gle, but we must not forget to take into consideration that this rising was not the final struggle of the Irish workers, but merely the preliminary thereto. In this way, this first revolutionary outburst of the masses obtained expression at a moment when pressure was felt most strongly from British imperialism and the war. But still the entire rising had a definite Socialist color. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic declared, although in vague terms, the right of the Irish people to the means of production of wealth. It is apparent from the fact that the rising primarily appealed to the workers, that the masses of the fighters were workers and agricultural laborers, and a considerable section of the leaders Socialists and trade unionists.
The warm words with which Lenin wrote of this Easter rising will best show our appreciation. In his article, "The Results of the Discussion on Self-Determination" of 1916* he attacks the "monstrous judgment" of those who termed this "heroic rising" a Putsch.
*Published in "Against the Stream."
"Those who can term such a rising a Putsch are either the worst kind of reactionaries or hopelessly doctrinaires, incapable of imagining the social revolution as a living phenomenon."
And again:
"To assume the possibility that a social revolution without risings of small nations in the colonies and Europe, without revolutionary outbursts of the petty bourgeoisie, with all their prejudices, without movements of the unconscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against the oppression of landowners and the church and monarchists and national oppression, is equivalent to denying the social revolution."
The Irish rising was, as Lenin shows, a manifestation of the serious crisis of imperialism, a crisis which in 1917–18, led to the collapse of a number of imperialist states and to the Proletarian Revolution.
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