English nationalism displaced international class solidarity among workers after 1850.

Evidence

Together, these political and economic setbacks—on the one hand to English and Irish industrial workers, and on the other to Irish farmers, peasants, and industrial workers in Ireland—resulted in both an ideological and physical drifting apart of the two “races.” From the mid-nineteenth century on, among English workers, the ideology of English nationalism gained ascendancy over the counterideology of international class solidarity and socialist hopes. … This was a part of a conservative reaction (trade unionism) to political defeat and economic growth, but it also had to do with the radical directions the Irish working classes (and the nationalist Irish middle class) had taken. As Marx had often stated in one fashion or another: “The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 265

Together, these political and economic setbacks—on the one hand to English and Irish industrial workers, and on the other to Irish farmers, peasants, and industrial workers in Ireland—resulted in both an ideological and physical drifting apart of the two “races.” From the mid-nineteenth century on, among English workers, the ideology of English nationalism gained ascendancy over the counterideology of international class solidarity and socialist hopes. This was a part of a conservative reaction (trade unionism) to political defeat and economic growth, but it also had to do with the radical directions the Irish working classes (and the nationalist Irish middle class) had taken. As Marx had often stated in one fashion or another: “The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland.” Early on, of course, it had been the presence of the Irish immigrant as a distorting and depressive element in the labor market that had produced markedly anti-Irish sentiment among English workers. This hostility had merely confirmed and complemented the racial feeling extant among England’s ruling classes, the historical bases of which we traced above. Later, from the 1850s on, the development of sympathy among English workers toward Irish nationalism became even more remote with the appearances of Irish Radical (middle-class) nationalism—the Home Rule movement—and the more radical peasant and working-class nationalist movement that assumed the form of a revolutionary agrarian movement. By the end of the nineteenth century, the English people were at one with respect to the Irish Question. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 265

Categorization

• XREF: This is the downfall arc the reader seeks: the mechanism by which nationalist ideology fractured the radical working-class tradition. — connects to: Class position shaped rival explanations of the 1847-8 crisis. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1646; The 1848 revolutions forced workers to reconcile local place with international space — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1657; The 1920 depression fragmented union solidarity into defensive per-industry retreat — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 412 (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that English workers’ embrace of nationalism was both a conservative reaction AND a response to Irish radicalism’s increasingly nationalist direction captures a genuinely dialectical, non-obvious process of the tradition’s decline.
• QUESTION: The claim that Irish immigrant presence ‘distorted and depressed’ the labor market mirrors — and arguably was the template for — English/British racial ideology later applied to non-white immigrants; worth chasing whether Robinson explicitly draws this continuity.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 265