Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
While speaking recently in Germany, the left-leaning economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis described Ireland as a tax haven, “free-riding” on the rest of Europe. Coincidentally, within a few days of his address to the IFO Institute for Economic Research in Munich1 two of Europe’s most powerful right-wing […]
The Industrial Relations Act (1990) was introduced on 18 July 1990, replacing the Trade Disputes Act (1906), the main principle of which was that anything done in a trade dispute, provided it was not illegal in itself, would be free from criminal and civil liability. The 1990 act was introduced […]
The European Union’s crisis of legitimacy continues to develop, as do the attempts by those elements that call themselves the “liberal centre”—that is, those political parties and the economic interests they serve that are central to the EU’s further integration and are attempting to use that crisis to mask their […]
30 July 2018 is the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth. Her singular novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), challenges class society in an amazing way. In the mid-1840s England was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, as described by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). […]
When global authorities, including the United Nations, insisted that it was impossible, because of dangerous conditions and sanctions, to provide aid to the people of war-torn Syria, a group of courageous people from Switzerland achieved the “impossible.” The following is an extract from a report written by Eva Heizmann and […]
With demographic change, Brexit, and a deadlocked Northern Ireland Assembly, the call for a border poll has been raised more and more often. Under the terms of the Belfast Agreement, a border poll is the only way partition can be ended. It can be allowed to happen only if the […]
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Two hundred years after the birth of Marx, looking back from our 21st-century vantage point into the middle of the nineteenth century, we ask, How useful is Marxism as a tool for understanding society […]
There have been articles in Socialist Voice recently on China and Laos. While I hope to write in the future on North Korea and Viet Nam, there are some points to make on the Asian models, especially their use of market relations in order to build socialism. It should be […]
The robots are coming!—The robots aren’t coming!—Half of all jobs will be gone!—No need to panic: there’ll be plenty of jobs building and designing robots. These are just some of the contradictory headlines and predictions we get from mainstream commentators on the subject of technology and work. All of this […]
Over the weekend of the 25th and 26th of May the first Connolly Festival in Co. Monaghan took place, the birthplace of the parents of James Connolly, John Connolly and Mary McGinn from Áth an Lobhair in the impoverished townland of Coillidh Chuanach, who left Co. Monaghan and settled in […]
This year’s Connolly Festival was another step in the consolidation of the festival as an important cultural and political event. Nearly all the events attracted a full house, and the response was uniformly positive. The festival opened with the unveiling of an exhibition on the life of James Connolly to […]
Comrade Robert Navan’s letter in the May issue of Socialist Voice raises some interesting questions that go to the core of Marxism. It is appropriate that he raised them in the month of the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth in Trier in Germany. The agricultural question was one that […]
More than two hundred employees of Lloyd’s Pharmacy in its fifty branches in the Republic are voting on whether they will take industrial action following the company’s refusal to negotiate with their trade union, Mandate. The union has called for a ballot. In response the company is using its tame […]
Once again problems relating to women’s health and the treatment of women within the health system were exposed with the the discovery that 209 women are affected by the Cervical Check scandal that emerged in the last few weeks. Once again people’s lives, and in particular those of women, have […]
What for long appeared unimaginable has seemingly now become inevitable. The Northern state, created with a built-in unionist majority and uncompromising regime, once seemed as permanent a fixture as its grandiose parliament building at Stormont. Not any longer, though. Britain’s Tory prime minister has voiced her doubts about its future […]
The United Irishmen founded the radical press in Ireland. They had three newspapers, aspiring to cover the entire country: the Belfast Northern Star (approximately 600 issues from January 1792 to May 1797), the Dublin Press, and the Cork Harp of Erin. The United Irishmen encompassed in their demand for equality […]