“The significance of the public service to the overall wellbeing of the country has never been more evident than during the past 10 months.”—Michael McGrath, minister for public expenditure, 16 December 2020
Author: Declan McKenna
Everywhere lies—Damn lies everywhere
You don’t need to have an ideological position to recognise that capitalism is rotten to the core. It is a massive lie from start to finish; but, like any lie that is repeated time and time again, the lies become “truth.”
Whether you are in the middle of a supermarket or the middle of a war, you are surrounded by a cushion of lies, designed to both confuse you and comfort you and always aimed to make you believe that you have no power.
CETA must be stopped
THE GOVERNMENT has been forced to postpone a controversial vote on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA)—a free-trade agreement between the European Union and Canada—until the new year.
It had hoped to have it ratified by the Dáil after a 55-minute debate on 15 December. The vote had already been postponed from October to give the Green Party leader, Eamon Ryan, time to convince his members to support the treaty, which he has failed to do. A number of senior members still have concerns, and they are attempting to
Little reason to celebrate the state of Northern Ireland
The six county state of Northern Ireland will reach its hundredth birthday in May. The British government, with enthusiastic support from Northern unionists, is making preparations to celebrate the anniversary.
Though claiming to emphasise the future rather than its history, it is inevitable that the nature of the Northern state, past, present, and future, must come under scrutiny. With even the best will in the world it is …
Nothing to celebrate
HUNDRED years after the partition of Ireland, a survey carried out by the Nevin Economic Research Institute on the annual earnings of workers in the North has exposed the reality for workers living in this British colony.
Wages in the North are much lower than any region in Britain, as are those of workers on low pay, with a quarter of all workers earning less than the living wage.
Working from home is a benefit for bosses
REMOTE WORKING, or working from home, is not something new. It has existed and been used at different stages of capitalist development and innovation, reflecting the state of technological development at that time and the cost-benefit to profit creation. Today it’s the same factors, considerations and driving forces as before. Take weaving and the manufacture of clothes as an example.
World’s poor left at the mercy of Covid
As 2020 comes to an end—a year that many would like to forget— sadly, despite the world pandemic, there is no good will from global capitalism towards the peoples of the global south in their battle against covid-19.
The TRIPS Council of the World Trade Organization, which deals with intellectual property rights, debated a proposal tabled by India and South Africa, supported by Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and Kenya,
O’Donnell Forum weekend of webinar to celebrate “War for Independence”
For anyone interested in politics, the last weekend in November’s online festival, organised by the Peadar O’Donnell Socialist Republican Forum, offered a wide range of views…
Imperialists promote subversion in Cuba
The farce of San Isidro in Havana, a new attempt – FAILED – of political destabilization and interference by the United States Government against Cuba Dear Friends, In recent days, social networks, essentially through Facebook, and western media have tried to make news of an artificial event that occurred in […]
Who said that?
“We’ve never had this dilemma between health and the economy. Obviously, the restrictive measures we’ve adopted . . . have had an economic impact but there’s no room for doubt that health comes first.”—Alejandro Gil Fernández, Cuban minister of economy and planning. “We are used to financial institutions making honest efforts to […]
The left, human rights, and class
During the second half of the twentieth century there was an ideological shift within the left in the West, namely from being the organised expression of the working class to seeing the working class as one among a variety of interest groups to be defended. The interests of any collective […]
Examining the contours of a developing crisis
Visible manifestations of social unrest have decreased considerably during the pandemic as people are unable to meet, organise or travel. This is shown by research conducted by the IMF in Figure 1 comparing major social unrest events with mobility data. Normality may be suspended to a large degree, but the […]
In America, political fantasies warn us of what the new decade may bring
“The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of us—black and white—rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal, and mismanagement.” Matt […]
Victory in Bolivia gives renewed hope
THE VICTORY of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in the Bolivian general election in October is a great result for the popular forces in Bolivia as well as anti-imperialist forces in Latin America and around the world.
Following the coup and the exile of President Evo Morales in November of 2019, the attempts by the regime of Jeanine Áñez to criminalise the struggles of the working class and Indigenous peoples of Bolivia has failed to defeat the MAS electorally.
Dreaming of “liberal socialism”
IN SEPTEMBER the former Greek minister of finance and self-described “libertarian Marxist” Yanis Varoufakis published his vision of a post-capitalist world in his new book, Another Now. He has explained that his motivation for writing the book stems from his belief that Marxists have yet to set out a detailed plan for how a socialist economy and society might function,
Identity politics, the far right, and masks
With the rise of the far right it is worth considering the issue of identity politics and the left. This, Eoin McDermott argues, is a type of politics that takes identity, often essentialised, as the central category for organisation and analysis. Its left-wing variant is