Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
It has long been held that states do not have friends, they have interests.¹ With that in mind I read the Defence Forces Review, 2020,² to see how an important part of the Irish state bureaucracy, the officer corps of the Defence Forces and the civil servants within the Department […]
Three important events happened in 1979 that continue to explain the modern struggles in the Middle East: the Islamic revolution (i.e. counter-revolution) in Iran, the siege of Mecca, and the sponsoring of anti-communists in Afghanistan. After the Second World War the Middle East experienced the growth of anti-colonial movements, which […]
The Americas are very much the front line in the struggle against US imperialism’s drive for unipolar, planetary dominance. The United States first tested its Monroe Doctrine there—the brazen assumption that the entire continent is America’s “back yard”—and has since sought to export this sense of colonial proprietorship throughout the […]
One hundred and ten years ago James Connolly opened up what became known as the Connolly-Walker controversy with the following sentence: “All thoughtful men and women who observe the political situations of their countries must realise that Ireland is on the verge of one of the most momentous constitutional changes […]
■ This is the first in a short series of articles dealing with the Middle East Palestine was first occupied by the Ottoman Empire, but after the break-up of that entity in the First World War it was transferred to the British Empire under the Sykes-Picot agreement, which divided up […]
Mephistopheles, a demon of German legend, says: “Hell is where I am. Wherever I go I’m still in it.” These words are relevant to imperialism as well. Recently the world’s attention converged on two issues: Ivan Duque’s oppression of the Colombian people’s strike and the Israeli bombing of Palestine. In […]
Before the Industrial Revolution, human activity did not create new, global environmental conditions that could translate into a fundamentally different stratigraphic signal. Since then, however, the exploration of coal, oil and gas, in particular, has enabled worldwide industrialisation, construction, and mass transport, producing a wide range of changes that leave […]
This year is the 50th anniversary of the Anti-Internment League, founded in London after the introduction of internment in the North of Ireland in 1971. The League, which brought together Irish and British left-wing campaigners, had two core demands: the immediate release of all internees, and the immediate withdrawal of […]
Following its most recent meeting, the National Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Ireland, is calling upon the trade union movement and progressive forces to demand that the Government break with the failed approach of allowing the EU Commission to control vaccination strategy and instead to obtain additional supplies […]
According to its high representative for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, the EU at present has 5,000 troops stationed around the world under its aegis.¹ Most of its operations are based in Africa (as shown in part 1 of this article). However, the EU’s most significant operation on the European continent […]
Two instructive headlines from the bourgeois financial news web site Business Insider give an indication of how the balance of global wealth has shifted since the covid-19 pandemic began in early 2020. The first: “Billionaires made $3.9 trillion during the pandemic,” informing us that the likes of the Victorian workhouse […]
Unity is indeed strength. We must ensure that the strength gained from Irish unity is for the working class. The partition of Ireland was an imperial solution as a result of the British empire beginning to crumble at the beginning of the last century. The British empire has been confined […]
Narcotics are, in some ways, just like any other commodity. Be it oil, natural gas, sugar, or coffee, under capitalism their purpose is to allow profits to be made. Hyper-consumerism has led to unequal levels of development in the Global North and South, social alienation in domestic markets, and environmental […]
Part 1 The Lisbon Treaty is working perfectly. Just as opponents of the EU in Ireland warned after the bloc’s leaders signed the treaty in December 2007, the last vestiges of the Irish state’s neutrality have disappeared over the last decade. The importance of the Lisbon Treaty to the incontrovertible […]
The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem, has judged Israel to be an apartheid state, bent on perpetuating the supremacy of Jews over Palestinians. “Israel is not a democracy that has a temporary occupation attached to it,” said the body’s executive director, Hagai El-Ad. “It […]
Dialectics says that everything is changing and everything is evolving. Capitalism is no exception—so can tactics for abolishing capitalism be the same? Capitalism was nascent during Marx’s time; and by the time Lenin arrived it had evolved into imperialism, which he said is the highest stage of capitalism. Marx’s assessment […]