Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Morality is meant to dictate that personal interests are not in conflict with social interests. Ethics form the framework within which people should act in a society. How does Marxism view moral principles? Marx and Engels placed every moral principle in a historical context, not as an eternal principle […]
Words carry meaning, they carry history and they are influenced by history as well. The meaning of the word “dictatorship” has evolved since Marx used it. Dictatorship acquired a terrible meaning after Hitler’s Nazism and Mussolini’s fascism. Every past society is a dictatorship of some class or the other. The […]
One of the major drawbacks to radical and transformative actions by activists involved in struggle, is the hoary old chestnut of a lack of class consciousness out there in the wider population… or so we like to believe. We say it constantly: why is it that there appears to be […]
A hundred years have passed since the death of Lenin, the name used by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov since 1901. A hundred years is not a long period in historical sense, but a lot of water has flowed under the bridge in the meantime. The Russian Revolution, anti-colonial struggles, the rise […]
The anti-communists tell us that communism cannot work because of human nature or that Marx failed to consider human nature. This has been met with some of those on the left claiming that humans are too complex or simply don’t have an inherent nature. Dr John Edward Terrell, a professor […]
CPI released a statement condemning the Dublin riots which contained the word “alienation”. How is alienation connected to the riots? Alienation is a concept put forward by Hegel, and was also mentioned by William Thompson who according to James Connolly was the first Irish socialist. Alienation literally means separation, and […]
Democracy is a combination of two Greek words, dēmos (people) and kratos (rule). As societies change, some words wither away, some new words come into existence, and some words change meaning. Democracy has a broader meaning today than in ancient Greece. The democracy of the ancient Greeks had its limitations […]
Party education is a continuous process. It is like riding a bicycle: we have to keep pedalling to maintain balance; if we don’t, the momentum will only take us a certain distance, after which we will fall. As the capitalist crisis becomes deeper there will be greater ideological attack on […]
The word “democracy” (from the Greek dēmos, meaning people, and kratos, meaning power) is certainly the most used and abused word in the world of politics—particularly bourgeois politics. It is used to mean whatever capitalist power wants it to mean. It can mean peace; it can mean war, death, and destruction; it can mean […]
This year’s James Connolly Conversations return as face-to-face meetings. At the same time we will provide an opportunity for others to join in the conversation on line. The sessions will take place on four consecutive Saturdays, from 28 May to 18 June, at 11 a.m. The meetings are designed to […]
Part 2 Last month I wrote an article on the importance of political theory. In that article I explained that it is not enough to read the Communist Manifesto to learn about Marxism properly but that you must examine different points of Marxism. In this article I will examine the […]
Comrade Carroll (Socialist Voice, April) provides an excellent analysis of the role of theory. However, a few points of addition. The concern with Marxism is perhaps not so much theory but science. A central claim of Marxism is that it is scientific. Characterising science is its method: the systematic study […]
Part 1 On the 14th of March we observed the 139th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death. Marx devoted much of his life to writing about the social and economic problems that plague the working class of the world, and his words still hold true more than a hundred years later. […]
The intention of this article is to bring into focus the idea of “rights” and to put forward the argument that the communist movement should not frame strategies within the language of rights: rather our analysis must be based on class power. If our objective is to develop class-consciousness with […]