“The significance of the public service to the overall wellbeing of the country has never been more evident than during the past 10 months.”—Michael McGrath, minister for public expenditure, 16 December 2020
Political Economy
China’s digital currency
In 2008 the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, expressed his view that “the root problem with conventional currencies is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.”¹ This is an old right-wing libertarian talking-point: “When the state spends money to achieve social aims, it devalues money in general, which is an attack on people with lots of money.”
The left, human rights, and class
During the second half of the twentieth century there was an ideological shift within the left in the West, namely from being the organised expression of the working class to seeing the working class as one among a variety of interest groups to be defended. The interests of any collective […]
Who said that?
“We’ve never had this dilemma between health and the economy. Obviously, the restrictive measures we’ve adopted . . . have had an economic impact but there’s no room for doubt that health comes first.”—Alejandro Gil Fernández, Cuban minister of economy and planning. “We are used to financial institutions making honest efforts to […]
Examining the contours of a developing crisis
Visible manifestations of social unrest have decreased considerably during the pandemic as people are unable to meet, organise or travel. This is shown by research conducted by the IMF in Figure 1 comparing major social unrest events with mobility data. Normality may be suspended to a large degree, but the […]
Take the money – and hide it! or Socialism for all? Not quite.
About 66,500 companies received a total of €2. 9 billion from the now-expired temporary wage subsidy scheme. The state paid out €2.9 billion of public money to mostly private companies to pay the wages of 664,000 employees; and that extraordinary news made the headlines for about eighteen hours. After that […]
UBI: A Trojan horse
The outbreak of covid-19 has exposed the glaring inequality in housing, health, education and work in Ireland and around the so-called “developed world.” This has led to renewed calls from some quarters for a universal basic income for all citizens. Some of those proposing this are well intentioned and believe […]
Dreaming of “liberal socialism”
IN SEPTEMBER the former Greek minister of finance and self-described “libertarian Marxist” Yanis Varoufakis published his vision of a post-capitalist world in his new book, Another Now. He has explained that his motivation for writing the book stems from his belief that Marxists have yet to set out a detailed plan for how a socialist economy and society might function,
Who said that?
“Instead of becoming distracted by the ‘threat’ of populism, we should do more to . . . represent the concerns of citizens and to deliver effective and timely policy solutions.”
From A to B, and everything in between
The Communist Party of Ireland has, time and time again, shown its analysis of capitalism and imperialism to be correct. Where we have been able to intervene and make a contribution to the wider political movements, debates and campaigns we have actively intervened in what were popular reformist demands, shifting them to transformative ideas and demands, in a number of crucial areas: (1) repudiating the debt,
(2) austerity is working, (3) the triple lock of imperialism, (4) public ownership of water enshrined in the Constitution,
(5) universal public housing, and (6) repeal of the Industrial Relations Act, to name a few. Eoghan O’Neill reports
The possibility of a perfect storm grows
The economic crisis facing the Government continues to grow. While economic data paints a much rosier picture of the economy, thanks to the dominance of foreign direct investment (i.e. transnational corporations), the pandemic is having a wider and more lasting impact on the domestic economy, in particular on small and […]
Who said that?
“The earth is not dying, it’s being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”—Utah Phillips, folk singer “The US has bombed no less than thirty countries since the end of World War II, killing millions of people, maiming tens of millions more, disrupting and destroying education, […]
Understanding the crisis – and preparing for what is yet to come
The CPI, in conjunction with Socialist Voice, streamed two talks in September under the title “Economics for Workers.” The guest speaker on each occasion was a leading Marxist economist. The thread that linked the interviews by Graham Harrington of the CPI was an attempt to understand the current crisis (or […]
The end of the neoliberal social contract
A strange thing happened in OECD countries between the 1970s and 2008: economic growth rates that looked poor on paper compared with the 1950s and 60s seemed to be boosted dramatically by a massive subsidy, somehow hidden from all national accounts statistics. That subsidy, it turns out, was cheap labour […]
Power to the working people
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 […]
Capitalist agriculture and the culling of small farms
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 […]