Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Paul Lynch’s novel Prophet Song has deservedly been short-listed for this year’s Booker Literary Award. The author spins a chillingly realistic tale of an Ireland governed by a fascistic regime in the throes of an armed conflict with its local opponents. The regime’s definition of public order is maintained by […]
In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pablo Neruda describes his escape from the Chilean government of Jorge Videla across the Andes to Argentina. The arduous and dangerous trek through this primeval world becomes a parable of humanity’s path through its own history and present, a world […]
Indigo Girls (Amy Ray and Emily Saliers) opened their recent show in what was without doubt an incredible performance, singing a combination of folk-protest songs and country music in a sold-out National Concert Hall, Dublin. They performed without orchestral accompaniment or flashing lights: just two women with acoustic guitars playing […]
In the age of social media, the term “vibe” is often used as shorthand for aesthetic, often with the substance shifted into the background and just picking up on the visual, sensory or language aspect of an object, movement, culture, or politics. I was reminded of this term when reading […]
■ Carlos Martinez, The East Is Still Red (Glasgow: Praxis Press, 2023) The East Is Still Red is a very readable and able defence of the current People’s Republic of China. The basic argument of the book is that China is on the right path with regard to building socialism, […]
■ Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997) In the thirty-two years since the Soviet Union was dissolved and Fukuyama’s “end of history” began, more and more young people are becoming communists. Multiple failures of capitalism—runaway rent and housing costs, and unabated climate disaster—are bringing young […]
Seán O’Casey—the first proletarian dramatist writing in English—made his theme the struggle for the emancipation of the Irish people and, by extension, of all working people. In Ireland, O’Casey is (unfairly) best known for his first three plays, examining the Irish working class at crucial moments of history. The Shadow […]
Brecht and radically proletarian art The majority of theatre broadly falls under the umbrella of dramatic theatre. It will have a linear plotline, actors who wholly inhabit well-developed characters, structured, thought-out themes, etc. Bertolt Brecht, the German Marxist playwright, would call it escapism. Brecht held that “art is not a […]
■ James Plunkett, Strumpet City (London: Hutchinson, 1969) The years from 1907 to 1914 are the subject of James Plunkett’s book Strumpet City. Set in this period before Irish independence, the collective hero of the novel is the working class, as it enters a new phase of its class struggle. […]
The film Oppenheimer begins with a mention of Prometheus, the Greek god who is cursed by Zeus for not abiding by the law, stealing fire and giving it to humans in the form of knowledge. Oppenheimer is portrayed as a present-day Prometheus who is applauded for using his knowledge of […]
Following my previous article on ChatGPT and machine learning models, I would like to shed some further light on why those models should be heavily scrutinised and monitored. So I’m going to share with you a personal story to demonstrate how they can end up being used to expropriate free […]
Sinéad O’Connor, who died on 26 July, was well known for her music career but was also a committed activist and republican. At one of her concerts in 1990 in the United States she approached officials to demand that the US national anthem not be played. This resulted in several […]
The emergence of the bourgeoisie between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries from traders, merchants and artisans marked the beginning of the modern, capitalist era, beginning in Italy. This new social class, seeking political power to underpin and further its growing economic might, found expression in the Renaissance, which displayed its […]
The show began at the Riverbank Arts Centre in Droichead Nua, with Lisa supported by a group of very talented musicians as she read stories and letters, from a large old-style book, about a time before electrification, radio, and the dance hall, an emotional performance that also included songs from […]
One of the lasting effects of the continuing Cold War against all socialist thought and culture is the West’s denial of the art of socialist countries. This affects all genres in all the socialist countries. The work of these artists is rarely readily available to the general public, and sidelined […]
The documentary Reds na hÉireann (dir. Kevin Brannigan, 2023), shown on TG4 on 24th May 2023, probably served as a bit of an eye-opener for many people whose ideas of communism and communists have been shaped by a century of relentless, hostile propaganda from the apologists and defenders of capitalism […]