Never miss the opportunities thrown up by a crisis to advance long-held goals! The Russian invasion of Ukraine has provided such an opportunity for the Irish establishment and the establishment media to push forward their long-held agenda to ditch Irish neutrality and to use the Ukrainian crisis to push for […]
Article
An urgent need to fight for neutrality
“Gallant little Belgium must be saved from the swinish Hun” was the cry in 1914. So intense was the propaganda deploring and berating the Kaiser’s Germany, and so heart-rending the story of a small European country being violated, that millions enlisted to fight and to die. Among the fallen in […]
British and American weapons in the war in Yemen
In March 2015 a Saudi-led coalition of ten countries, backed by the United States, invaded Yemen, with the goal of restoring power to the government of President Hādī. This would be the start of a brutal war, which has been going on for the past seven years. As a result […]
The ugly face of war
All wars bring out the worst in humans. The war in Ukraine has shown us two ugly faces. One is the calamity of war itself; the other is racism. When European countries are welcoming Ukrainian refugees (with white skin and blue eyes) with open arms, the world also witnesses with […]
Trade unions call for control of Covid
A growing number of trade unions are joining the call for measures to control the increasing numbers being infected by the omicron variant of covid. At the end of March the general secretary of the Irish Nurses’ and Midwives’ Organisation, Phil Ní Shéaghdha, in a letter to the ICTU, explained […]
Venezuela doubles its oil production
Venezuela is close to reaching its maximum petroleum production capacity, since it has managed to double its crude production in recent months, thanks to Iran and other countries that have helped it evade US sanctions. Oil industry sources confirmed to the Spanish-language newspaper El Nuevo Herald, published in Florida, that […]
James Connolly Festival 2022
The James Connolly Festival is an annual, week-long series of events in radical arts, culture, and politics. It is a community-centred celebration of music, film, discussion and debate that brings together the ideas and thoughts of progressive and radical thinkers and organisations from around Ireland and beyond. Since the festival’s […]
Socialist revolution and women’s rights
Alexandra Kollontai, born 150 years ago on 31 March 1872, was an outstanding figure in the Russian communist movement. Kollontai’s active political work began with workers’ evening classes, through which she became part of the Political Red Cross, an organisation supporting political prisoners. She participated in leafleting and fund-raising campaigns […]
Hobo Musician
Being There (a found poem from The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck) We’ll be ever’where —Wherever they’s a fightso hungry people can eat,we’ll be there. Wherever they’s a copbeatin’ up a guy,we’ll be there. We’ll be in the way kids laughwhen they’re hungryan’ they know supper’s ready.An’ when our folks […]
Capitalism goes back to “normal”
The ruling class around the world have decided that the global economy must get back to normal, and that restrictions introduced to protect people in the so-called “developed world” from the covid-19 pandemic must be abandoned, despite the onset of a new wave of the virus. Governments have gone back […]
The importance of political theory
Part 1 On the 14th of March we observed the 139th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death. Marx devoted much of his life to writing about the social and economic problems that plague the working class of the world, and his words still hold true more than a hundred years later. […]
The burden of ASD
Imagine your child who you love so much suffering mental distress. You would literally do anything for them. Their anxiety reaches a point where they become so frustrated it turns to anger and rage. Violence erupts. You act in self-defence, and the family home is up-ended, debris everywhere. The Gardaí […]
Notes on the ideology of the Cuban Revolution
Part 1 I believe that what can give coherence to cultural, political, and ideological work is a definition of the ideology of the Cuban Revolution. Our ideology is based on the guiding principles of Cuba’s national liberation and social emancipation processes; on the development of our own thought characterised, as […]
Another unacceptable manoeuvre
A small group of individuals of different origins, with dissimilar professional results, most of them residing outside Cuba, claim they represent the entire Cuban intellectual community, of millions of people who speak loud and clear for ourselves. The website La Joven Cuba serves as their voice, because their text is […]
The History of IWWD
This March 8th, we observe International Working Women’s Day or IWWD, but the first unofficial women’s day took place in America on the 28th of February 1909. In 1910 Clara Zetkin proposed that an international working women’s day would be observed every year at the Conference of Working Women. March […]
Are rights subordinate to class power?
The intention of this article is to bring into focus the idea of “rights” and to put forward the argument that the communist movement should not frame strategies within the language of rights: rather our analysis must be based on class power. If our objective is to develop class-consciousness with […]