This November, tens of millions of working people around the world will celebrate the centenary of the Russian Revolution, which took place on 7 November 1917 (or 25 October according to the Julian calendar, then used in Russia). To understand how the revolution happened we need to place it in […]
History
A legacy of struggle for humanity
Käthe Kollwitz, whose work is on exhibition for the first time in the National Gallery of Ireland, was one of Germany’s greatest artists and sculptors. She stands tall among anti-war artists and champions of the dispossessed of our time.Kollwitz broke completely with bourgeois aesthetics and made the subjugated, humiliated working […]
A fitting account of a great communist
The play Jimmy’s Hall, running at the Abbey Theatre, is said to be adapted from Paul Laverty’s film script of the same name, directed by Ken Loach. When the film was first mooted it sent a scurry of excitement around certain sections of the left, and in particular the CPI, […]
Thoughts on ideology
The ideas that reflect the objective interests of a class are its ideology. The ruling class in any society imprints its ideology on “mainstream” thinking, as expressed in all the official opinions of the state—in politics, economics, philosophy, art, religion, and so on. As it expresses the interests of the […]