Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Ransom ’79 (dir. Colm Quinn, 2024) is the story of Charlie Bird working on his final documentary, about a demand to extort £5 million from the government or foot-and-mouth disease would be unleashed into the south of Ireland, back in 1979. This is a true crime story, that remained covered […]
On Tuesday 25th June, the LGBT committee of CPI’s Dublin branch organised a screening of the East German film, Coming Out (dir. Heiner Carow, 1989), with party members and members of the public in attendance. Coming Out was the last film produced in the GDR, by the production house DEFA, […]
Spy thrillers about and accounts of East-West spying during the cold war abound, are always written from a particular Western political standpoint. Autobiographies relating the stories of former “agents for peace” on the other hand are rare. Beatrice Altman-Schevitz’ The Shadow in the Shadow is the only such memoir to […]
East German Literature: Challenges and Triumphs in Cultural Recognition Germany’s minister of state for culture, the senior Green politician Claudia Roth, one of the almost exclusively West German-born government officials, voiced her surprise at a recent literary event upon discovering that there were other books on East German (GDR) bookshelves […]
Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom saw its Dublin launch at Trinity College, mere minutes after the Trinity students celebrated the end of their encampment. The book launch was a chance to contextualise the euphoria of one of the first wins for the […]
The M-C-C’-M’ circuit means Money (M) which is exchanged for Commodities (C) – including labor power which also becomes a commodity in a capitalist society – involved in the production process to produce a value-added commodity (C’) which is sold for more Money (M’), and thus the accumulation of capital […]
In a departure from the usual week-long run of events, this year’s James Connolly Festival ran from Thursday to Sunday, culminating on 12th May: 107 years to the day that Ireland lost its greatest martyr and Marxist theoretician, James Connolly. It was at the outbreak of war in Europe during […]
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 […]
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 […]
George Gordon Lord Byron was born in London on 22 January 1788. In 1794, he inherited the title Baron Byron on the death of his great uncle, and was titled Lord Byron in 1798. He attended Harrow and went on to study at Cambridge in 1805. Here he published his […]
Until we Fall: Long Distance life on the left is a fascinating and sometimes inspiring account of decades of political engagement. The words Until We Fall distil the essence of six chapters into three words. Until We Fall suggests a commitment that is unwavering and a purpose all consuming. Anyone […]
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, […]
Kohei Saito’s book on degrowth communism was an unlikely bestseller in 2020, with half a million copies sold in Japan. This is an oft-cited line introducing Saito’s works in the West, in anticipation of the English translations. After the English translation of Marx in the Anthropocene coming out last year, […]
One of the major drawbacks to radical and transformative actions by activists involved in struggle, is the hoary old chestnut of a lack of class consciousness out there in the wider population… or so we like to believe. We say it constantly: why is it that there appears to be […]