Still reading The Seven: The Lives And Legacies Of The Founding Fathers Of The Irish Republic. Not that I know much about the history of socialism, but it seems like James Connolly had the idea of socialism in one country long before Stalin, square brackets mine:
In deference to the nationalism of those he was trying to convert, [Connolly's 1896 manifesto] also denounced the 'subjection of one nation to another, as of Ireland to the authority of the British Crown', and called for an 'Irish Socialist Republic'. This was a novel idea that Connolly developed in three articles in the ILP's weekly, Labour Leader, designed to persuade British Marxists to abandon their belief that Home Rule for Ireland was a necessary stage before the proletariat took over throughout the British Empire. 'The interests of labour all the world over are identical, it is true,' he said, 'but it is also true that each country had better work out its own salvation on the lines most congenial to its own people.'
Edit: More research has me discovering that this wasn't quite a pre-empting of Stalin, and that Lenin saw Connolly as unobjectionable enough to take inspiration from him.
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Notes -
Still reading The Seven: The Lives And Legacies Of The Founding Fathers Of The Irish Republic. Not that I know much about the history of socialism, but it seems like James Connolly had the idea of socialism in one country long before Stalin, square brackets mine:
Edit: More research has me discovering that this wasn't quite a pre-empting of Stalin, and that Lenin saw Connolly as unobjectionable enough to take inspiration from him.
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