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 […]
Socialism
CYM celebrates its 50th anniversary
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
Opinion – Why communists support trans rights
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. […]
Combating tailism and economism
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….
Che and Fidel: Revolutionaries to the end
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.
Who said that? Wealth
“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.
Forward to a decade of rebuilding
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 time has come
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
Nationalism: Progressive or reactionary?
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? […]
Only socialism can save the planet
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 […]
Some aspects of mental health under capitalism
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 […]
Cuba: A living, developing revolution
On 1 January 2020 we celebrated the sixty-first anniversary of the triumph of the first socialist revolution in the Western Hemisphere. Sixty-one years after that historic event Cubans, and the friends of Cuba in the world, recognise the greatness of that event, which made the peoples of the world fix […]
The capitalist illusion Part 5 There is an alternative: socialism
The most important task of our class is to shatter the illusion that socialism failed. Socialism, directed by communist and workers’ parties— contrary to what we are all taught and told to believe—did in fact succeed. It worked, and continues to work, very well.
Is national pride anti-Marxist?
As the “Irish question” comes back to haunt British Toryism as well as British social democracy, it is worth reflecting on what attitude Irish Marxists should take on the national question.
It is worth pointing out that nationalism is only ever criticised when it comes from an oppressed people
“My sin was being indigenous, leftist, and anti-imperialist”
As the brutal coup in Bolivia has yet again demonstrated, these suffocating limits on democracy are even narrower in nations under the boot of imperialism and neocolonialism.
Under the leadership of President Evo Morales and his party, MAS (Movement to Socialism), the poor and indigenous people of Bolivia have made enormous…
Bus Connects: A route to privatisation?
A route to privatisation?
As pointed out in Socialist Voice in August 2018, Bus Connects appears to have a much higher frequency from the suburbs into the city centre; but in fact the frequency is often reduced, or citizens…