Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
This year’s James Connolly Festival runs from Tuesday 6th to Sunday 11th May 2025 with almost all events taking place at Connolly House and The New Theatre. It will include a week-long James Connolly Art Exhibition. Seven artists have been invited to prepare prints and paintings that will be available […]
1800s British colonialism’s “hierarchy of races” saw white Europeans as superior peoples, followed by east Asians, with the Irish tied with Africans, coming just ahead of the Australian aborigines, who placed bottom of the ladder. This grotesque “race science” would be taken up and furthered by the Nazis later on, […]
Western Marxism (WM) by Dominico Losurdo, translated into English and published recently by Monthly Review, is an important work exposing the idealism, pro-imperialism and eurocentrism (i.e. the paternalistic approach towards struggles in the periphery) of western Marxists. In the introduction, the book explains that WM is not a geographical orientation […]
Ilan Pappé, as readers may know, is one of the most controversial of Israel’s “new historians” after having sacrificed his academic career there by publishing extensively on the buried history of the Nakba and challenging official Zionist accounts of the colonisation of Palestine. His most recent work, Lobbying for Zionism […]
By the end of China’s civil war in 1949, the country was severely damaged: its agriculture decimated, most transport routes destroyed, the industrial infrastructure looted by the Japanese. Despite chaos, poverty, and hunger, Mao Zedong successfully built a centrally planned economy and a self-reliant military. The first Five-Year Plan in […]
What lies behind the British Government’s announcement last month that it intends to commission the production of what is being described in Westminster as an “official history of UK government policy towards Northern Ireland during The Troubles”? Due to the nature of the commissioning process and the fact that this […]
The German Peasants’ War (1524–1525) was a large-scale social and political uprising in early modern Europe, where peasants, who constituted the majority of the population, revolted against the oppressive feudal system. Trapped in servitude, the peasants were burdened with labour and levies to the nobility while a growing bourgeois class […]
At the end of April, the first draft of China’s Environment Code was presented. The second large legislative undertaking in this decade for the Chinese legislators after the introduction of the Civil Code, the Environment Code harmonises the corpus of over 30 environment laws, amounting for 10% of the overall […]
In last month’s article1, we argued that public ownership is not enough, but that it must be combined with democratic planning to truly serve the working class. Planning is the linchpin of socialism: the conscious, collective organisation of economic life for the common good. This article takes that argument further […]
Diarmaid Ferriter, who has come to be something resembling the public face of “History” in the respectable Irish media, has cannily inverted the title of his popular 2004 work The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 in his latest book The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020, which represents a sequel of sorts outlining […]
The Communist Party of Ireland sends May Day greetings to the working class of Ireland, to all anti-imperialist and progressive organisations, to the international Communist movement, to all those struggling against imperialism, colonialism, fascism and native capitalism, and to those actively struggling to build socialism in their workplaces and communities. […]
The current coalition government of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and motley crew of right-wing independent TDs has found itself embroiled in a bitter row with the opposition over speaking rights in the Dáil for those independents who support the government. At the same time as the Dáil was in “turmoil” […]
Investigating an Economic Alternative, Part 4 Over the past three articles, we have dismantled the myths of capitalist efficiency, exposed the failures of privatisation, and demonstrated the necessity of public ownership as a democratic imperative. We have argued that nationalisation of key sectors of the economy and the use of […]
In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of noise about instability in the NATO military alliance. The EU is up in arms about Trump’s diplomacy with Putin and US pronouncements that they may not defend NATO allies slacking on defence spending. Tánaiste Simon Harris said “a gulf […]
As recent announcements indicate, both the European Union and the British government have markedly oriented public spending policies towards militarisation. The North of our island has been a direct recipient of such expenditures, notably Thales in Belfast. Military expenditure historically plays three important roles in capitalist societies: it protects the […]
May I beg to differ with the carefully created mainstream media consensus surrounding Micheál Martin’s meeting last month with US president Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance? Ireland’s establishment media took the view that the Taoiseach had very skilfully handled an incredibly challenging situation and had, thankfully, exited the […]