Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
As South Korea faces political turmoil – an impeached president, public outrage, and a pivotal election – recent events reveal deeper systemic fractures rooted in imperialism, authoritarianism, and comprador capitalism. Historical Foundations: Colonialism and Cold War Repression South Korea’s modern political economy was forged under Japanese colonialism (1910–1945), which exploited […]
When you mention “the politics of food”, most people look at you askance. Through no fault of their own, they have never been told about the crucial links of consumerism, politics or economics to food and its production. They certainly know about the Thatcherite “hand-bag” economics. The ever-rising cost of […]
Marxists know well the state is not a neutral arbiter but a mechanism for managing the affairs of the capitalist class. While the state may exhibit relative autonomy, that is, it can act independently from capital, it functions, in the last instance, to reproduce the conditions for accumulation, whether state […]
China’s economy is now 23% larger than the US according to the IMF. China is the largest trading partner with Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Japan and third largest to the EU. The Belt and Road Initiative has gone from strength to strength since 2013 and is the centrepiece […]
In Gaza today, we are witnessing an atrocity: an attempt not merely to kill a people but to erase them. Whole families exterminated, hospitals turned to rubble, libraries turned to ash. This is not simply military conquest, it is the logic of settler colonialism: the logic of elimination. The goal […]
This year’s James Connolly Festival runs from Tuesday 6th to Sunday 11th May 2025 with almost all events taking place at Connolly House and The New Theatre. It will include a week-long James Connolly Art Exhibition. Seven artists have been invited to prepare prints and paintings that will be available […]
1800s British colonialism’s “hierarchy of races” saw white Europeans as superior peoples, followed by east Asians, with the Irish tied with Africans, coming just ahead of the Australian aborigines, who placed bottom of the ladder. This grotesque “race science” would be taken up and furthered by the Nazis later on, […]
Western Marxism (WM) by Dominico Losurdo, translated into English and published recently by Monthly Review, is an important work exposing the idealism, pro-imperialism and eurocentrism (i.e. the paternalistic approach towards struggles in the periphery) of western Marxists. In the introduction, the book explains that WM is not a geographical orientation […]
Ilan Pappé, as readers may know, is one of the most controversial of Israel’s “new historians” after having sacrificed his academic career there by publishing extensively on the buried history of the Nakba and challenging official Zionist accounts of the colonisation of Palestine. His most recent work, Lobbying for Zionism […]
By the end of China’s civil war in 1949, the country was severely damaged: its agriculture decimated, most transport routes destroyed, the industrial infrastructure looted by the Japanese. Despite chaos, poverty, and hunger, Mao Zedong successfully built a centrally planned economy and a self-reliant military. The first Five-Year Plan in […]
What lies behind the British Government’s announcement last month that it intends to commission the production of what is being described in Westminster as an “official history of UK government policy towards Northern Ireland during The Troubles”? Due to the nature of the commissioning process and the fact that this […]
The German Peasants’ War (1524–1525) was a large-scale social and political uprising in early modern Europe, where peasants, who constituted the majority of the population, revolted against the oppressive feudal system. Trapped in servitude, the peasants were burdened with labour and levies to the nobility while a growing bourgeois class […]
At the end of April, the first draft of China’s Environment Code was presented. The second large legislative undertaking in this decade for the Chinese legislators after the introduction of the Civil Code, the Environment Code harmonises the corpus of over 30 environment laws, amounting for 10% of the overall […]
In last month’s article1, we argued that public ownership is not enough, but that it must be combined with democratic planning to truly serve the working class. Planning is the linchpin of socialism: the conscious, collective organisation of economic life for the common good. This article takes that argument further […]
Diarmaid Ferriter, who has come to be something resembling the public face of “History” in the respectable Irish media, has cannily inverted the title of his popular 2004 work The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 in his latest book The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020, which represents a sequel of sorts outlining […]
The Communist Party of Ireland sends May Day greetings to the working class of Ireland, to all anti-imperialist and progressive organisations, to the international Communist movement, to all those struggling against imperialism, colonialism, fascism and native capitalism, and to those actively struggling to build socialism in their workplaces and communities. […]
There has always been great talk in Ireland that Ireland is a neutral country. Nothing could be further from the truth. The evidence for this is based on our 900 years of occupation by British Imperialism. Non-neutrality was reinforced by the outcome of the 1922 counter-revolutionary civil war in Ireland. […]
The Communist Party of Ireland sends May Day greetings to the working class of Ireland, to all anti-imperialist and progressive organisations, to the international Communist movement, to all those struggling against imperialism, colonialism, fascism and native capitalism, and to those actively struggling to build socialism in their workplaces and communities. […]
The women of the Communist Party of Ireland would like to offer our deepest solidarity with the Mothers Against Genocide group, we share the outrage felt across the solidarity movement at your horrific treatment. In your fight to expose the genocide currently being carried out by the Zionist occupation against […]
It was the 8th of March in 1917, in the midst of World War I, when women workers took to the streets with the cry of “Peace, Land and Bread” and began the process of the Russian Revolution. Women have since remained at the forefront of the anti-war struggle, here […]
The current coalition government of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and motley crew of right-wing independent TDs has found itself embroiled in a bitter row with the opposition over speaking rights in the Dáil for those independents who support the government. At the same time as the Dáil was in “turmoil” […]
Investigating an Economic Alternative, Part 4 Over the past three articles, we have dismantled the myths of capitalist efficiency, exposed the failures of privatisation, and demonstrated the necessity of public ownership as a democratic imperative. We have argued that nationalisation of key sectors of the economy and the use of […]
In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of noise about instability in the NATO military alliance. The EU is up in arms about Trump’s diplomacy with Putin and US pronouncements that they may not defend NATO allies slacking on defence spending. Tánaiste Simon Harris said “a gulf […]
As recent announcements indicate, both the European Union and the British government have markedly oriented public spending policies towards militarisation. The North of our island has been a direct recipient of such expenditures, notably Thales in Belfast. Military expenditure historically plays three important roles in capitalist societies: it protects the […]
May I beg to differ with the carefully created mainstream media consensus surrounding Micheál Martin’s meeting last month with US president Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance? Ireland’s establishment media took the view that the Taoiseach had very skilfully handled an incredibly challenging situation and had, thankfully, exited the […]
Since plants have to mate and produce offspring while rooted to the spot, they have to be pollinated: by wind, water, or animals – most commonly insects. They use a surprising array of tricks to attract pollinators: striking colours, iridescent light effects and enticing scents, to name but a few. […]
What distinguishes Marxist-Leninist parties from others on the “Left”? How do we differ from the various types of Social Democratic, Anarchist or Trotskyist parties? A central difference, perhaps the central difference, is our understanding of the process of historical change. We study society through the prism of dialectical and historical […]
First covered in The Irish Times in 2017, sex-for-rent is periodic news fodder and is a lasting, if not growing, feature of the rental market in Ireland. Predatory landlords advertise properties either specifying women tenants only or merely dismissing messages from men, and then as the prospective tenant arrives, they […]
Despite Wahhabi jihadist Jolani’s assurances that minorities would be safe in new Syria, Alawite communities have been subject to a number of massacres since December 2024. On 4th March, Jolani’s gangs of the so-called “new Syria” regime launched a campaign against Alawites in the Daatour neighbourhood of Latakia. Mainstream media […]
Comrades from the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) recently participated in a series of events in Tarancón, Jarama, Madrid and Co Tyrone organised by Friends of the International Brigades Ireland (FIBI) to commemorate the heroic sacrifices of the International Brigades in the Spanish Anti-Fascist War 1936-1939. The International Brigades were […]
In 19th-century England, a new realism in painting emerged, driven by the country’s advanced capitalist development compared to the European continent. Landscape painting became the hallmark of this realism, particularly with William Turner (1775–1851). Turner’s work sought to capture the immense forces of nature while reflecting social transformations. A lifelong […]
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, authors of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, successfully cover an impressive range of topics in a coherent, extremely readable volume. When we speak of the book’s readability, in this case it is a testament to superb skill in using technical language when […]
The women of the Communist Party of Ireland would like to offer our deepest solidarity with the Mothers Against Genocide group, we share the outrage felt across the solidarity movement at your horrific treatment. In your fight to expose the genocide currently being carried out by the Zionist occupation against […]
It was the 8th of March in 1917, in the midst of World War I, when women workers took to the streets with the cry of “Peace, Land and Bread” and began the process of the Russian Revolution. Women have since remained at the forefront of the anti-war struggle, here […]
Indisputably, the exploitation of women under capitalism is deeply rooted in the class structure of society and the economic system itself, and even a rudimentary class analysis quickly reveals how capitalism perpetuates and benefits from the oppression of women, particularly working-class women. Under capitalism women must battle with the dual […]
Investigating an Economic Alternative, Part 3 In the previous two articles a case for public ownership has been made based on the economic and social benefits of taking key industries into public ownership[1]. In this article we will explore the theme of democracy and the deepening of democratic principles through […]
