Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
This article seeks to explore the apparent contradictions inherent in China today and to examine the evidence relating to criticisms made of the Chinese state by some figures and organisations on the left. Broadly speaking, critiques of China from the left fall under three categories: that the rapid growth and […]
Ireland’s mental health crisis was already in a bad way before covid; now it’s getting even worse. Covid has not caused the crisis, it has only made it even more serious.
As quarantine conditions worsen, it’s becoming more apparent that isolation and alienation are a serious danger to human beings. Yet alienation is a central component of capitalism as a system.
Even our primate ancestors “worked”; they had “jobs”—not as we know them today but jobs nonetheless. And they “worked” to feed themselves and their offspring, just as we must do today. But of course they worked only to satisfy their needs: there was no working for someone, or being exploited.
Early human farming too was to survive; but then, with improving farming techniques, not only did…
At the end of 2020 the water “futures” of California, the largest state in the United States in population and economy, were floated on Wall Street for the first time, under the banner of Nasdaq Veles California Water Index.1 It was the first flotation of its kind, offering potential investors the opportunity to hedge against the future availability of water in California: in simple terms, to get rich from the scarcity of the most important substance for all human, animal and plant life to survive.
On 25 January, 2021, the 13th National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam will open in Hanoi. The Congress takes place in the context of Vietnam’s successes against Covid-19 where Vietnam has seen less than 1.5 thousand cases and 35 deaths (at the time of writing) in a country […]
We might see this as amusing, or a bit futuristic. Wrong! It’s here already. Amazon Health, Amazon Pharmacy and Babylon Health, among many others, are testing new “digital medical systems,” where you ask a computer about your health. This, in time, will spell the end of GPs as we know them.
The same systems could be used for cancer consultations or any
As I stood outside the GPO selling the Socialist Voice a young teenager asked me: “What is socialism?” I explained that socialism is when capitalism failed with their disaster economics, like what we had in 2010.
THERE HAS been a lot of discussion lately in left circles about the relationship between the Connolly Youth Movement and the Communist Party of Ireland, a relationship, it must be said, that is going through a difficult time at the moment.
In an attempt to give some context and to clarify some historical aspects of the relationship, Socialist Voice asked Seán Edwards (CPI international convenor and a founder-member of the CYM) and Eddie Glackin (CPI education convenor and a former general secretary of the CYM) for their recollections of the formation and early years of the CYM and its relationship with the party.
Over recent years a discernible pattern has been emerging in many of those countries that the BBC likes to describe as “parliamentary democracies.” Long-established precedents are being flouted by elected power-brokers in the leading capitalist states. While those who govern on behalf of capitalism have never been reluctant to subvert […]
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 […]
THE VICTORY of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in the Bolivian general election in October is a great result for the popular forces in Bolivia as well as anti-imperialist forces in Latin America and around the world.
Following the coup and the exile of President Evo Morales in November of 2019, the attempts by the regime of Jeanine Áñez to criminalise the struggles of the working class and Indigenous peoples of Bolivia has failed to defeat the MAS electorally.
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,
With the rise of the far right it is worth considering the issue of identity politics and the left. This, Eoin McDermott argues, is a type of politics that takes identity, often essentialised, as the central category for organisation and analysis. Its left-wing variant is
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
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 […]
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 […]