ground out of them, when they have grown a burden to the revenue, drive them away, and sum up your Net Revenue!," Marx writes in disgusted response to a column in The Economist that casually uses numerical trickery to mask the Potato Famine's true dire impact upon the Irish population. Marx and Engels were forced to confront political opportunism, miscalculation, and religious sectarianism within the Irish Catholics. Simultaneously, they witnessed, up-close-and-personal, that the Anglo Protestant rejection of the Catholic workers and the anti-Papal prejudices resulted in the squandering of any gains made on behalf of the whole working class, demonstrating vividly that "united we stand, divided we fall." Composed of newspaper columns, excerpts from larger works like Condition of the Working Class in England and Das Kapital, speeches and resolutions from the First International, two unpublished surveys of Irish history authored by Marx and Engels, and letters to Sorge, Kugelman, Jenny Longuet, Eduard Bernstein, Kautsky, Liebneckt, and Samuel Gompers, this is how revolutionaries responded to crises like the Irish Potato Famine. The Russian text of this collection was prepared for publication by L.I. Golman and V. E. Kunina, assisted by N.L.A. Zhelnova. Translated from German by S. Ryazanskaya and V. Schneierson, from the French by K. Cook, and from the Italian by B. Bean. The History of Ireland, “Notes for the History of Ireland” and “Notes for the Preface to a Collection of Irish Songs” have been translated by Angela Clifford. Edited by R. Dixon Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978. — 656 p.