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 […]
Culture
Films – Some harsh truths about American police and politics
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 […]
I Come And Stand At Every Door
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 […]
Tressell’s work is a timeless piece of working class literature
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 […]
Emily Brontë, Heathcliff, and the nature of class society
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). […]
Opinion – Marxism in the twenty-first century
“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 […]
Connolly Festival, 2018
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 […]
Connolly Festival in Clones
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 […]
Poetry: Fóntacht na filíochta
Leabhar dátheangach (Fraincis–Béarla) é If the Symptoms Persist, dánta le Francis Combes aistrithe go Béarla ag Alan Dent agus foilsithe ag Smokestack Books (www.smokestack-books.co.uk). Creideann Combes san fhilíocht, filíocht de shaghas áirithe, une poésie d’utilité publique. Is réabhlóideach an dearcadh é sin ar go leor slite. File réabhlóideach é Combes. […]
Saluting the creator of political photomontage
John Heartfield died fifty years ago, on 26 April 1968. He was the creator of political photomontage, a fearless communist and activist. Helmut Herzfeld was born on 19 June 1891 in Berlin. In 1899 his parents abandoned Herzfeld, his brother and two sisters at a very young age. The children […]
Poetry: O’Connell Street
A Francis Ledwidge poem translated to Irish by Gabriel Rosenstock
King Lear today
Just before thousands of students agonise once again over the question of Lear’s madness and other issues, Socialist Voice presents a Marxist view, based on understanding Shakespeare’s times. Shakespeare lived in early capitalist society, marked by an uninhibited pursuit of power on the one hand and a new, humanist image […]
Film Review: No stone unturned?
No Stone Unturned (2017) is a documentary film about the Loughinisland massacre, directed by Alex Gibney. For those unaware of what happened in Loughinisland or, like me, who were born after the events took place, the two-hour documentary is well worth watching; and for those who remember the events well […]
International Working Women’s Day celebrated in Dublin
On the 8th of March in the Liquor Rooms in Dublin the CYM and CPI held their first joint celebration of International Working Women’s Day, under the heading “A Different Perspective.” The night was kicked off by a brief introduction to the history of International Working Women’s Day as well […]
Creating revolutionary mass media in a social-media world
“The purpose of our meeting today is precisely to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people […]
James Connolly Festival, 2018
The James Connolly Festival (from Wednesday 9 May to Sunday 13 May 2018), now in its fourth year, is an annual community-centred celebration of music, films, theatre, and debate, with a radical twist. Since its foundation in 2014 the festival has aimed to bring together friends and supporters, critics and […]