Anybody who thinks they’re an expert on North Korea is either a liar or a fool. Every so often the media go into a frenzy in reporting the latest news story about the country, playing up its eccentricities. Time and again North Korean officials who were supposedly executed will turn […]
Socialism
Music, value, and all that jazz
I have been a musician for more than twenty years, playing in various original bands, cover bands, and wedding bands. As the whole industry for working musicians becomes ever more uncertain because of covid-19, I have often found myself pondering the question of the value of being a musician. Many […]
Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?
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.”
Senior citizens abandoned
COVID-19 did not cause the crisis in our two- tier, two-jurisdiction health service. It did, however, expose the utter failure of it.
When’s the revolution coming?
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?
Cuba faces covid-19
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
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?
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 […]
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? […]