Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
AMONG OTHER brutal passings, going into May we pay tribute to Marx’s one and only paramour: the Paris Commune. “Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class,” declared Marx, while Connolly, thirty years later, argued: “The Commune, if it had been successful, would have inaugurated the reign of real freedom the world over—it would have meant the emancipation of the working class.”
COVID-19 did not cause the crisis in our two- tier, two-jurisdiction health service. It did, however, expose the utter failure of it.
HIS QUESTION Is often posed to those who even dare suggest the possibility of a socialist future.
In today’s marketised business world we’ve been conditioned into nihilism, a belief in Man’s inherent evil, and to expect nothing more than what we get; it’s essentially Christianity without Heaven at the end. “Socialism” and “revolution” are merely idealistic dreams from the past. But the cynics do ask a fair question: When will the working class take ownership of the state and society?
ON 11 MARCH, Cuba had the first three cases of covid-19, detected in three Italian tourists. From that moment the country began to implement the contingency plan for dealing with this virus, which had been developed months earlier.
At the time of writing [24 April] the country has 1,285 people infected, has had 44 deaths and more than 2,000
Cuba’s medical internationalism – Graham HarringtonDownload “Whoever cannot fight for others will never be sufficiently able to fight for themselves.” Fidel Castro Since 1960, socialist Cuba has sent 400,000 doctors and nurses to more than 164 countries to share their medical expertise. Internationalism has been a part of the Cuban […]
Dictatorship: Who decides? – Seán Ó MaoltuileDownload The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. Karl Marx (1845) Once from the pulpit, now from the mass media, the elite of society have always sought to ingrain within us an acceptance of our own subjugation. The […]
In 2015 delegates from two Irish cities made their way to East Essex Street in Dublin to conduct the Connolly Youth Movement’s annual congress. In 2018, delegates from three cities convened on Cork for the same purpose. In 2020, delegates, for the first time from branches established in six different cities, will congregate in Belfast
Why does supporting trans liberation attack rather than defend gender roles and stereotypes? As Marxists we must provide a materialist understanding of trans people to understand how to fight against our patriarchal society. Trans liberation as class struggle First, we should examine what the conditions of trans people are today. […]
THE WORKING CLASS is already dvided by capitalism. If we are to build a revolutionary movement we, as communists, must unite those divisions, not further deepen them. To do so we need to combat the tendencies of tailism and economism in our own ranks. The ruling class utilise a range of tactics designed to weaken the working class, but none of these is more….
As we celebrate the sixty-first anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, a great Irish friend, loyal defender of Cuba, asked me to write for Socialist Voice about the imprint of Fidel
Castro and Ernesto Guevara on the most important event of the twentieth century in Latin America—not without first clarifying for me, with the typical frankness and the
classic and imperative Irish style: it had to be brief.
“In many countries, the wealthy pay lower effective taxes than far poorer people. We need to change course— or face the pitchforks. “The ecological catastrophe fueled by climate change and the socio-economic upheaval threatened by grotesque inequalities of wealth and power have the potential to destroy everything we care about.
AS WE ENTER a new decade, the real living conditions of working people continue to decline; profits are up, which means exploitation is intensifying; large numbers of working families rely on family income supplement—the state’s subsidy on behalf of low-pay employers—to survive.
THE WORKING CLASS is under attack in a class war that we are losing. There was a time when one average worker could earn enough to provide a family with the basic necessities of food and shelter and a few luxuries. This, of course, did not
The first requirement in a debate is that everyone agree on the meaning of the words they use; otherwise the exercise is pointless and can only generate more heat than light. Nowhere is this more evident than in the debates about nationalism. Is nationalism a progressive or a reactionary ideology? […]
The Soviet Union put a massive emphasis on forest preservation and set up zapovedniki (nature reserves), set aside for scientific research. By the 1930s enough new forests had been created to cover an area the size of Mexico. The country was also home, by the 1980s, to one of the […]
It is not in the interests of capitalists to resolve crises: it is in their interests to make money from them. Too often we find that the interests of profit and the interests of the people are irreconcilable. With mental health it is no different. The capitalist media are happy […]