Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
This year’s James Connolly festival opens on Thursday 9th May 2024 with a panel discussion titled ‘Land And The People’. We ask the question: what is our relationship to land and resources? We’ll be joined by Sinead Mercier, Patrick Bresnihan, Róisn Ní Chinnéide and Rory Rowan. Friday 10th May will […]
The Socialist Voice is to be commended for providing the only party medium on the Irish left that supports critical debate. Such debate was evident in the February, March, and April editions on unions in the North. These articles reflected on the Assembly and its potential for worker rights. One […]
For over 6 months, the imperialists who trumpet the virtues of their so-called “rules-based international order” continue to support the genocide of Gaza. The US, Britain, Germany, and France continue to sponsor and sell arms to their settler-colonial Zionist state. Even the Irish government, who talk big on Gaza, have […]
The historical narrative that we are taught has been consciously constructed by the ruling class. This historical narrative is constructed so that those of the ruling class are seen as the driving force of history and those of us who make up the working class are merely dragged along. This […]
Liberal environmentalism is in a perpetual crisis; it is unsurprising that the crisis is a chance to escape the individualist traps with which it is riddled. A pamphlet I recently read illustrates well where boundaries of such environmentalism lie. Two points were particularly illustrative and left ample space for Marxist-Leninist […]
Over the past quarter century, there has existed in the North of Ireland a political policy known as “constructive ambiguity”. A stratagem long practiced by British colonial administrators, it first emerged in public discourse during the negotiations leading to the Good Friday Agreement. More than a little patronising, the underlying […]
With the developing narrative around the EU directive on adequate minimum wages, workers should not be duped into believing that the EU is some sort of a benign benefactor for workers’ rights. The EU directive on adequate minimum wage claims to be an effort to reduce working poverty and inequality […]
Duke Ellington, a prominent figure in music and cultural history, especially in jazz, died fifty years ago on May 24, 1974. Edward Kennedy Ellington was born into a lower middle-class family in Washington on April 29, 1899. His mother was the daughter of a former slave. Ellington’s childhood was marked […]
There’s been a word on every activist’s lips recently; burnout. For the last 7 months, thousands of people who typically spend their evenings or weekends stopping illegal evictions, tackling environmental collapse, unionising workplaces, undermining the recently empowered far-right and a plethora of political and altruistic endeavours, have added the genocide […]
This short article asks the genuine question is it time for a new popular front formation to defend democracy and fight fascism, however, in the current concrete environment by necessity it would need to be different from 90 years ago, and so, how? The popular front concept was a communist […]
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest announces itself dramatically, with a blank screen and two minutes of foreboding music by Mica Levi heralding something ominous and important. The film, loosely based on the Martin Amis novel of the same name, centres around the professional and family life of Rudolf Höss, […]
“I live according to the rules ‘visit no one, do not receive anyone’—to which I once added ‘and do not open the peephole on the door for an old woman from Al-Bireh’—and ‘measures, precautions, requirements, and rules.’ Between this and that, I resist and I cook, I sleep, I dream, […]
It is important to distinguish between wars of oppression and liberation wars, between imperialist invasion and resistance to it. Anti-imperialist wars create a different consciousness among the population. In early 1942, the artist Sofia Sergeyevna Uranova (1910-1988) was drafted and remained in her division until the end of the war, […]
It is hardly surprising that many progressive people have become increasingly uneasy about the Sinn Féin leadership’s relationship with the British establishment. Party vice president and Stormont First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, was recently pictured in a close embrace with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, while only last May, along with […]
The tricolour that draped Michael Gaughan’s coffin was used for Terence McSwiney’s funeral, contributed by life-long Communist Party member Muriel MacSwiney, widow of Terence MacSwiney. During the people’s resistance against injustice in the North of Ireland, it was said that ordinary people did extraordinary things. This could be said of […]
Socialist Voice articles last month by Jimmy Doran and Niall Cullinane provided the basis of an interesting discussion in the Greater Belfast Branch of the CPI. The articles were about the January 18th “Generalised Strike Action” across the North, directed against the British Tory Secretary of State for withholding funding […]