Of all the leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, James Connolly, the great labour leader and agitator, was the only one with military experience. It was, after all, as an underage recruit to the British Army that Connolly first came to Ireland. But it's also worth remembering that later in life, during the First World War, and as the pressure for an Irish uprising grew ever stronger, Connolly wrote extensively on insurrectionary history and techniques, preparing the way for the struggle to come.
As WK Anderson pointed out in his excellent James Connolly and the Irish Left (1994), Connolly's principal self-identification was as a revolutionary, and all he did was contributory to that goal and purpose. He was not a militarist, and he was sceptical of the 'physical force tradition' in Irish republicanism. But Connolly was no pacifist, either, and recourse to force was always one of the options at the disposal of the revolution as far as he was concerned.
The interest in armed doctrine and ideas in Connolly is mirrored in the geo-tactical ideas of his great Italian contemporary Gramsci, whose thought - as Edward Said noted many years ago - is suffused with the metaphors of military action: territories, blocs, mutual siege, civil conquest, war of manoeuvre and war of position. I am posting here links to Connolly's essays on earlier uprisings, side by side with an essay on Armed Insurrection, 'a work of illegal propaganda written by a collective of Comintern military and political specialists', including Ho Chi Minh and Palmiro Togliatti, and now reissued by Verso:
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