Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
“Right now there are changes happening, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years, and we are the ones driving these changes together”
— Xi Jinping, President of the People's Republic of China, to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, at their summit in Moscow, 22nd March 2023
A current fashion within the left is the championing of multipolarity. It assumes a bloc of states in different countries, some with more mixed economies than others, as objectively “anti-imperialist” insofar as they present a threat to the American hegemon. Some of this interpretation is jaundiced, especially when one considers […]
Indigo Girls (Amy Ray and Emily Saliers) opened their recent show in what was without doubt an incredible performance, singing a combination of folk-protest songs and country music in a sold-out National Concert Hall, Dublin. They performed without orchestral accompaniment or flashing lights: just two women with acoustic guitars playing […]
In the age of social media, the term “vibe” is often used as shorthand for aesthetic, often with the substance shifted into the background and just picking up on the visual, sensory or language aspect of an object, movement, culture, or politics. I was reminded of this term when reading […]
■ Carlos Martinez, The East Is Still Red (Glasgow: Praxis Press, 2023) The East Is Still Red is a very readable and able defence of the current People’s Republic of China. The basic argument of the book is that China is on the right path with regard to building socialism, […]
■ Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997) In the thirty-two years since the Soviet Union was dissolved and Fukuyama’s “end of history” began, more and more young people are becoming communists. Multiple failures of capitalism—runaway rent and housing costs, and unabated climate disaster—are bringing young […]
Seán O’Casey—the first proletarian dramatist writing in English—made his theme the struggle for the emancipation of the Irish people and, by extension, of all working people. In Ireland, O’Casey is (unfairly) best known for his first three plays, examining the Irish working class at crucial moments of history. The Shadow […]
Brecht and radically proletarian art The majority of theatre broadly falls under the umbrella of dramatic theatre. It will have a linear plotline, actors who wholly inhabit well-developed characters, structured, thought-out themes, etc. Bertolt Brecht, the German Marxist playwright, would call it escapism. Brecht held that “art is not a […]
Part 2 ■ Part 1 was published in the August issue here The Communist Party of Ireland recently accepted an invitation from the International Department of the Communist Party of China to attend the 3rd Communist Party Leaders’ Delegation of North American, Oceanian and Nordic Countries at three venues in […]
Last month’s Socialist Voice had an article on “learning with the people.” The writer made the point about its content that “is anything being said that hasn’t been said a thousand times before? Almost certainly not.” While that may be true, it seems that it’s often forgotten. Socialist movements are […]
The 15th summit of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) was held in South Africa in August under the slogan “Partnership for Mutually Accelerated Growth, Sustainable Development, and Inclusive Multilateralism.” More than sixty countries from around the world participated in this summit, which made the momentous decision to […]
The high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy, Josef Borrell, visited Cuba on 25–27 May to represent the EU at the third Joint Council of the EU-Cuba Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement (PDCA), which was set up in 2018. This process, established with the full […]
On 13 July, An Taisce hosted Kevin Anderson’s talk “A Velvet or Violent Climate Revolution: Which Will We Choose?” in the Tailors’ Hall in Dublin. Anderson was introduced as a climate scientist “telling it as it is,” a tagline reinforced by his opening slide, in which he warned the audience […]
The dystopia that awaits our children, and their children The ladder has been well and truly pulled up on younger generations—and not just that, but the earth around them has been set on fire. Not everyone shares equal blame for this; and not every state shares equal blame. It is […]
It has often been said that the nature of a country is reflected in the state of its prisons. We should add to that by including the nature of policing in any society. Think, for example, of the Six Counties before the Good Friday Agreement and its police, the RUC, […]
The Industrial Relations Act (1990) was designed to control workers, and it attacked the trade union movement at its very core by making solidarity between workers illegal. This was done by restricting workers taking industrial action together, dividing work-places into separate grades, and banning support strikes. Solidarity is the foundation […]
Following a protest organised by the Communist Party of Ireland outside the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin to condemn the Government’s decision to provide weapons training to the Ukrainian armed forces, the following letter was handed in to the minister for foreign affairs, Micheál Martin. The Communist Party of […]
The issue of Irish neutrality has begun to gain political traction. In August the Communist Party of Ireland organised a public meeting on neutrality in Belfast, took part in a protest against the pro-NATO theme of the MacGill Summer School in Co. Donegal, and held a demonstration outside the Department […]
A pretence of listening to the people
Listen to the latest episode of
The Irish Spark Podcast
■ James Plunkett, Strumpet City (London: Hutchinson, 1969) The years from 1907 to 1914 are the subject of James Plunkett’s book Strumpet City. Set in this period before Irish independence, the collective hero of the novel is the working class, as it enters a new phase of its class struggle. […]
Part 1 In this first part of a two-part report, Gearóid Ó Machail, member of the CPI National Political Committee, who travelled to China accompanied by the CPI general secretary, Jimmy Corcoran, provides an account of the delegation’s time spent in China and makes some observations based on his experience […]
The farming and rural community is in uproar with the news of the latest assault on farmers: the proposed plan to cull 200,000 cows out of the national herd. This, we are told by the government and mainstream media, is to help Ireland meet its climate goals. From what I […]
To my eternal embarrassment, it’s only in very recent times that I realised that, in the scale of human existence, capitalism was actually a very young system of living—or existing. For some reason, I never thought to see it in terms of age. It would seem obvious now, but it […]
The film Oppenheimer begins with a mention of Prometheus, the Greek god who is cursed by Zeus for not abiding by the law, stealing fire and giving it to humans in the form of knowledge. Oppenheimer is portrayed as a present-day Prometheus who is applauded for using his knowledge of […]
Following my previous article on ChatGPT and machine learning models, I would like to shed some further light on why those models should be heavily scrutinised and monitored. So I’m going to share with you a personal story to demonstrate how they can end up being used to expropriate free […]
Sinéad O’Connor, who died on 26 July, was well known for her music career but was also a committed activist and republican. At one of her concerts in 1990 in the United States she approached officials to demand that the US national anthem not be played. This resulted in several […]
On 22 June, RTE announced that it had overpaid Ryan Tubridy of the “Late Late Show” by a figure of €345,000. This was done through secretive deals and barter accounts, and resulted in Tubridy earning more than €500,000 each year. The following weeks saw wall-to-wall coverage of the scandal in […]
It is expected that by the time we go to press the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill will have been passed into law. The new legislation will establish what is described as an Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery, under the leadership of the former lord chief […]
On 13 July, An Taisce hosted Kevin Anderson’s talk “A Velvet or Violent Climate Revolution: Which Will We Choose?” in the Tailors’ Hall, Dublin. Anderson was introduced as a climate scientist “telling it as it is”—a tagline reinforced by his opening slide, in which he warned the audience that his […]
On 21 June the French government dissolved the environmental group Les Soulèvements de la Terre. The immediate cause cited in the decision was a clash of the activists with the police while resisting the construction of a reservoir in the west of the country. The group was dissolved as a […]
The draft All-Ireland Strategic Rail Review is an excellent start to the changes that must be implemented if we are to reach our emissions targets and seriously tackle climate change. The review can only be published in draft form, as the Stormont Assembly is not sitting, and it will be […]
The threat to completely abandon what remains of Irish neutrality is a continuing and increasing one. The recent intervention of President Higgins may have slowed down Micheál Martin’s march to NATO, but the threat remains. Rather than applying for NATO membership immediately, the ruling class have set their sights as […]
History The theme of this alternative pride is the radical history of pride. As many people know, modern queer pride started in 1969, when queers, including many people of colour and then called transvestites (now you would say drag queens and trans people) fought back against a raid by the […]
As the trade union movement gathers in Kilkenny for the ICTU biennial delegate conference, we must take notice of the changing demographics of union membership. The average age of union members is 48. Only about 12 per cent of members are under 30 years of age. Despite the number of […]
If you don’t work in tech, most probably you have heard of ChatGPT, and thought that it’s amazing. Actually many who do work in tech would share your amazement—a system that can mimic humans to the extent that, many argue, it can pass the Turing test, the gold standard for […]
