Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
The Central Intelligence Agency has a long history of fighting against progressive movements and supporting the most reactionary regimes ever seen. This can be seen by the CIA-backed coups against the democratically elected governments of Mohammad Mosaddeg in Iran, Salvador Allende in Chile, and Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, among dozens […]
Engels said, “The nation cannot be free if it oppresses other nations. The force needed to oppress others in the end will turn against them.” All have a beginning, they flourish, and then they implode under their own weight. Spain explored the world, discovered new land masses, and brought many […]
Paul Lynch’s novel Prophet Song has deservedly been short-listed for this year’s Booker Literary Award. The author spins a chillingly realistic tale of an Ireland governed by a fascistic regime in the throes of an armed conflict with its local opponents. The regime’s definition of public order is maintained by […]
Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland – 25 September 2023 The news and the scale of the ecological catastrophe at Lough Neagh are getting worse by the day. These issues did not come to light this month, nor indeed this year. The ecosystem collapse in the lough has long […]
There have been poisonous Green and Orange algae in the six north-eastern counties of Ireland for more than a hundred years. But now there are new poisonous algae making the headlines here. It’s a blue-green alga that has infected Lough Neagh. And only a few minutes ago the local Fermanagh […]
The Mandate trade union has called on the Government to use budgetary surplus to improve public services and housing while replacing the minimum wage with a living wage. Mandate, representing more than 24,000 workers in the retail, bar and administration sectors, is calling on the Government to invest in capital […]
Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland – 25 September 2023 The Communist Party of Ireland condemns the terrorist attack on the Cuban Embassy in Washington on 24 September, and calls on the US authorities to provide greater protection to the embassy. This attack must be seen in the light […]
Ukraine is haemorrhaging tens of thousands of soldiers, the west is pumping in trillions of US dollars, and the EU is pumping in billions of euros, yet there is no end in sight to this senseless slaughter. By the time this war ends, as it will, Ukraine will be a […]
Before the war, the EU had never used common funds to reimburse member-states for the delivery of weapons to a third country. This precedent was established in February 2022 with €500 million for arms through the European Peace Facility (EPF), an off-budget instrument financed by member-states’ contributions, established in March […]
A current fashion within the left is the championing of multipolarity. It assumes a bloc of states in different countries, some with more mixed economies than others, as objectively “anti-imperialist” insofar as they present a threat to the American hegemon. Some of this interpretation is jaundiced, especially when one considers […]
Indigo Girls (Amy Ray and Emily Saliers) opened their recent show in what was without doubt an incredible performance, singing a combination of folk-protest songs and country music in a sold-out National Concert Hall, Dublin. They performed without orchestral accompaniment or flashing lights: just two women with acoustic guitars playing […]
In the age of social media, the term “vibe” is often used as shorthand for aesthetic, often with the substance shifted into the background and just picking up on the visual, sensory or language aspect of an object, movement, culture, or politics. I was reminded of this term when reading […]
■ Carlos Martinez, The East Is Still Red (Glasgow: Praxis Press, 2023) The East Is Still Red is a very readable and able defence of the current People’s Republic of China. The basic argument of the book is that China is on the right path with regard to building socialism, […]
■ Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997) In the thirty-two years since the Soviet Union was dissolved and Fukuyama’s “end of history” began, more and more young people are becoming communists. Multiple failures of capitalism—runaway rent and housing costs, and unabated climate disaster—are bringing young […]
Seán O’Casey—the first proletarian dramatist writing in English—made his theme the struggle for the emancipation of the Irish people and, by extension, of all working people. In Ireland, O’Casey is (unfairly) best known for his first three plays, examining the Irish working class at crucial moments of history. The Shadow […]
Brecht and radically proletarian art The majority of theatre broadly falls under the umbrella of dramatic theatre. It will have a linear plotline, actors who wholly inhabit well-developed characters, structured, thought-out themes, etc. Bertolt Brecht, the German Marxist playwright, would call it escapism. Brecht held that “art is not a […]