Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Covid-19 continues to wreak its ill-effects round the globe. Here in Ireland, as in many capitalist countries, the most vulnerable in society have been hardest hit by the virus. In addition to the scandal of the meat-processing plants in the midlands, which saw the pro-business, anti-worker 26-county government “lock down” […]
Robert Owen, the nineteenth-century philanthropist, was by any standard a decent sort of bloke. He believed workers should be treated compassionately and that they deserved a reasonable standard of living. In fact he went a step further and attempted to build ideal societies in different countries, including one at Ralahine […]
Capital accumulation is one outcome of the irrational motor that drives our economic system. This is no less true for the agricultural sector than it is for industry. As capitalist production advances over time we witness a greater and greater accumulation of capital in fewer and fewer hands. Let’s consider […]
Covid-19 did not cause overcrowding in schools, but it has exposed it. Schools are reopening with up to thirty people in a confined space for extended periods. There are almost a million children, teenagers and teachers in four thousand schools. In the two weeks before reopening, more than a hundred […]
Articles 1 and 2, “Health of a Nation” (June and August) violate democratic centralism. Both are public attacks on CPI policy. I wrote a 2,500-word article criticising the inadequacy of article 1; article 2 is no better. Between congresses and coming up to congress it is protocol that we discuss […]
Like a game of fantasy football, the establishment media and media pundits fill the pages and the air waves with speculation about how long the present coalition government may last. The coalition of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party, while only in office since 27 June, stumbles and […]
The much-heralded recent “Next Generation EU Agreement” between the member-states of the European Union is little more than the papering over of growing and deepening cracks. The lack of a co-ordinated response to the covid-19 pandemic exposed the underlying fault lines within the European Union, contributing to and speeding up […]
This is the second part of a discussion article offering a detailed look at the effects of partition, at the continued role of British imperialism in Ireland and the effect it has had and continues to have on our people. The focus on public health in the Six Counties argues […]
War imagery and rhetoric abound in the media discourse surrounding covid-19, along with the resurgence of the post-“Celtic tiger” crash cry of “we’re all in this together”—all of which paints a picture of a country united and unified in action against the menace of the deadly virus. It is true […]
Irish farming as we know it is in a state of terminal decline. But why is this so, and who is to blame? Some will insist that it is a natural development of economic progress; but, as always, we must ask, Progress for whom? The average Irish farmer struggles to […]
The hard-boiled readers of this paper rarely recognise the huge difficulties encountered by a right-wing coalition as it endeavours to govern this republic. There is the problem of ensuring that the rich are pampered, and that the middle class receives favourable treatment, and all the while guaranteeing that the working […]
The “Republican Party” of Fianna Fáil is back in government. Its leader has laid out a pragmatic approach to the national question that rules out a border poll, meaning that a united Ireland is out of the question. How very republican indeed! Instead Micheál Martin has advocated a policy “much […]
Governments in capitalist societies have given priority to protecting “the economy” before protecting the people’s health and well-being, while the covid pandemic has accelerated an existing deep global economic recession. Such countries as Cuba, Viet Nam and China, on the other hand, which have a fundamentally socialist-based economy, have given […]
“We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”—Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, responding to a critic who pointed out (correctly) that the US regime organised a coup in Bolivia to secure lithium for the Musks of this world. “The US military has its knee on the throat […]
International solidarity has a tendency to be treated as an optional extra by revolutionary movements, the type of thing you do if you have the time. Nothing could be further from the truth. Showing solidarity with others in struggle is a central component of communist ideology. It should be recognised […]
The Black Death was the most devastating pandemic ever recorded, resulting in the death of between 75 and 125 million people. It reached its peak in Europe between 1347 and 1351, having come on Italian merchant ships from Asia via the Silk Road. In fact the idea of quarantine originates […]