Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
The 11th of November 2018 is the centenary of the ending of the First World War. During that bloody slaughter the propagandists described it as “the war to end all wars.” A hundred years and as many wars later, the militarists in the United States and Europe—many of them the […]
Paul Stewart, Tommy McKearney, Gearóid Ó Machail, Patricia Campbell, Brian Garvey, Between Sectarianism and Neo-Liberalism: The State of Northern Ireland and the Democratic Deficit (Glasgow: Vagabond Voices, 2018) If, like me, you mourn the loss of intelligent debate among Irish republicans as they descend into the gobbledegook of bourgeois democracy, […]
Panos Cosmatos’s film Mandy (2018) has received widespread acclaim for its visually arresting murder-and-revenge story, set in a heavily aestheticised 1980s rural America (thanks to the cinematography of Benjamin Loeb). This article is not so much a review of the film as a critical assessment of some of the political […]
Thro’ the shattered mainstream of life the waste land bears testimony to the shadow Hear mothers wail for dead children whose fathers slave to re-erect the rubble Upon the rubble their fathers erected This alter for sacrificed generations Build fast! Build furious! Erect the citadels of despair Light high in […]
Twenty years ago, on 8 October 1998, the communist writer José Saramago became the first Portuguese author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The first fifty years of Saramago’s life were defined by the fascist dictatorship that ruled Portugal from 1926 to 1974 and his active resistance against it. […]
Robin Hood, the legendary outlaw known throughout the world, has an unusual connection with Ireland, and an even stranger connection with the communist movement. No-one knows for certain whether Robin Hood ever existed or was based on a real individual. There are records of people named Robin Hood or similar […]
A Star Is Born has been remade for the fourth time and was released in Irish cinemas on 5 October. The retelling follows the familiar story of an aging male star—this time the country singer Jackson Maine (played by Bradley Cooper)—who happens across an ordinary woman whose talent is being […]
Forty-five years ago, on 11 September 1973, the Chilean military, under the command of General Augusto Pinochet and backed by the United States, overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. Allende, who had won the election in September 1970, was faced even before taking office with the enmity […]
Winner of the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film, In the Fade, by the Turkish-German director Fatih Akın, is one of the more important new political films on the state of Germany today. It is loosely based on the NSU (National Socialist Underground—i.e. fascist) trials, which were concluded this summer […]
BlacKkKlansman is Spike Lee’s latest cinematic offering, a dramatic dark comedy that is based on a true story of a black detective who goes undercover in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. The film has suffered criticism for being “anti-white” (the irony is tangible on that one) and for […]
Originally a poem by the great Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and translated into English by Jeannette Turner. Here Gabriel Rosenstock translates Pete Seeger’s version of this great antiwar song (https://tinyurl.com/pnyykae). Im’ sheasamh ar gach tairseach bím Im’ sheasamh ar gach tairseach bím Ní chloistear áfach mo choiscéim An […]
Robert Tressell’s book The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists is the first important working-class novel in English literature, written between 1906 and 1910 and first published posthumously, and very abridged, in 1914. The working class has championed this novel about their experience and written from their own point-of-view like no other working-class novel […]
30 July 2018 is the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth. Her singular novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), challenges class society in an amazing way. In the mid-1840s England was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, as described by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). […]
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Two hundred years after the birth of Marx, looking back from our 21st-century vantage point into the middle of the nineteenth century, we ask, How useful is Marxism as a tool for understanding society […]
This year’s Connolly Festival was another step in the consolidation of the festival as an important cultural and political event. Nearly all the events attracted a full house, and the response was uniformly positive. The festival opened with the unveiling of an exhibition on the life of James Connolly to […]
Over the weekend of the 25th and 26th of May the first Connolly Festival in Co. Monaghan took place, the birthplace of the parents of James Connolly, John Connolly and Mary McGinn from Áth an Lobhair in the impoverished townland of Coillidh Chuanach, who left Co. Monaghan and settled in […]