Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Maxim Gorky was born 150 years ago this month. His works remain widespread on all continents and contribute to the consolidation of proletarian class-consciousness. Gorky’s socialist-realist method is his ground-breaking world literary achievement. His books, stories and plays continue to be a touchstone and benchmark for socialist writers all over […]
One of the tragedies that befell Ireland after its partial independence was that the aspirations for this newly liberated state were almost immediately replaced, as Liam O’Flaherty put it, by the “tyranny of the Irish Church and its associate parasites, the upstart bourgeoisie, the last posthumous child from the wrinkled […]
One of the lessons of the fall of the Soviet Union is that Marxists should seek to look critically at states that are attempting to build socialism, while also not being over-simplistic. Most views of China today write the country off as simply selling out and having fully embraced capitalism, […]
There is no doubt that Venezuela is the main target of the United States in Latin America, which it sees as the principal obstacle to its domination of the continent—its God-given right, as stated by numerous presidents, from Monroe to Reagan, Obama, and Trump. Of all the countries of America, […]
The January issue of Socialist Voice had an article by me entitled “The wage system and the capitalist illusion.” A worker being told they are getting their equivalent wage relating to their work is being held captive by an illusion that in reality leads to a non-equivalent exchange, which is […]
On 22 February this year the Feminist Ire blog published an open letter to the organisers of the “We Need to Talk” tour. The letter is well written, and solid in its argument, and highlights the ideological divide in modern feminism. The “We Need to Talk” tour organisers are known […]
The term “strong women” has been niggling at me for some time, but I had mixed feelings about it, as it appeared to be setting an example for women to assert themselves and be strong; and what can be wrong with that? But one must look critically at these fashionable […]
Readers of Socialist Voice may be familiar with the idea of worker self-directed enterprises, or WSDEs. The idea is promoted in the United States, particularly by the Marxian economist Richard Wolff. Those who are not acquainted with the logic behind WSDE might be well served by engaging with this topic, […]
Struggle and resistance in the work-place is more common than readers might think. If we think of resistance or conflict between capital and labour in work-places as only industrial disputes, well then, yes, it is a pretty dismal picture. Of course we see the headline disputes of workers collectively organised […]
Marx’s theories are the key to understanding the Irish housing crisis. It may seem that the situation we find ourselves in is a uniquely modern one, but nothing could be further from the truth. What has happened is a gradual shift from battles at the “point of production” (where value […]
It was said of the Bourbons after the Restoration in 1814 that they had forgotten nothing and learnt nothing. Something similar may well be said about the DUP in particular and unionism in general. Having seen its regional parliament collapse yet again in early 2017, and largely as a result […]
Let’s make no mistake about it: despite the merry-go-round of posturing in the Brexit negotiations, it is and always was two imperial powers locked in a phoney war of position; and the concerns of Irish citizens are of little interest to either Britain or the EU. The interests of the […]
■ See “Understanding land value tax” by Eoghan O’Neill, Socialist Voice, January 2018, p. 10 I do not think it is correct to suggest that land is finite but can be reused. We have seen in Chernobyl that land will not be reusable in any human lifetime; it is useless for […]
Michael Ryan, My Life in the IRA: The Border Campaign (Dublin: Mercier Press, 2018) Mick Ryan, a member of the IRA from the age of nineteen, became one of the most active participants in the IRA’s “border campaign,” launched in December 1956 and officially abandoned in February 1962, though its […]
Following the American Civil War there was a brief period of Reconstruction in the former Confederate states before the imperialist war was resumed against the Indigenous peoples of America, when the colonialists gave full expression to the policy of “manifest destiny” in both extending the borders of the United States […]
Trump’s State Department has just announced the initiation of a “Cuban Internet Task Force”—another illegal, offensive and typical act of interference in the internal affairs of a nation lining up to conclude its general election process. It makes a bit of a mockery of their indignation at what Russia was […]